sojo's double standard

Jon Stewart on Limbaugh: 'Extremely Loud and Incredibly Gross'

For one thing, isn't Stewart castigating someone else a bit like a drunk getting on someone else's case for looking at a beer can? Or, as the commenter (so far) quite succintly put it.

pot...kettle...

But my concern is mainly Sojo, and their double standard. Remember this?

Jesus Gets the Last Word on Rick Perry's Ad

Yep, this is Sojo gleefully posting a video where a man depicts Jesus, and this jesus calls someone an a--hole.

So, Sojo finds insults to those they disagree with hilarious (and to not apologize for posting them), while continuing the usual liberal schtick when a conservative messes up, even after the conservative apologizes.

Yep, Sojo--elevating the conversation by plunging it even deeper into the mud. Is this what is meant by "falling upwards"?

God as facebook

In modernity we created one theological connection point for the entire world: "You are a sinner who will die in your sins unless you repent. You must be born again." This sounds theologically correct, but is it really the case that this is the only connection with God through the Jesus story? I think not, though I think it is a connection to Christianity and has been the dominant mode of connection in the church post-Reformation. But is not the sole means. And in postmodernity, such exclusion has little chance of connecting with the seekers and practitioners of the new religious economy. Multiplicity, a network of connections, is necessary, making room for both the sinners and the sinned against, the broken and the whole. Speaking more of the writer Gadda, Calvino says, "Whatever the starting point, the matter in hand spreads out and out, encompassing ever vaster horizons, and if it were permitted to go on further and further in every direction, it would end by embracing the entire universe."
Barry Taylor, Entertainment Theology, p 198

Is the statement he claims was created in modernity really created in modernity?

If one has read the Bible and has even a basic understanding of it, how can one say that that is a rather accurate summation? Does the Bible not say that we are all sinners, and come short of the glory of God? Does it not say that the wages of sin is death? Was not the message of Jesus and the Apostles that people needed to repent and believe the Gospel? Did not Jesus Himself say the we must be born again?

Upon what basis, then, can Taylor say that is not the sole means? How can he say that repentence and believing the Gospel is not the universal place where all must begin, the door through which all much enter? He may have a point that not all like that way, or like the door, but what does that mean? Does the fact that one doesn't like the door mean that one can try to climb in through the window? Does he give one scriptural source for his position? I've given the place where this paragraph may be found in his book, you may look for it and see for yourself--there is no scripture given in the context.

And when he starts writing about 'multiplicity' (wasn't that the name of an old Michael Keaton comedy movie, something about clones?) and 'a network of connections', does that strike you as him making God seem like Facebook, or some other social networking internet site? Have you made God your 'Facebook friend'? Have you left any comments lately on his wall?

Whatever Calvino or Gadda may have meant by that last bit Taylor quotes, I don't think there's any doubt what Taylor means by it--universalism. That only acceptable religious idea is one that would "end by embracing the entire universe". The most correct religious teachings are the one that embrace the most--the most people, the most other ideas, the most other beliefs--that that is embraced by the most--the most people, the most of the correct kinds of people, the most followers of other religions (so long as they are of the right beliefs, too), the most seekers and practitioners of what is considered the new religous economy.

If, in Taylor's view, God seems a lot like Facebook, Christianity becomes like Bill Clinton--everything must be polled and tested, to see what people want, and only then is a decision made about what to do and what to believe and what to teach. God, then, ceases to be the authority, and the power passes to the people--the correct kinds of people, of course.

waterworld as philosophy???

'Waterworld' is essentially a modern tale. The central dream is to get back to dry land, which, when finally discovered by Mariner and his newly fashioned and reconfigured family, is reminiscent of Eden. It is the return to Milton's 'Paradise Lost' rather than the discovery of new frontiers. The film represents the modernist's desire to return to the old order, achievable only in the cinematic imaginery, but still a compelling image to many. A key message in the movie is that real life and living as humans are possible only on dry land, the utopian tendency of modernity's universalizing binary oppositions. Mariner stands as a testament to the fact that life in other permutations is quite possible, somthing that is daily being explored in postsecular situations.
Barry Taylor, Entertainment Theology, p 91

First, I hope you will join me in a few chuckles, at the idea of using 'Waterworld' as a deeply philosophical metaphor. Sadly, Taylor doesn't seem to have gotten too far into the canon of works made famous (or infamous) by Mystery Science Theater 3000, so we will not get further philosophical breakdowns of such great works like how mythology meets science "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians", or maybe the conflict between ancient religions and modern technology in "The Robot versus The Aztec Mummy", or the misadventures of modern people in their quest through the desert of the real and the perils of looking for a helping hand in the classic "Manos: The Hands of Fate".

No, we shall just have to accept that Taylor had to use what even he called a "box-office dud", p 89, to try to convince us that we live in a water-world of postmodernism.

"A key message in the movie is that real life and living as humans are possible only on dry land". Umm, yeah, we humans are just so made for life on the water. Don't we like to swim around in water, eat fish, and all that? So, come on, dive in, leave the dry land behind!!

One could get the impression that Taylor and those like him are trying to outdo even Jesus. Jesus, after all, only compared a man building a house on sand to one building it on the rock. These are going even further, saying that not only should be build our houses on water, but that it is a much better think than to build it on the rock.

Oops, don't stay under water too long. You may drown.

Wait, Costner's character had gills!!! You can...well...you can...well...well.

Oh, that's right. It's Costner. And, it's a movie. The normal person doesn't have gills.

Oh, and there's the food, too. Yeah, we can eat fish, clams, and such things, for a while. But what about the vegans? Are they going to have to subsist simply on seaweed? And don't us normal omnivores need veggies every now and again, too?

"Mariner stands as a testament to the fact that life in other permutations is quite possible". Umm...Costner's character is fictional!!!! You know, made up, not real, likely not even possible. I know, one can find some science fiction that could be considered predictive, but I doubt that Waterworld falls in that category, especially when it comes to Costner's character and his sudden development of gills.

emergents despising Christ's return?

Ever turn on religious television? Most of Christian TV is filled with people excited at the prospect of Jesus' return and the end of the world. How can a religion be so turned around that its adherents would wish, even pray, for the end of the world? And yet this seems to be some religions' focus today--driving the world ever closer to some kind of apocalypse, be it Christian, Muslim, or some other version.
Burke and Tayler, A Heretic's Guide to Eternity, p 125

Yeah, you silly Christians, you should be happy with this world only, then with the good things to come. And never mind such passages as "Looking for the blessed hope, the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ".

In fact, if taken in context, this "blessed hope" has a far different result than the fear-mongering speculations of Burke and Taylor.

"For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men. It teaches us to say 'No' to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in this present age, while we wait for the blessed hope--the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for himself a people that are his very own, eager to do what is good" Titus 2:11-14

So, if waiting and longing for Christ's return is "driving the world ever closer to some kind of apocalypse", it's not because waiting and longing for Christ's return is wrong, but because the world is wrong.

"For I am already being poured out like a drink offering, and the time has come for my departure. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day--and not only to me, but also to all who have longed for his appearing." II Timothy 4:6-8

Apparently, Jesus will even reward those who "have longed for his appearing" on that day of judgment. Far cry, indeed, from the this-world-only focus of Burke and Taylor.

So, don't let the emergent's rob you of the legitimate hope we can have of Christ's return. It is perfectly legitimate and reasonable to, along with the Spirit, pray "Come". "The Spirit and the bride say 'Come!' And let him who hears say 'Come!' Whoever is thirsty, let him come; and whoever wishes, let him take the free gift of the water of life." Revelation 22:17

emergents' selective salvation

Archbishop William's book, Writing in the Dust, closes with a thought about this story and the dust Jesus wrote in: "He does not draw a line, fix an interpretation, tell the woman who she is and what her fate should be. He allows a moment, a longish moment, in which people are given time to see themselves differently precisely because he refuses to make the sense they want. When he lifts his head there is both judgment and release." The judgment is against those who want to make God, first and foremost, a judge and condemner of humanity. The release is for those bruised by life, by their own foolishness, yet who receive mercy and grace from God

This story represents a shift in God's character--or, if it makes you more comfortable, a change in our perception of God's character. Either way, if God or the perception of God had changed, the Jews could not remain unchanged. The problem was that they wanted to remain the same. This was the dilemma Jesus created among them. "We know youare a teacher who has come from God," Nicodemus says in the book of John. But the unspoken issue was that by acknowledging that Jesus came from God, the Jews either had to make him conform to and affirm their ways or had to shift their own thinking to embrace his new theology. They preferred the former, which, of course, didn't work because Jesus didn't come to conform to conventional standards of God's kingdom.
Burke and Taylor, A Heretic's Guide to Eternity, pp 161-162

Is any of that true?

For example, was Jesus' condemnation directed at "those who want to make God, first and foremost, a judge and condemer of humanity"? Was his release directed at "those bruised by life, by their own foolishness"?

Since they seem to engage in some speculations, perhaps it gives me a bit of license to do so, too. What if, for example, the husband of the woman was among those in the crowd? Could he not be considered among those "bruised by life and (his) own foolishness", the foolishness of marrying a woman who was not faithful? If mercy was directly only at the woman, what about him?

And who did Jesus condemn in this story? Is there any condemnation at all? Can Jesus' words that the one without sin may cast the first stone be seen as him condemning them? Maybe, but it seems far from plain.

Yet if we want to look at the Gospels as a whole, then the idea of condemnation cannot be escaped. "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God's one and only Son. This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men love darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil." John 3:16-19

This is, I think, a telling passage. God did not send Christ to condemn, but to save, but the further truth is that those who did not believe in Christ were already condemned. The judgment had been rendered--the deeds of the members of mankind, men and women, are evil, so they love the darkness.

Hardly a bright, cheery view of humanity. But there is hope--"Whoever believes in him is not condemned". Those who believe in Christ, believe in the Christ of the Scriptures and not a christ made up by men, are not condemned.

How simple, how so very simple. How very far from the physical-only salvation through works the emergents want us to buy into.

All are condemned, no matter their socio-economic status, the size of their pocket book, or whatever sad-sack story they can tell about their life. But all can believe and be saved, no matter their soci-economic status, the size of their pocket book, or whatever sad-sack story they can tell about their life. God sent Christ to save us, we who are sinners, "while we were still sinners, Christ died for us".

the emergent buffet

Spiritual bricolage is the mining of ideas and concepts about God that already exist in the world and creating a whole new vocabulary, as well as new concepts and understandings of what it means to have a spiritual life.
Burke and Taylor, A Heretic's Guide to Eternity, p 143

What a perfect way to view the emergent and progressive 'religion' that people like Burke and Taylor are wanting to create--religion as buffet. Your first trip through, maybe you get a main course of materialistic atheism seasoned with a bit of something that's like Christianity but isn't (remember No-Salt?) Go over to another table and get a spoonful or two of eastern mysticism, maybe a bit of hot-and-sour new-agey gunk, and a touch of Islamic garnish on the sides just to be religiously correct. Some things in the Judaism section may be safe, though one can have such awful heartburn when it's combined with the Islamic garnish.

Oh, and for dessert--a heaping helping of marxist-socialist social-justice pudding sweetened with artificial Jesus-talk (remember Sweet-and-Low?) with chunks of all the above mixed in.

Yeah, I did use the word "chunks" intentionally.

But don't bother about the Orthodox Christianity table. It's old hat stuff. Sure, it's got all the necessary vitamins and minerals, but it's all so...unexciting. Who wants plain oatmeal with berries when you can have superultramega oats with chocolate sprinkles? How do you know your apples are natural if the proper authorities have not labeled them as organic? Do you really want your grandma's cookies, or cookies baked in all-natural cookie-stuff and filled with raisins certified to have had bugs all around them because no pesticides were used, were hand-picked by illegal immigrants who were paid a wage someone arbitrarily decided was fair, and no puppies were harmed in their making? Can your granny honestly say her cookies never harmed a puppy? I didn't think so.

Oh, sure, Orthodox Christianity was good enough for your grandparent. It helped them through a couple of world wars and severe financial depression, not to mention the other things they went through. And, yes, they're old and going to kick the bucket soon, so you really don't want to tell them that Heaven is just a myth--let them have their comforting lies, just like kids and Santa.

But you! You're young! You're different! You're special!!! You have the internet, Google, television, channel after channel of ESPN, coffeehouses on every corner! You're postreligious postchristian postright-and-wrong postmodern postmoral postcapitalism postElvis posteverything!!! You don't want plain food, you want super-foods! You want postfood foods!!

vibes

Spirituality begins its discussion of the sacred from the desire for an integrated life. Religions often operate on a sin-redemption paradigm, which has little resonance in today's society.
Burke and Taylor, A Heretic's Guide to Eternity, p. 60

"...little resonance in today's society". Well, maybe. So?

When has man wanted to know that he is a sinner in need of redemption? Yes, it doesn't resonate in society--any society. The Pharisees in Jesus' day seemed to not mind calling other's sinners, but were not so happy when Jesus did it to them. As they write a few pages later...

Although the link between grace and sin has driven Christianity for centuries, it just doesn't resonate in our culture anymore. It repulses rather than attracts. People are becoming much less inclined to acknowledge themselves as "sinners in need of a Savior." It's not that people view themselves as perfect; it that the language they use to describe themselves has changed. "Broken", "fragmented", and "lacking wholeness"--these are some of the new ways people describe their spiritual need.
p 64

So, people don't want to think of themselves as sinners, we shouldn't deal with sin? If a person has a serious illness, are doctors not allowed to deal with that illness or call it by name if it "just doesn't resonate in our culture anymore"? If a patient has cancer, is the doctor not allowed to use the word 'cancer' because "it repulses rather than attracts"?

As the Scriptures say, Christ died for our sin. If Christ died for our sin, then our sin is a serious issue, and should not be shunted aside because it "just doesn't resonate in our culture anymore", or it "repulses rather than attracts"; indeed, it could be said that we should stress it even more strongly when among people to whom it doesn't resonate and for whom it repulses rather than attracts.

It is not our job to rethink, redesign, reimagine, rewhatever the message God has given us, especially if the message is not well-received. Trust me, if all we have to deal with are people saying it "just doesn't resonate", well, that's rather mild compared with the tortures and persecutions and martyrdoms Christians have suffered and still suffer. Some people have given the "It's not relevant and it's repulsive" in rather definite, strong, and (for the Christians) painful ways.

a correctiong, of sorts

A few posts back, I gave a quote from the book "The Heretic's Guide to Eternity" which was itself a quote attributed to one Carter Heyward. In that post, I referred to Heyward at least one time as "Mr. Heyward".

Silly me.

Carter Heyward

Isabel Carter Heyward (b. 1945 in North Carolina) is a lesbian[1] feminist theologian, teacher and priest in the Episcopalian Church - the province of the worldwide Anglican Communion in the United States.

Well, this was...enlightening.

Theology - the Nature of God
Author of a number of books and numerous articles, Carter Heyward's most distinctive theological idea is that it is open to each of us to incarnate God (that is, to embody God's power), and that we do so most fully when we seek to relate genuinely to others in what she calls relationality. When we do this, we are said to be 'godding', a verb Heyward herself coined.[4] God is defined in her work as 'our power in mutual relation'.[5] Alluding to mainstream Christian views of God, Heyward has stated 'I am not much of a theist'.[6] For her, 'the shape of God is justice',[7] so human activity can, as theologian Lucy Tatman has observed, be divine activity whenever it is just and loving. In her book Saving Jesus From Those Who Are Right, Heyward asserts that 'the love we make... is God's own love'.[8] In Heyward’s work, God is therefore not a personal figure, but instead the ground of being, seen for example in compassionate action, which is 'the movement of God in and through the heights and depths of all that is'.[9]

[edit] Theology - Jesus in Carter Heyward's thought
Again in contrast to the more traditional Christian focus (on Jesus Christ as God incarnated as a redeemer), Heyward believes that 'God was indeed in Jesus just as God is in us - as our Sacred, Sensual Power, deeply infusing our flesh, root of our embodied yearning to reach out to one another'.[10] This power works to change despair, fear and apathy to hope, courage and what Heyward terms 'justice-love'.[10] But God's Spirit is not contained 'solely in one human life or religion or historical event or moment'.[11] God was Jesus' relational power for 'forging right (mutual) relation, in which Jesus himself and those around him were empowered to be more fully who they were called to be'.[12] Insisting on the God-incarnating power of all, Heyward observes that 'the human act of love, befriending, making justice is our act of making God incarnate in the world'.[13] Interestingly, in her recent work she suggests that even the non-human creation may incarnate God, commenting that 'there are more faces of Jesus on earth, throughout history and all of nature, than we can begin even to imagine'.[14]. Not unrelated to this perception, Heyward founded the Free Rein Center for Therapeutic Horseback Riding and Education at Brevard, North Carolina, where she is an instructor[15]

Well, no wonder the Oozers quote her so favorably. And no wonder she wants people to belief it's ok to read the Bible in such different ways than those people long ago. She certainly does.

don't tell me what i don't wanna hear!!

Spirituality begins its discussion of the sacred from the desire for an integrated life. Religions often operate on a sin-redemption paradigm, which has little resonance in today's society.
Burke and Taylor, A Heretic's Guide to Eternity, p. 60

"...little resonance in today's society". Well, maybe. So?

When has man wanted to know that he is a sinner in need of redemption? Yes, it doesn't resonate in society--any society. The Pharisees in Jesus' day seemed to not mind calling other's sinners, but were not so happy when Jesus did it to them. As the Heretic's Guide writers write a few pages later...

Although the link between grace and sin has driven Christianity for centuries, it just doesn't resonate in our culture anymore. It repulses rather than attracts. People are becoming much less inclined to acknowledge themselves as "sinners in need of a Savior." It's not that people view themselves as perfect; it that the language they use to describe themselves has changed. "Broken", "fragmented", and "lacking wholeness"--these are some of the new ways people describe their spiritual need.
p 64

So, because people don't want to think of themselves as sinners, we should do away with sin? If a person has a serious illness, are doctors not allowed to deal with that illness or call it by name if it "just doesn't resonate in our culture anymore"? If a patient has cancer, is the doctor not allowed to use the word 'cancer' because "it repulses rather than attracts"?

As the Scriptures say, Christ died for our sin. If Christ died for our sin, then our sin is a serious issue, and should not be shunted aside because it "just doesn't resonate in our culture anymore", or it "repulses rather than attracts"; indeed, it could be said that we should stress it even more strongly when among people to whom it doesn't resonate and for whom it repulses rather than attracts.

It is not our job to rethink, redesign, reimagine, rewhatever the message God has given us, especially if the message is not well-received. Trust me, if all we have to deal with are people saying it "just doesn't resonate", well, that's rather mild compared with the tortures and persecutions and martyrdoms Christians have suffered and still suffer. Some people have given the "It's not relevant and it's repulsive" in rather definite, strong, and (for the Christians) painful ways.

what are you doing in another universe now?

Spirituality operates on a new cosmology that sees a "multiverse" rather than the universe. It attempts to redefine the practice and experienc of faith in a post-Newtonisn world. As Marshall McLuhan said, "The phrase 'God is dead' applies aptly, correctly, validly to the Newtonian universe which is dead. The ground rule of that universe, upon which so much of our Western world is built, has dissolved." Religion operates on premodern views of the owrld. Ever since man took pictures of the earth from the moon, our understanding about cosmology and the nature of being has evolved into a postmetaphysical understanding of life.
Burke and Taylor, A Heretic's Guide to Eternity, p. 60

If you read that, and are thinking "What does any of that mean?", join the club.

A few months ago, some big progressive type had a shindig about "Theology After Googles". I think I wrote a bit about some things he wrote about it. Pretty much, we are to think that, after the advent of the internet search engine Google (sorry, MSN and Yahoo and all you other search engines), we have to redefine and rethink and redo and rethis and rethat all things theology.

This is hardly new. Some took the true horrors and evil of the Nazi death camps and extermination chambers to tried to formulate a theology after Auschwitz, and some of them concluded that God is dead, though without consulting God, I would suppose. Burke and Taylor are trying to say that the lunar landing or the first photos from orbit somehow necessitates a need to rethink and all that in theology.

Sometimes, it seems like every new invention or big event has some people saying we need to rethink God because of it. Why? What does Google have that trumpts God? Why does even an ugly event like the killings in the Nazi camps mean we have to rethink God? Is this all not just ways so shifting blame and responsibility?

It strikes me that the ancients were made of much heartier stuff. Jeremiah walks among that ruins of Jerusalem, and cries out to God. Daniel gets carried off to a foreign country, and sticks true to his God and the true beliefs in Him. Nehemiah actually believes those old words of God concerning the return of His people from exile and so acts on them. Jesus actually tells the disciples that Jerusalem will be destroyed and the Temple torn down, and they don't try to redefine Him and rethink His words and try to explain away what He told them.

There are true contradictions that should be avoided. But there are also seemingly contradictions that are not really contradiction, but rather, like colors, enhance the overall picture. Gideon can say "The Lord is peace" and believe that that same God can tell him to raise an army and kill the people who have conquered them, and he can see no contradiction in those things. And there isn't a contradiction.

Emergents and progressives seem unable to comprehend that. McLaren posits that God in the Old Testament is at times "unchristlike", a blasphemy if I've read one. His god is a small, weak thing, a creature made in McLaren's own image, not the great, grand, at times frightening God we see throughout the Bible.

Man can make whatever technological advances they want. They still haven't surprised or surpassed God. If anything, man's tech advances have only made us worse. The person who could at one time have only killed a few people with bare hands or knives can now kill scores with guns, or even thousands with something as seemingly innocent as airplanes, not to mention nuclear weapons. Lies which would have not even been heard about in another country a few hundred years ago can reach the other side of the world in seconds now.

pomo reading shenanigans

Every generation, on the basis of its own social and cultural history, tradition, education, and experiences, reads the Bible in ways that our ancestors would not recognize. This is because we always read the text of our own lives in relation to the biblical texts," Carter Heyward observes.
Burke and Taylor, A Heretic's Guide to Eternity, p 108.

Every generation reads the Bible in ways people before us would not recognize? Oh, really? And what proof can this Mr. Heyward offer for that claim?

Perhaps he bases it on things in the writings of the early church fathers? Irenaeus? Justin Martyr? Or is his way of reading them, let alone the Bible, so different that he can't even read them correctly?

And why just the Bible? Do people read Plato and Aristotle that same way? Or other Greek writers, poets and playwrites and philosophers? Can we not even understand Homer in any correct way?

Now, I've read a small bit of a few of the early church fathers. Not much, I admit, but a bit. I know, for example, that Justin Martyr had an eschatology that was rather a lot like what he today call Futurism, meaning that there would be a time when an Antichrist would rise and rule before the physical return of Christ. Though, as well, he thought that the church had taken the place of Israel, which I have a few problems with, but as with other Christian writers like Chesterton and Lewis whom I have found informative, I reserve the right to disagree as well as agree.

But I don't think the read the Bible in some kind of way that was so different from my own that it would not by recognizable to each other. Granting areas of disagreement, if the problems of language could be bridged, I think we could mostly understand each other.

On the other hand, I've recently had some encounters with those who could be said to read the Bible in ways that a Justin or an Irenaeus would likely not have understood, though maybe Irenaeus, in his studies of the Gnostics, would have been familiar with similar things.

The encounter began when I responded on an internet board to someone writing the he or she didn't believe that Christ died for our sins. I responded by posting several New Testament scriptures showing that Christ did indeed die for our sins. I was then told that this wasn't good enough because they weren't from the Gospels, that I was quoting Paul and John and not Jesus. And when I responded that I was quoting the Word of God, I was then told that if I was going to quote the Word of God I should quote Jesus, because of John calling Him the Word in that Gospel, that Paul and the other epistles-writers were struggling to understand Jesus' death and resurrection and what it meant to them (putting into question the concept of divine inspiration in the epistles), and that we can't even say that Bible is really the Scriptures.

And, to go to another though rather related source, even the words and teachings of Jesus are not enough. "...I could live with the idea that Paul condemned what we today have constituted as 'homosexuality' and that if anyone ever asked Jesus about it (and if they did we have no record of it) he would have said the same thing as Paul...In my view, even if there is a dominant view against homosexuality in the Scriptures and tradition...I would argue that on this point the Greeks were right and the dominant tradition among the Jews and Christian is wrong...Indeed, by invoking the spirit of a certain Jesus, I would argue for a counterfactual conditional: were Jesus alive to day and familiar with the pros cna cons of the contemporary argument, his centeredness on love would have brought him down onthe side of the rights of what we today call the 'homosexual' difference..." (Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct, pp 108-109). In other words, Jesus' own acceptance of and agreement with the laws against homosexuality is not enough if one can spin (I mean, deconstruct) things to the benefit of one's agenda. Even granting that the Bible never condones homosexuality means that we today must do so, in the minds of those who would call good what is evil. And apparently showing what the Scriptures say about the blood of Christ is not an "intelligent argument", whatever that means.

And there are others, too. I would wonder if Irenaeus would feel forgotten, because after he put a 1000 year kabash on Gnosticism through his works, it's back and people want to make such Gnostic gospels as authoritative as the biblical Gospels (or maybe take the authority of the biblical Gospels down to the level of the heretical Gnostics).

So, maybe Heyward has a point. Though if his point, and that of the Heretic's Guide authors, is that one way of reading the Bible (or, more accurately, interpreting it) is as good as the other, well, even they don't think that's true. If anything, Burke and Taylor and other emergents and progressives use themselves as the starting point for reading the Bible--they are the ones that judge and even condemn the Bible, not the Bible that judges us and both condemns us and tell us of God has provided us salvation. They even have the gall of judge and condemn God, as McLaren does in "A New Kind of Christianity" when he says that there are times in the Old Testament when God is "Unchristlike".

I really can't imagine a Justin or an Irenaeus thinking the God in the Hebrew scriptures was unlike Christ. When that happens, I think McLaren's views of God and of Christ are seriously, even fatally, skewed.

motes and beams

Spirituality focuses on authenticity and honesty. Religion tends to emphasize perfection and holiness. In fact, so great is the pressure to be progressing that people often lie to each other and even themselves about their religious experience and where they really are in their lives.
Burke and Taylor, A Heretic's Guide to Eternity, p 60

This is one criticism they have that has a bit of validity. What I question is how much "authenticity and honesty" is in their spirituality.

For one thing, we have to question what is meant by "authenticity and honesty". Perhaps it involves many things, but one sure thing it seems to involve is that one can admit to practicing what was once considered bad and sinful behavior (homosexuality, worshiping other gods, wanting other people's property through 'social justice', breaking the laws for rather lame reasons) is not only something they can now admit to, but also things that these people will support them in doing.

Now, on the other hand, if you disagree with these people who practice "authenticity and honesty", well, you may find that your own "authenticity and honesty" is somewhat less welcomed.

Perhaps there is pressure in churches to appear more spiritual than one really is, I'll not deny that. But I don't think that the church is alone in that fault, but that emergents are as prone to it as any other. The truth is, the 'emergent conversation' is not so welcoming of dissenting voices as they would like to pretend. One need only ask Mark Driscoll how welcoming they were of him when he started questioning them.

materialism as spirituality

Spirituality is material (meaing of this world) and tries to connect the world of the divine with the world of the human. Religion, on the other hand, is external and generally focused on "otherworldly" experiences. It often has very little to say about the sacredness of all creation here and now.
Burke and Taylor, A Heretic's Guide to Eternity, p 60

There are certain things that people say that can only be taken seriously if we realize they have their tongue firmly planted in one of their cheeks. For example, something like "red is the new black" is a nonsense statement unless we realize the context, and realize that it's said with a touch of humor and what the speaker may consider wit.

So, when these two make the statement "spirituality is material", while we may assume they are trying for wit, we still have to assume that somehow they are being serious. Spirituality is the new materialism, up is the new down, opera is the new punk, and jars of urine is the new art.

And why do I think that, at the very least, they have things backwards? What does it even mean, really, to "connect the world of the divine with the world of the human"?

Finally, there is, of course, the stereotypical and baseless slam against the church. It is too "otherworldly", too focused on life after death. Never mind all the hospitals and charites the church has been a part of, all the centers of learning the church has helped to found, all the causes it has supported that have made societies better. Never mind, as Chesterton points out in "The Everlasting Man", that the one thing that kept Europe from becoming like Asia was the church.

Which, of course, also includes the immeasurable good of telling people their sins can be forgiven through repentence and faith in the crucified and resurrected Jesus Christ.

Were Burke and Taylor to honestly look at history, they couldn't offer enough thanks to the church, or the God for the Church, for all the good Christians have done. But they won't, they have their own agenda to push, and the true church and the Gospel it preaches is simply in the way.

un-Taylor-ing Chesterton

This is Christ for this age but also a Christ for all ages. Images of Jesus are historical and contextual, as are recitations of the gospel. Things are added and subtracted; there are differences in focues and emphasis. My opening quote from Chesterton is of help here. Chesterton wrote at a time when atheism was a sigificant and growing alternative to faith. The rise of scientific-rationalism, including new theories such as Darwin's evolutionary model, were undermining the already embattled Christian faith that Chesterton held. The gift Chesterton offers is the power of a new perspective. Rather than address issues of sin, salvation, and redemption, he appeals directly to the "atheistic" potential in the Jesus story, the singular moment in the Passion where a conversatio about atheism and God is a viable one. This is what I mean when I say that we must once again encode the message of Jesus.

In the present situation it seems that some are willing to change, rearrange, and rethink form, but there is little attention to changeof content in the presentation of the Christian message in teh postsecular. My sense is that it is the message, the very content, that which we present as being representative of Christian faith that is the one thing that needs to be revisited and re-encoded...But in some sense, as long as Christianity remains a vapor trail fo modern and premodern concepts about how the relation between the human and teh divine is achieved, Christian thinking will not contribute much to the matters at hand....The message needs to speak to our time, not times past. Chesterton made room for atheists at the foot of the cross, not by denying other realities of the story, but by isolating the very point of connection by which the potential for engagement might be effected.

Barry Taylor, Entertainment Theology, pp 209-210

And his quote of Chesterton's.

When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the very cry from the cross: the cry which confesses the God has forsaken God. And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a gof from all the gods of the world...they will not find another god who has himself been in revolt...They will find...only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.
from Orthodoxy

As someone who has read a bit of Chesterton, and learned more than a bit from him, I rather immediately smelled (in a metaphorical sense) that something was wrong here. I recognized that quote, though it took me a bit to find in the text file of Orthodoxy that I have (courtesy of the Gutenberg Project), but I finally did. One note--since I am using a text file for the reference, I can't give you a page number, but I can say that the quote is in chapter VIII called The Romance of Orthodoxy.

Lastly, this truth is yet again true in the case of the common modern attempts to diminish or to explain away the divinity of Christ. The thing may be true or not; that I shall deal with before I end. But if the divinity is true it is certainly terribly revolutionary. That a good man may have his back to the wall is no more than we knew already; but that God could have his back to the wall is a boast for all insurgents for ever. Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete. Christianity alone has felt that God, to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king. Alone of all creeds, Christianity has added courage to the virtues of the Creator. For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point--and does not break. In this indeed I approach a matter more dark and awful than it is easy to discuss; and I apologise in advance if any of my phrases fall wrong or seem irreverent touching a matter which the greatest saints and thinkers have justly feared to approach. But in that terrific tale of the Passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt. It is written, "Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." No; but the Lord thy God may tempt Himself; and it seems as if this was what happened in Gethsemane. In a garden Satan tempted man: and in a garden God tempted God. He passed in some superhuman manner through our human horror of pessimism. When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Nay, (the matter grows too difficult for human speech,) but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.

A couple of times in that paragraph, Chesterton admits that he is dealing with a difficult subject, and one time admits to thinking that he what he's writing may be taken wrong. I think Taylor is taking him wrong, whether by accident or not, I'll not venture to say my suspicions, except that some of his claims show a staggering ignorance of the book.

When, for example, Taylor says "Rather than address issues of sin, salvation, and redemption...", making it sound like Chesterton does no such thing, he only leads me to believe that he has never read Orthodoxy. If he had, he would likely have read things like this.

But I think this book may well start where our argument started-- in the neighbourhood of the mad-house. Modern masters of science are much impressed with the need of beginning all inquiry with a fact. The ancient masters of religion were quite equally impressed with that necessity. They began with the fact of sin--a fact as practical as potatoes. Whether or no man could be washed in miraculous waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he wanted washing. But certain religious leaders in London, not mere materialists, have begun in our day not to deny the highly disputable water, but to deny the indisputable dirt. Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved. Some followers of the Reverend R.J.Campbell, in their almost too fastidious spirituality, admit divine sinlessness, which they cannot see even in their dreams. But they essentially deny human sin, which they can see in the street. The strongest saints and the strongest sceptics alike took positive evil as the starting point of their argument. If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat.
Chapter II

And concerning the idea that Christianity needs to keep up with the times, well, consider these.

An imbecile habit has arisen in modern controversy of saying that such and such a creed can be held in one age but cannot be held in another. Some dogma, we are told, was credible in the twelfth century, but is not credible in the twentieth. You might as well say that a certain philosophy can be believed on Mondays, but cannot be believed on Tuesdays. You might as well say of a view of the cosmos that it was suitable to half-past three, but not suitable to half-past four. What a man can believe depends upon his philosophy, not upon the clock or the century. If a man believes in unalterable natural law, he cannot believe in any miracle in any age. If a man believes in a will behind law, he can believe in any miracle in any age. Suppose, for the sake of argument, we are concerned with a case of thaumaturgic healing. A materialist of the twelfth century could not believe it any more than a materialist of the twentieth century. But a Christian Scientist of the twentieth century can believe it as much as a Christian of the twelfth century. It is simply a matter of a man's theory of things. Therefore in dealing with any historical answer, the point is not whether it was given in our time, but whether it was given in answer to our question. And the more I thought about when and how Christianity had come into the world, the more I felt that it had actually come to answer this question.
Chapter V

I have alluded to an unmeaning phrase to the effect that such and such a creed cannot be believed in our age. Of course, anything can be believed in any age. But, oddly enough, there really is a sense in which a creed, if it is believed at all, can be believed more fixedly in a complex society than in a simple one. If a man finds Christianity true in Birmingham, he has actually clearer reasons for faith than if he had found it true in Mercia. For the more complicated seems the coincidence, the less it can be a coincidence. If snowflakes fell in the shape, say, of the heart of Midlothian, it might be an accident. But if snowflakes fell in the exact shape of the maze at Hampton Court, I think one might call it a miracle. It is exactly as of such a miracle that I have since come to feel of the philosophy of Christianity. The complication of our modern world proves the truth of the creed more perfectly than any of the plain problems of the ages of faith. It was in Notting Hill and Battersea that I began to see that Christianity was true. This is why the faith has that elaboration of doctrines and details which so much distresses those who admire Christianity without believing in it.
Chapter VI

This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy. People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad. It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic. The Church in its early days went fierce and fast with any warhorse; yet it is utterly unhistoric to say that she merely went mad along one idea, like a vulgar fanaticism. She swerved to left and right, so exactly as to avoid enormous obstacles. She left on one hand the huge bulk of Arianism, buttressed by all the worldly powers to make Christianity too worldly. The next instant she was swerving to avoid an orientalism, which would have made it too unworldly. The orthodox Church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions; the orthodox Church was never respectable. It would have been easier to have accepted the earthly power of the Arians. It would have been easy, in the Calvinistic seventeenth century, to fall into the bottomless pit of predestination. It is easy to be a madman: it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one's own. It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob. To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the historic path of Christendom--that would indeed have been simple. It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.
Chapter VI

I could go on; indeed, I consider much of Chesterton's writings to have in some sense refuted much of the egotistical nonsense of postmodernism long before posmodernism was born. I think I'll leave it for now, though, with this last quote.

Religious authority has often, doubtless, been oppressive or unreasonable; just as every legal system (and especially our present one) has been callous and full of a cruel apathy. It is rational to attack the police; nay, it is glorious. But the modern critics of religious authority are like men who should attack the police without ever having heard of burglars. For there is a great and possible peril to the human mind: a peril as practical as burglary. Against it religious authority was reared, rightly or wrongly, as a barrier. And against it something certainly must be reared as a barrier, if our race is to avoid ruin.

That peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself. Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought. It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, "Why should ANYTHING go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?" The young sceptic says, "I have a right to think for myself." But the old sceptic, the complete sceptic, says, "I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all."

There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped. That is the ultimate evil against which all religious authority was aimed. It only appears at the end of decadent ages like our own: and already Mr. H.G.Wells has raised its ruinous banner; he has written a delicate piece of scepticism called "Doubts of the Instrument." In this he questions the brain itself, and endeavours to remove all reality from all his own assertions, past, present, and to come. But it was against this remote ruin that all the military systems in religion were originally ranked and ruled. The creeds and the crusades, the hierarchies and the horrible persecutions were not organized, as is ignorantly said, for the suppression of reason. They were organized for the difficult defence of reason. Man, by a blind instinct, knew that if once things were wildly questioned, reason could be questioned first.
Chapter III (aptly named The Suicide of Thought)

If, as Taylor claims, Chesterton was trying to make "... room for atheists at the foot of the cross", he was not doing so in order that the atheist should remain an atheist; rather, Orthodoxy was to a large degree an account of his own move from atheism to Christianity, and he spends quite a few of his very long paragraphs showing the contradictions of the things atheists say against Christianity. He certainly wasn't interested in pretending that the atheist could remain an atheist and be a Christian, which seems to be quite the fashion today.

story proves nothing

Spirituality is concerned with the particular rather than the universal. It holds that the subjective-self narrative is integral to the expression of authentic faith. Religion, in contrast, is consumed with accounts of the universal human condition. As a result, people reject religion not because they don't believe but because their individual stories are overlooked and their voices not heard.
Burke and Tayler, A Heretic's Guide to Eternity, pp 59-60

First, my apology for the lengthy delay in posting. It's been a busy time, and I've been doing other things.

Now, to the substance...

I suppose this is an attack on the big postmodern bugaboo called the 'metanarrative', which is what I think they mean when they refer to "accounts of the universal human condition".

Now I suppose it could be of interest to point out that these writers attack metanarratives by employing another metanarrative. In order to attack the metanarrative of "accounts of the universal human condition", they must employ another metanarrative of "people reject religion...because their individual stories are overlooked and their voices not heard".

This is a very postmodern thing to do. A few minutes ago, I was listen to a sermon by Rob Bell and Shane Hipps on Chris Rosebrough's "Fighting for the Faith", and at one point Bell says that he doesn't want to engage in debate or argument with those who are critical of him, but instead speaks of an adequate answer to them would be something like people gathering around a water cooler and them telling their stories about how they have experienced God. The sermon they preached was filled with attacks on correct biblically-based beliefs, instead substituting some kind of "big Jesus" that is present even in the ungodly practice of transcendental meditation. For them, story validates, not correct biblical beliefs and interpretation.

But what does story validated? It seems that throughout my times in church, there have been people 'giving their testimony', as it was sometimes called, relating to the people of the church how God has been blessing and helping them. Far from overlooking the individual's story, they would likely have welcomed them.

But that doesn't mean they would have uncritically accepted those stories. If, for example, someone had told of how God was blessing his affair with a woman he wasn't married to, that would likely have not been acceptable. And rightly so. A good story of how someone thinks God's blessing a sinful sexual relationship does not validate that sinful sexual relationship.

Stories are fine, and testimonies can be very effective, but story is far from enough. There is a man who has written books about what he calls "Conversations With God". The one time I read a part of one of his books, I came away knowing that whatever he had been conversing with, it hadn't been God, because his 'god' had nothing in common with the God of the Bible. People may give testimonies of how a new-age guru like Eckhard Tolle has helped them, but Tolle's teaching are directly counter to Scripture, and so even if they were helped, that help was a lie, and their testimony does nothing to validate the teachings of Tolle.

Finally, there is simply the wholesale reject of any claim about the "universal human condition". But are there no truths that can be said about that people as a whole? If so, than to reject them is unwise, even foolish. If it is true that "all have sinned and come short of the glory of God", a statement about the universal human condition, then it cannot be good to reject it simply because one rejects such statements. And if it is true, then no story that says differently can be true.

getting the whole truth?

Spirituality favors a holistic view of the individual, seeing the self not as a series of compartments but as a whole entity. The tendency of religion, meanwhile, is to divide the body and spirit, emphasizing the spirit's superiority over the body.
Burke and Taylor, A Heretic's Guide to Eternity, p 59

In his book 'A Christianity Worth Believing', Doug Pagitt says a bit about babies and our responses to them. For most people, a newborn is a good thing, something to be valued and whose arrival is to be celebrated. It would seem very incongruous if someone where to talk about a newborn child as a horrible sinner.

We the massed unwashed who are outside of the great enlightened Postmodern ones are at times accused of not being nuanced. In this, Pagitt showed himself to lack that 'virtue'.

There is no contradiction in saying the a chld, or any person of any age, is both precious and sinful, both a valuable being and a sinner in need of redeeming. In fact, one sees it in the Bible, "God has commended his love to us in this, that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us".

And here, we have to deal with a similar type of thing that some people seem to think of as contradictory--the body is valuable and good, the material world is a creation of God and good, and the physical body even has an important role in the resurrection, but it is not more important than the soul.

Consider marriage. The Bible says much concerning the importance of marriage, and it is a good thing, something set up by God. But then, Jesus tells us that in the age to come we will not marry, but will be as the angels. If I may put it so, Jesus tells us that marriage is only a temporary thing, something for this world only--if one of the couple in a marriage should die, the other is free to marry another.

"Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both body and soul in hell" Matther 10:28. The idea of some sort of difference between body and soul is not new. As this passage shows, Jesus taught it.

either/or either/or or both/and?

Spirituality adopts a "both-and" approach to life, allowing culture, context, and situation to be reflected in the beliefs and practices of the seeker. Whereas spirituality encourages tolerance and acceptance of difference as the foundation for postmodern ethics, religion tends to trade in binary oppositions. It is most comfortable with clear boundaries and "us and them" divides.
Burke and Taylor, A Heretic's Guide to Eternity, p 59

In his book Can Man Live Without God, on pp 126-129, Ravi Zacharias related a time when he had a debate of sorts with a professor of philosophy, concerning this concept of "both-and'. The professor tried to say that Hinduism was a "both-and" religion, "...when you see one Hindu affirming that God is personal and another insisting the God is not personal, just because it is contradictory you should not see it as a problem. The real problem is that you are seeing that contradiction as a Westerner when you should be approaching it as an Easterner. the both/and is the Eastern. The both/and is the Eastern way of viewing reality".

Zacharias, who was born in India and born among the Eastern mind, was having none of it. He points out the contradiction in the argument, than when one studied Hinduism "I either use the both/and system of logic or nothing else?", and ends with a more everyday example, "...even in India we look both ways before we cross the street--it is either the bus or me, not both of us".

In fact, this list that Burke and Taylor have created shows the contradiction in their statement. The claim the spirituality is "both-and", but have set up a list of "us and them" in the form of "spirituality and religion", or more accurately "spirituality vs religion", and it is obvious that they think that spirituality is much better than religion.

So, in order to say that spirituality is a "both-and", they must create a "binary opposite" between spirituality and religion. Or, as the professor who debated with Zacharian put it, "The either/or does seem to emerge, doesn't it?"

It does emerge. It cannot help but emerge. Either you are 'spiritual', or you are something else--athiest, religious, fundamentalist, whatever else may be out there. Either you believe in "both-and", or you don't, which kinds of puts paid to any sort of universal application of the notion of "both-and".

And as you may expect, there is no hint of a "both-and" in the teachings of Jesus; if anything, they are full of "us and them", even to Him saying that those not against Him are for Him. His parables are full of "binary opposites"--wise and foolish virgins, wheat and weeds, faithful and wicked servants, sheep and goats, lost and found sheep, those who walk by the wounded man and the Samaritan who helps him, the man in Abrahams bosom and the one in Hell.

living the zombie life

Spirituality is concerned with conscious living and with cultivating the sense of interconnectedness. Religion, by comparison, is often held captive by pseudo-orthodoxy and tends to be concerned with professions of belief rather than transformational living.
Burke and Taylor, A Heretic's Guide to Eternity, p 59

First, we have to consider some of their stranger words here. What, for example, do they mean by 'interconnectedness'? And what kind of living do they consider 'transformational'? Or, for that matter, what they mean by 'conscious living' (I'm assuming it's opposed to some kind of 'unconscious living', like, maybe, people asleep, or in comas, or maybe the fictional undead-ness of a zombie?)

I consider these words to be vague, feeling words, mostly feel-good ego words. To my mind, it's not so much that these words have any concrete meaning, but that these words are how people like Burke and Taylor describe themselves, and thing of themselves. What they describe is more the sense of superiority these 'spirituality' people feel over the poor unenlightened unwashed, those who believe that creeds and professions of faith actually mean something over vague feel-goodiness.

Of more concreteness is "pseudo-orthodoxy". That seems to be saying that any attempt to say that there are certain things that must be believed is either false, or that more or all such beliefs that are called necessary in their view wrong. To put is another way, the term "pseudo-orthodoxy", as use in this context, is essentially anti-orthodoxy.

I am not anti-orthodoxy. I am very much pro-orthodoxy. In fact, I am very much pro-Orthodoxy. And I will show that Chesterton, in his book Orthodoxy, has already quite sufficiently answered these anti-orthodoxy types.

This is what I have called guessing the hidden eccentricities
of life. This is knowing that a man's heart is to the left and not
in the middle. This is knowing not only that the earth is round,
but knowing exactly where it is flat. Christian doctrine detected
the oddities of life. It not only discovered the law, but it
foresaw the exceptions. Those underrate Christianity who say that
it discovered mercy; any one might discover mercy. In fact every
one did. But to discover a plan for being merciful and also severe--
THAT was to anticipate a strange need of human nature. For no one
wants to be forgiven for a big sin as if it were a little one.
Any one might say that we should be neither quite miserable nor
quite happy. But to find out how far one MAY be quite miserable
without making it impossible to be quite happy--that was a discovery
in psychology. Any one might say, "Neither swagger nor grovel";
and it would have been a limit. But to say, "Here you can swagger
and there you can grovel"--that was an emancipation.

This was the big fact about Christian ethics; the discovery
of the new balance. Paganism had been like a pillar of marble,
upright because proportioned with symmetry. Christianity was like
a huge and ragged and romantic rock, which, though it sways on its
pedestal at a touch, yet, because its exaggerated excrescences
exactly balance each other, is enthroned there for a thousand years.
In a Gothic cathedral the columns were all different, but they were
all necessary. Every support seemed an accidental and fantastic support;
every buttress was a flying buttress. So in Christendom apparent
accidents balanced. Becket wore a hair shirt under his gold
and crimson, and there is much to be said for the combination;
for Becket got the benefit of the hair shirt while the people in
the street got the benefit of the crimson and gold. It is at least
better than the manner of the modern millionaire, who has the black
and the drab outwardly for others, and the gold next his heart.
But the balance was not always in one man's body as in Becket's;
the balance was often distributed over the whole body of Christendom.
Because a man prayed and fasted on the Northern snows, flowers could
be flung at his festival in the Southern cities; and because fanatics
drank water on the sands of Syria, men could still drink cider in the
orchards of England. This is what makes Christendom at once so much
more perplexing and so much more interesting than the Pagan empire;
just as Amiens Cathedral is not better but more interesting than
the Parthenon. If any one wants a modern proof of all this,
let him consider the curious fact that, under Christianity,
Europe (while remaining a unity) has broken up into individual nations.
Patriotism is a perfect example of this deliberate balancing
of one emphasis against another emphasis. The instinct of the
Pagan empire would have said, "You shall all be Roman citizens,
and grow alike; let the German grow less slow and reverent;
the Frenchmen less experimental and swift." But the instinct
of Christian Europe says, "Let the German remain slow and reverent,
that the Frenchman may the more safely be swift and experimental.
We will make an equipoise out of these excesses. The absurdity
called Germany shall correct the insanity called France."

Last and most important, it is exactly this which explains
what is so inexplicable to all the modern critics of the history
of Christianity. I mean the monstrous wars about small points
of theology, the earthquakes of emotion about a gesture or a word.
It was only a matter of an inch; but an inch is everything when you
are balancing. The Church could not afford to swerve a hair's breadth
on some things if she was to continue her great and daring experiment
of the irregular equilibrium. Once let one idea become less powerful
and some other idea would become too powerful. It was no flock of sheep
the Christian shepherd was leading, but a herd of bulls and tigers,
of terrible ideals and devouring doctrines, each one of them strong
enough to turn to a false religion and lay waste the world.
Remember that the Church went in specifically for dangerous ideas;
she was a lion tamer. The idea of birth through a Holy Spirit,
of the death of a divine being, of the forgiveness of sins,
or the fulfilment of prophecies, are ideas which, any one can see,
need but a touch to turn them into something blasphemous or ferocious.
The smallest link was let drop by the artificers of the Mediterranean,
and the lion of ancestral pessimism burst his chain in the forgotten
forests of the north. Of these theological equalisations I have
to speak afterwards. Here it is enough to notice that if some
small mistake were made in doctrine, huge blunders might be made
in human happiness. A sentence phrased wrong about the nature
of symbolism would have broken all the best statues in Europe.
A slip in the definitions might stop all the dances; might wither
all the Christmas trees or break all the Easter eggs. Doctrines had
to be defined within strict limits, even in order that man might
enjoy general human liberties. The Church had to be careful,
if only that the world might be careless.

This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy. People have fallen
into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy,
humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting
as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to
be mad. It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses,
seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude
having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic.
The Church in its early days went fierce and fast with any warhorse;
yet it is utterly unhistoric to say that she merely went mad along
one idea, like a vulgar fanaticism. She swerved to left and right,
so exactly as to avoid enormous obstacles. She left on one hand
the huge bulk of Arianism, buttressed by all the worldly powers
to make Christianity too worldly. The next instant she was swerving
to avoid an orientalism, which would have made it too unworldly.
The orthodox Church never took the tame course or accepted
the conventions; the orthodox Church was never respectable. It would
have been easier to have accepted the earthly power of the Arians.
It would have been easy, in the Calvinistic seventeenth century,
to fall into the bottomless pit of predestination. It is easy to be
a madman: it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let
the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one's own.
It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob.
To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration
which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the
historic path of Christendom--that would indeed have been simple.
It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at
which one falls, only one at which one stands. To have fallen into
any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed
have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been
one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies
thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate,
the wild truth reeling but erect.

What is most inane, and even insane, in the statement by Burke and Taylor is the statements of belief are somehow inferior to how one lives; rather, it should more accurately be stated that beliefs precede actions, and thus beliefs are most important, as they will lead to actions.

And let them not fool you, Burke and Taylor are very concerned about correct beliefs, as they define them. The whole book is about how the church's beliefs are either not-quite-right, or very wrong. Belief in hell, for example, should be either discarded or hell should be redefined; the belief that only those with faith in Christ will be saved needs to be discarded, and those of other religions and faiths should be welcomed.

beyond what is commanded, probably not good

Spirituality trades in mystery and seek experiential, firsthand encounters of the divine. Religion, meanwhile, frequently comes across as overly dogmatic and absolutist. Religion too often imposes blanket rules and regulations on us without considering context or social and environmental dynamics.
Burke and Taylor, A Heretic's Guide to Eternity, p 59

Read the New Testament, and you'll read many commands. Jesus tells us to do many things, and so the writers of the Epistles. Some are specific, others more general.

One thing I have not seen suggested or commanded in the New Testament is that we are to "seek experiential, firsthand encounters of the divine".

That doesn't mean such experiences may not happen. The Apostle Paul's conversion was brought on by such an experience, and he seems to have had other visions and supernatural experiences after that. He relates a bit about a man who was taken to Heaven itself, and many think he is talking about himself, which I'm not sure of that way or this. I have heard of accounts of people in the more recent past who have had similar experiences.

But while being open to such experiences may be acceptable, actively going to look for them is not ever commanded in the Bible. More importantly, in all of the practical things the New Testament tells us to do, none of them involve any kind of 'spiritual practices'--trances, mind-emptying meditations, repetitive prayers (in fact, Jesus' words against prayers of "vain repetition" may be considered against such a practice), isolation, labyrinths, or others.

Also, we may ask, how does one know that one is experiencing a "firsthand encounter of the divine"? Let us be real, if there is a divine, is there not also a diabolic? Does the Bible not tell us that the the Devil and demons can appear as "angels of light"? Is any man so true and experienced at the spiritual that he can know when he's dealing with the good or the evil?

This is particularly important, I think, when we consider the last part of Burke's and Taylor's paragraph. Religion says that there are things that must be believed, and says there are moral absolutes that apply to all people at all time. Christianity that is based in the Bible certainly says such things. It is as wrong for a man to sleep with another man's wife today as it was for King David to commit adultery with Bathsheba, the wife of another man. Murder is as wrong now as it was when Cain murdered his brother. Lying, stealing, dishonesty in business and other relationships, and worshipping false gods and idols, all were wrong long ago, and there is no reason to think they have suddenly become right today.

I know the New Testament's words about the Law being abolished or replaced can cause confusion. Much of what is now not followed are more like ceremonial laws, or things that the Old Testament Law called unclean but are no longer so. There are people who have dealt with it in more detail than I currently can.

The statement against dogmas and rules shows an astonishing amount of arrogance on the part of Burke and Taylor, as they essentially say that they need no guides when they deal with the spiritual, that they can venture into such things on their own, that they can determine for themselves if what they experience is really divine, and not devilish. Such arrogance should be avoided, as should, I think, any unbiblical attempts to push oneself into the supernatural. If God chooses to give you dreams and visions, or even prophecies, all well and good, but that is God's choice, not yours to take upon yourself.

are they really countercultural?

Spirituality encourages a countercultural dynamic. It challenges many of the values of material life by injecting a renewed focus on the divine. On the other hand, religion and the establishment tend to go hand in hand. While the sacred texts may encourage countercultural living, in practice, religion has embraced the values of contemporary life.
Burke and Taylor, A Heretic's Guide to Eternity, p 59

Wow, so much politically loaded language in that, it's difficlt to know where to begin.

"Spirituality encourages a counterculturlt dynamic". Really? A counter to what culture? The copyright for the book is 2006, so likely much or all of it was written circa 2005 and 2006. Meaning in the time of George W Bush's second term as US President, with of course inspiration coming from the first term.

In other words, "countercultural" in this book likely has at least some hint of an anti-conservatism that President Bush represented in many people's minds, though rather imperfectly I think.

It is interesting, now in 2010, to see how things have changed. If there is a movement that could be considered "countercultural", it would be the Tea Party Movement. The people in it, largely falling into the category of 'common people', have stood up to what they consider injustices and wrongs--unfair excessive taxation; attempts by the government to gain control of such private spheres as automotive manufacturing and health care; attempts to curtail certain types of speech, notably conservative talk radio.

Yet with this counterculture movement, the take on it has been--much less favorable. Those who had previously been 'countercultural' now attack those who are against the present US adminstration, which has taken what was once considered 'countercultural' and is making it cultural. The attacks on the Tea Party, often based on lies and unsubstantiated claims, are numerous and vicious. Those who previously applauded the countercultural now attack the countercultural when their own ideas and preferences become or seem to be becoming the cultural norms, the establishment.

And this is the thing to keep in mind, in regards to this excerpt from "Heretic's Guide..."--'spirituality' is countercultural only until it becomes the 'establishment', then it ceases to be countercultural.

And one must question, as well, how much religion has "embraced the values of contemporary life". If by this Burke and Taylor mean evangelical Christians (possibly among others), then what values has it embraced? The killing of the unborn, which almost all evangelicals deplore? The drug culture? The culture of loose sexuality, which has had it's effects but which is still fought against?

If anything, one could argue that it is the 'spiritual' that embraced compromise with culture. For example, on p 49 of this same book, it seems that even their preference and pushing of 'spirituality' is a cultural thing. "The cultural shift in favor of spirituality over religion and towards a God freed from the constraints of religious dogmatism and feudalism is exciting. The table is being set for the future, and I believe we will see the ideas that have captured humanity's imagination aobut God for centuries transitioned into new contexts".

The current controversy concerning homosexuality is a prime example. While most evanglicals have stood against the legalizing and recognizing of homosexual partnerships as 'marriage', it is the 'spiritual' people, the ones who denigrate the Bible and claim to be more spiritually aware than the average ''Christian", who are all too ready to compromise with what the world wants, and to even provide spiritualized supports for it--explaining away biblical passages which forbid such sexual practices, claim that "love" is more important than "law", and when all else fails, say that those who are against it are "haters" who do not show true Christian love.

I would conclude, then, by saying this statement of Burke's and Taylor's is rather misleading.