Getting the Story Right... Or Wrong.

In the New York Times over the weekend, Nicholas Kristof interviewed Elaine Pagels, who has apparently written another book.  Here's the whole article.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/21/opinion/virgin-birth-jesus.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR1KTT0T7uiI_mhJ7s2SmX2BWYnurSAkssDQOfMU--Ed-oyu4UZqHUezXJk_aem_7HgqKv-lCqc4RTQJZz574g

Christians hold the story of Jesus' mother giving birth to him without having sex with a man as essential.  You cannot accurately call yourself a Christian if you clam up for part of the definitive Creeds.  The problem has always centered on how we believe it, what believing it means, and what we do with this belief.  

On the one hand, Empire has always twisted the Virgin Birth story in ways that perpetuate imperial power.  Medieval theologians decided it was all about Mary's "purity" because they learned from St. Augustine that sex was evil.  This of course saddled real women with impossible standards -- virgin and mother -- and served to keep them subservient and subject to guilt-trips for centuries.  Modern theologians like Pagels attack the doctrine mainly because, in reaction to that Medieval view, they have judged it as non-historical and contrary to what we know of gynecology, therefore untrue.  In searching for the "truth" they assumed that some man impregnated Mary.  They dismiss the Virgin Birth story as concocted mainly to imitate other mythic and political miraculous births.  

Kristof insists Pagels talk about how her book points "to ancient evidence that Jesus might have been fathered by a Roman soldier, possibly by rape."  

First of all, that's not our story.  I have zero patience with people who need to contradict the Christian story.  As if everything needs to happen in order to gratify our needs and preferences.  So if I don't like some aspect of a story, I should feel free to adapt it to something more satisfying to me.  When we do this to our own personal memories, we call it delusion or lying to ourself.  When we do it to someone else's story, it is slander.

Perhaps Pagels dredges up this "Mary was raped" lie because she feels it has the underscores Mary's situation as an oppressed woman.  It supposedly shows God bringing good out of evil.  While this interpretation may theologically redeem the slander, Empire can easily utilize it like an opiate, excusing its own evil.  "Too bad this happened to you, but think of our new baby!"  

If we want to hear what the story means when not whitewashed by Empire, coming from the mouth of an actual oppressed woman, we might listen to abolitionist and former slave, Sojourner Truth.  In 1851, she stated that Christ came "from God and a woman.  Man had nothing to do with him."  In other words, the Virgin Birth separates Jesus from patriarchy.  It prevents any man from claiming to have brought him into the world.  Completely cut off from a male line, he has no inheritance, his bloodline comes through King David and Abraham by adoption.  According to the alternative exhumed by Pagels, the Empire, represented by a soldier, may claim parental rights over God.  Jesus isn't even fully Jewish, anymore, but half something else.  It makes Jesus white.  Now the Empire owns him.  The DNA would show it.

That's good news for Empires, at any rate.  Our own version of Empire, Modernity, has very effectively exercised paternity over God by basically reducing Jesus Christ to a harmless mascot while using his image as a cynical spiritual warrant for its regime of eco-cide, vivisection, exploitation, and domination.  Modernity sired a "historical Jesus," different from the One in the gospels, who only says and does what Modernity decides measures up to its criteria for "truth."  Just as Rome used the cross as a warning of what will happen to resisters, the effect of Pagels' story is to remind women on behalf of Empire: "your body, my choice."  "You will bring into the world what we make you bring into the world."    

It does not surprise me that Pagels has so much enthusiasm for this.  Her entire career has been an aggressive affirmation and articulation of the hold that Empire -- that is, Modernity -- has over Jesus Christ.  For her, the categories, methodologies, mentality, demands, and assumptions of Modernity determine who Jesus is.  Modernity thus  "liberates" Jesus from his own family, the community of his disciples, the Church.    

In the article she seems to try to move away from historicity and understand the stories more as stories, "They are not written simply as history; often they speak in metaphor.  We can take them seriously without taking everything literally," she says.  "I left Christianity behind," she relates, after having experienced one of its more toxic aberrations in particular church.  But compelled by "something powerful" she went back, "asking questions.  How were these stories written?  How do they affect us so powerfully?  They speak to a deep human longing for a sense of transcendence and spiritual experience.  For we can respond to the same story in more than one way.  As a historian, I question the literal truth of the virgin birth story.  But I still love the midnight service on Christmas Eve, where the story is gloriously told and sung as miracle."  So she balances her welding the machete of scientific method with a  saccharine sentimentality.  

I get the impression she believes these stories are mainly entertainment, spectacle, written for what kind of feelings they produce.  They can't possibly be about God; it always has to be about what we want and what we feel.  Such is the Modern view of everything.  It's all about us, me.   

Uh, no.  I realize that Pagels merely reflects the confusion, chaos, and compromise  that hobbles churches this time of year.  But these invented reimaginings of the story tell us nothing about Jesus, God, the world, or us.  They only push the empty, novel, desperate ideas of the inventors.  They are certainly not worth a trip to church to hear about.

I'm sorry Pagels had a bad experience in some church somewhere.  It does not justify her for poisoning our stories with such malicious nonsense.  I say, let the stories shine in the radical, deeply subversive, highly transformational glory they have without her redactions.  Pagels appears to be too thoroughly indoctrinated into the ideology of our own Empire to see that.

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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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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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Postliberal.

The term "Postliberal" gets increasingly used these days.  Since I have used this term to define myself for many years, I find myself both amused and alarmed to hear how some secular writers and politicians use it now.  For one thing, I understand that Sen. J. D. Vance describes himself this way.  Since I don't have a whole lot in common with him, I felt a need to get to the bottom of this language.

I have considered myself "Postliberal" since college, from which I graduated in 1977.  So this is not a new thing.  In reading books like The End of the Modern Age by philosopher Allen Wheelis, I came to the conviction that the whole civilizational framework that has dominated the West, and then the world, since the so-called Enlightenment in the 1600's, had basically ended.  Something else would take its place which people began to call "Postmodern."  In seminary and later I found myself most attracted to theological thinkers who questioned the assumptions and practices of Modernity, starting with Karl Barth's rejection of Liberal Theology after World War I, and extending to people like Hans Frei, George Lindbeck, Stanley Hauerwas, John Milbank, and others.  I call myself Postliberal in that sense.

But today, many of those who adopt this label, who often come out of a Roman Catholic perspective, just use it to mean "conservative."  As I read their stuff, they seem really more anti-liberal and pre-modern than anything else.  They hate a lot of the way Modernity turned out.  (So do I, but we are repulsed by different things.)  They respond by looking back and seeking to restore some important things that Modernity originally devalued or even got rid of.  I understand the sentiment and have some sympathy with it.  But when they say they want to get back to the traditional virtues, I have to wonder what they mean.  I could never go along with them because of the cruelties they casually embrace and defend.  Too many of these guys seem motivated mainly by homophobic bigotry.  Like Rod Dreher, who writes a very interesting book called The Benedict Option, and fatally mars it with hate-speech towards Gays throughout.  Or take the case of Vance who admits to inventing and spreading noxious lies defaming immigrants to make a point.  So... lying is now a virtue?    

I do not believe it possible or desirable to go back.  Even to make the attempt requires the deployment of massive and unconscionable violence and cruelty.  Think Fascism.  For me "post" means after; "Postliberal" means we always move forward.  For one thing, this is the only way time moves.  Nothing ever gets "restored" or "recovered" in full; new things are new because our context continually shifts.  Every moment and everything in it is new.  

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Another word that describes me is "traditionalist."  But I cannot abide those who take this to mean looking back and keeping things rigidly the same as they were.  For me tradition does not reject change, but understands it to happen within a framework of continuity and community.  I hold to basic values and practices, particular ways of thinking and acting, while responding to an ever-changing world.  For me the organizing principles are those of orthodox Christianity.  

I use a sailing metaphor to talk about this.  As a traditionalist I maintain the same larger goal, but I also realize that I need to respond to changes in my context moving forward.  As with sailing, a straight line simply doesn't do it.  Rather, to reach the destination one must make turns and go in directions that seem completely counter-intuitive.  In sailing the sails and the rudder, and the immediate direction of the boat, continually change.  But it is all in the service attaining an unchanging goal.  Walking a labyrinth has similar qualities of being led in directions that seem to preclude reaching the goal.  Yet we must trust the Way itself as continuous with the goal.

In my view, the conservative approach, even if they call it "postliberal," insists on keeping the sails and rudder where they have always been, which means to go in circles at best.  On the other hand, I can't follow the approach of many liberals that dispenses with the goal altogether and chooses to simply go along with where the wind and the current take us.

As much as liberal theology would like to imagine otherwise, we never exist outside of the context of tradition and community.  Never.  If we think we can do this we not only lie to ourselves but allow ourselves to function as a tool of Empire.    

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The goal, destination, telos, and desire of Christianity -- and me, I hope -- is Jesus Christ.  We only have access to Jesus Christ through and in the community and tradition bearing his name.  So no matter how radically we may feel we have to tack and wear to account for rough and challenging conditions, we have to make an honest and credible case that this serves that one Destination.  The end does not justify the means because the end is the means. Jesus Christ is not just the destination; he is also the path, the Way.  We have some leeway, but not infinitely.  It is in fact very limited.  Postliberal for me means both reestablishing Christ as the Goal, and seeing and participating in his life as the Way to the goal.  Here the labyrinth image works better than the one about sailing. 

In other words, we depend on Jesus Christ like a "tractor beam" that occurs in science fiction, pulling a spaceship towards it source.  Jesus Christ works like an energy field that grabs us and draws us inexorably towards himself.  Just as in the words of pacifist, A. J. Muste, that there is no way to peace but peace is itself the way, so also with Christ.  There is no way to Christ except obedience to Christ.  In him the Way and the Goal are one. 

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Finally, I only care about postliberalism as it pertains to the Church.  We have no stake in getting in on the ground flood with the next manifestation of Empire, even if it is technically post-Modern.  Our Protestant forebears made that mistake by making an alliance with Modernity, the new form of Empire that solidified in their own time.  Our global society hurtles towards a postmodern civilizational framework that only now begins to congeal and take on a recognizable form.  I see as yet no evidence that it will manage to separate itself from greed, shame, domination, injustice, cruelty, and the manipulation of fear and anger by the Leaders, whatever we will eventually call them.  Whatever it becomes, it will inevitably be at least as far from the Way of Jesus Christ as was Modernity.  Our initial job is never to convert the culture, but simply follow Jesus. Our following the Light needs to be enough of an attractive and admirable example to function, like salt and yeast, and influence the whole around us.

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