Transcend Transform Transgress

Something a little different today: here is a reflection that I wrote and below is the video of me trying to present it on the live-stream Sunday morning (with limited success).

I would love to hear your thoughts.

There is a wonderful and often quoted passage in Galatians chpt 3 that I wanted to flesh out a little today.

²⁶ So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, ²⁷ for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. ²⁸ There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. ²⁹ If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.

It is important to understand what Paul is saying here and what the possible implications are for us in the 21^st century – since this verse has sometimes been used in a harmful way.

In the first century that Paul was writing in, there were 3 divisions of identity (if you will) and this passage addresses them all.

• Political
• Personal
• Religious

Paul is saying that in Christ these divisions are ruptured or transcended. In the political realm, slave and free would have had very different lives. In the personal (gendered) realm, males and females would have completely different rights and obligations. Life would have looked very different. In the religious realm, Jews and Greeks were vastly different categories – especially under Roman religion regulations.

What Paul is saying is that in Christ those categories are complicated, called into question, and transgressed.

It is not that those categories ceased to be or ceased to be important. It is that they no longer were totalizing. They lost their power to be ultimately determinative. They did not completely define or confine you.

This is an amazing implication of the gospel – the good news of life in Christ. You were not the categories that you were born into and that society placed upon you. There was now something else about that transcended those external categories and transformed who you are in the world.

You might be able to say in our day: there is no republican or democrat, no gay and straight, no citizen and immigrant.

This is a very transgressive thing to say! It violates the very categories that we have set up for sorting out who is us and who is them.

Now here is the important part: those categories still exist. It is just that they don’t define us, limit us, contain us, and restrain us.

Transgressive issues can be very powerful. They call into question the entire structure of the inherited system and undermine (or subvert) the very way that we categorize society.

This is why I prefer to talk about transform instead of reform. It is not enough to us and we need to transcend these limitations in divisions. The danger is that we will come in times of great tension and social upheaval, redress when we should transgress.

Those are my words for the day:

• Transform
• Transcend
• Transgress

I have been fascinated over the last several years to watch and listen to the heated debate around bathrooms and who gets to use which bathroom. As somebody who lives between two established communities having been raised Evangelical but now operating in Progressive circles, I have been astounded at the amount of attention and contention that issues of Trans people has received.

In the LGBTQAI+ formulation the T is only 1/8 of the signifier. It is notable that when looking at the millions of people who would identify by this series of signifiers that percentage wise trans people are a microscopic percentage. Not even one percent – a fraction of one percent. And yet, in the social imagination, their presence has drawn overwhelming amount of attention.

This is the power of the transgressive category. The presence of the ‘other’ calls into question the entire system, the whole configuration. It is one thing to be gay or straight, male or female– That’s contentious or confusing is the debate surrounding those to be –it is another thing to call the entire concept of genderization into question.

We live in very contentious times where any issue can you become instantly aggravated an divisive. I have been amazed at the outsized amount of attention that this issues who can use which bathroom has received in both my current liberal circles and in the evangelical circles that I get to visit. There is something very telling about the disproportionate amount of attention that this issue has drawn.

It is telling. And it is a good thing because it questions or interrogates the entire structure. And the structure needs to be examined!

I became aware of how big of a problem our gendered categories were when I moved to LA and I inadvertently picked up some new hand motions. Apparently they were a little too feminine for a large man to be using and people would point it  out to me. When someone would say that they were not very manly, I would protest by saying, “no. I am a man who uses these hand motions–that makes them manly”.

We also categorize colors by gender. It is interesting to know that 100 years ago pink and blue were used in the exact opposite way for baby boys and girls as they are now. In fact both the yellow and purple were acceptable. It was not until the first color addition of the Sears Roebuck catalog in the early 1920s that our current pink and blue category was formalized.

I recently read a story that my friend posted on social media about being confronted by somebody because her male dog had a purple harness.

Listen, if hand motions and colors and dog harnesses can be gendered then the entire enterprise needs to be called into question.

Our gender categories are too overly determined and totalized.

So that brings us back to our text. It is not that there is no such thing as a male and female, Republican and Democrat, citizen and immigrant… it’s that there is a category which transcends, transforms, and transgresses our understanding inherited categories.

I might say to you today that in Christ your identity it’s so much bigger then any of those external signifiers that society places upon you. It doesn’t mean that we are no longer males or females, that we are not Black and white and Asian And Native American, that we are neither gay nor straight–we continue to be all of those things. It’s that they are not final or total in their capacities to define us and divide us.

There is something much bigger about Life in Christ (the gospel) that subverts, undermines, and interrogates the ways that the world has been divided up for us and changes the ways that we are called to participate in the world.

Daddy God

More than masculine imagery is needed for health and wholeness.

The divine – transcendent – eternal is so much more than the metaphors and analogies that we utilize is worship and prayer.

“The rule of prayer is the rule of faith” has migrated historically from prayer to sacrament to preaching and, now in our musical age, to worship. See also Worship Words Determine Faith [link]

Our language about God functions – Elizabeth Johnson

This is why we must both account for and attend to a more well-rounded and balanced approach to our imagery about God.

Please support the work of Naked Pastor

Watch this video and let me know your thoughts about my nuanced and constructive proposal.

Here is the comic from Naked Pastor

Nudity as Social Construct

A State-Trooper in Georgia introduced me to the difference between ‘naked’ and ‘nekid’.

Naked is when you don’t have any clothes on.
Nekid is when you don’t have any clothes on and you are up to somethin‘.

This is a surprisingly helpful distinction!

Earlier this week I saw a podcast episode humorously entitled “Nudity as a Social Construct”.  I am finding this analogy equally helpful.

Every time I attempt to talk to somebody about how both race and gender are socially constructed, they want to argue about biologic (or physical) element of skin color or genitalia – things are visible to the naked-eye (as it were).

I have been looking for a third example to use as an analogy and now I have it: nudity.

See, the fact that you don’t have any clothes on is not up for debate. That is a physical reality, a biological ‘given’.
What it means in our society – or how it is interpreted – is both situational and culturally determined.

Depending on your:

• geography
• culture
• situation
• era
• intention

Not having a shirt on could mean very different things. If you were a tribesman in the 1900’s in Saharan Africa, not having a shirt on means something very different than if you show up to a business presentation with no shirt on in modern-day America.

Both men have no shirt on. How that is interpreted is socially constructed.

It is situational, or location specific. Like the clothes that you wear (or don’t wear) to the beach.

I am finding this analogy a helpful conversation starter with those who struggle to understand how race and gender are socially constructed concepts and not simply biological realities.

Have you found any helpful analogies or tools to further this conversation?

Not Literally God

An interesting discussion from Facebook this week continues so I thought I would post it here as well.

I commented Sunday morning,

Some church songs are easier to make gender neutral than others.

Some of these songs lean so heavily on the masculine pronoun that they are nearly unusable

As someone who is very intentional about mixing up the English pronouns used for God [link], this is an important issue for me. It sparked a nice little discussion. To clarify I added the following:

“The gender pronouns in the Bible are not a problem unless you think they are literal.
Scripture is fine as contextual (and timely) expression (as all expressions are). It is actually comes down to your view of language.
Language is the limiting factor because each era attempts to do its best with the words that it has – OUR era has two difficulties

1. Hebrew and Greek do not come into English smoothly – one issue is the lack of masculine/feminine that say Spanish and French have. English is limited in that sense.
2. The nature of language means that we utilize word pictures and metaphors that are never the exact representation of thing we are talking about. It is just as accurate and inaccurate to call God a rock, a father, or a mother hen. Of course, God is not actually ANY of those things really. They are word pictures. God’s ontological reality is not captured in any language.

We are just doing the best with the tools that we have.”

People will then point to Jesus’ gender as an endorsement of a masculine God.

Jesus, however, was using relational language. Not literal. God is not a big man with a penis in the sky. Jesus was saying that he related to God as one relates to a perfect parent.
IN fact, Jesus’ statements about his relationship ‘abba’ were so in depth that they comprised Jesus’ character {as in ‘I and the father are one’ if you have seen me you have seen the one who sent me)
In this way, Jesus was unique in history and truly worthy to be called ‘son of god’ which makes him worthy of praise (as we praise god) so that the Christian church developed a trinitarian understanding of god (a novel development)

It reminded me of that old CS Lewis poem, “A Footnote To All Prayers” (it references Pheidias who was  a legendary statue maker in the ancient world)

He whom I bow to only knows to whom I bow
When I attempt the ineffable Name, murmuring Thou,
And dream of Pheidian fancies and embrace in heart
Symbols (I know) which cannot be the thing Thou art.
Thus always, taken at their word, all prayers blaspheme
Worshipping with frail images a folk-lore dream,
And all men in their praying, self-deceived, address
The coinage of their own unquiet thoughts, unless
Thou in magnetic mercy to Thyself divert
Our arrows, aimed unskilfully, beyond desert;
And all men are idolators, crying unheard
To a deaf idol, if Thou take them at their word.
Take not, O Lord, our literal sense. Lord, in thy great
Unbroken speech our limping metaphor translate.

I am always surprised by how insistent people are that their language of God is accurate and sufficient. I guess that is a good reminder why this issue is worth contesting and why it is so vital that we challenge the status quo.

Jordan Peterson and the Past

I listened to a fascinating podcast yesterday where an older British intellectual (Philip Dodd) took Jordan Peterson to task on one subject after another. It was very argumentative and quite contentious – not to my irenic liking.

Jordan Peterson has risen to fame recently in a parallel way to “Make America Great Again” based on the same ‘things are out of control’ discomfort and backlash. This is a phenomenon that I am particularly intrigued by.

Peterson’s brand of ‘we have to get back to the preferable past’ reclamation project is the perfect blend of two things that I am very familiar with: The academic approach of Alasdair MacIntyre and the therapeutic manliness of John Eldredge’s “Wild at Heart” series.

Eldredge has a therapeutic approach to masculinity based loosely on Jungian archetypes (warrior, king, magician, lover) and thinkers like MacIntyre are trying reclaim Aristotle’s ancient Greek notions of virtue, ethics, and moral character.

When you combine “Wild at Heart” masculinity, with Aristotelian principles in ethics, and throw in a dash of ‘make culture great again’ … you get Jordan Peterson.

Peterson’s book is “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos”. The first six rules are:

1. Stand up straight with your shoulders back
2. Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping
3. Make friends with people who want the best for you
4. Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today
5. Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them
6. Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world

None of these rules seem intrinsically bad. Rule 1 is very ‘Wild at Heart’. Rule 6 is very MacIntyre.

Now I have written a lot about MacIntyre and the problems of Aristotelian reclamation projects. Susan Heckman[1] has convinced me that the solution is not simply to (re)claim/(re)cycle/(re)purpose ancient, antiquated, or Aristotelian concepts from the pre-modern world.

 “MacIntyre’s approach exemplifies a disturbing characteristic of much of the communitarian literature: the romanticization of premodern societies that ignores the oppression and hierarchy that was endemic to those societies. Even Sandel (1984), despite his modernist leanings, sometimes falls prey to the tendency to glorify traditional communities. The narrative selfhood that MacIntyre lauds can only be obtained at a high price: the ascription of traditional roles.”

She explains:

“When it comes to the highly charged issue of the sexism and racism of the traditions he praises so highly, MacIntyre seems to abandon his interrelationship thesis. With regard to the Aristotelian tradition, he tries to deny the claim that sexism and racism are an integral part of this system of virtues.

… throughout his writings MacIntyre unambiguously asserts it is this traditional community we must foster if we are to return to any semblance of a moral life:

“What matters at this stage are the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us (1984).”

To thinkers like MacIntyre and Hauerwas and Peterson, we are descending further into an age of darkness.[2] Their answer is to (re)claim or (re)turn to some former understanding or expression of virtue and order. Hekman is right though – we cannot even attempt to do so without acknowledging and addressing the inherent racism, sexism, and disparity built into every level of the structures from which those romantic notions come.

This is the problem with Jordan Peterson’s notion of the past.

 

Three thoughts that I want to leave you with:

Don’t read Peterson – it is too predictable. Read instead Teaching Community by bell hooks and Church In The Round by Letty Russel if you want to understand and do something in our historical moment.

 

The future is going to be slightly like the past but largely unlike it. The world is really changing in some ways and this cultural shift requires not just a new mental framework (thus my interest in ‘social imaginaries’) but a new skill-set. In a land based culture, farmers develop a certain set of skills. As we move to a more liquid and fluid culture, sailors need to develop a different set of skills and knowledges. Both require strength and intelligence … but they are very different.

 

Peterson came to prominence for contesting Canada’s language directives to use gender-neutral pronouns for trans people. Now, leaving out the argument about the government telling us how to talk (a whole other subject) I just want to say that using ‘they’ instead of ‘he’ or ‘she’ is not that difficult and doesn’t take anything away from your masculinity.

It is a really easy change to make once you realize that language (and especially English) is always adapting and evolving anyway. Referring to people by their preferred pronoun is a gracious thing to do (Peterson claims to be a Christian and bases much of his thought on Hebrew Bible stories) and it models Christlikeness through Kenosis (self-emptying) as seen in Philippians 2.

 

 

[1] Hekman, Susan. “The Embodiment of the Subject: Feminism and the Communitarian Critique of Liberalism.” The Journal of Politics 54, no. 04 (November 1992): 1098–1119.

[2] In the consumer society of the 21^st century, it is not enough to want to ‘get back’ to a former era of romanticized notions which utilize previous formulations of order and social coherence. We must follow Jesus’ example of interrogating the ‘as is’ structure of our given systems. Jesus employed tactics which subverted the assumed nature of the status quo to inspire people’s imagination about the way that things can be. The way that things are is not the way that God wants them. Things can be different. The gospel calls us to imagine that the world can be a different way. This is good news (evangelion) in the original sense.

 

Morphing Nature of Race and Gender

Understanding both race and gender can seem difficult at times. Concepts can be illusive and definitions can feel like they change mid-course.

What if it turns out that it doesn’t just seem that way – it actually is that way?

An article that has been very helpful to me is by Troy Duster called “The Morphing Properties of Whiteness” in the book The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness.

His approach moves us from an ‘essentialist’ understanding of race to an elemental one. That is my phrasing, not his – but it holds great possibility for discussions around race and, I would add, gender.

It is in vogue today to say that is race is not a biological reality (DNA, science, etc) but is instead a socially constructed category. That is fine and true BUT that does not help us deal with historical and ongoing effects of race and our previous racial understandings.

In adopting a “Morphing Properties” approach, it gives us a framing metaphor of steam/water/ice to help distinguish between abstract concepts (gas), fluid definitions (liquid) and concrete consequences (solid). It also acknowledges that things can change very quickly. His personal story on p. 123 is telling.

I have been using this article for over a year in whiteness workshops, church settings, and in the classroom. It seems to help people make sense of an overwhelming, complicated, and elusive topic. This gives them an entry point without their white fragility causing them to get their hackles up right away.

I have also started utilizing the elemental approach to gender with those who have inherited an essentialist binary of male/female. I am working here off of Elaine Graham’s Transforming Practice where she engages Judith Butler’s notion of perfomativity. (see below)

I’m arguing that masculinity is performed and that whiteness operates on a performative register.

My thesis: We enact and embody (concrete) our understandings and ideas (abstract) in a fluid environment of social relationships (liquid).

This is a conversation that I would very much like to have in 2017 so I wanted to recommend this article.

If you are looking for a good paperback, I would suggest How The Irish Became White.
If you want a good (and inexpensive) Kindle book, The History of White People is a doozy.

Raising Girls

There are a lot of great women in my life – women that I love, respect, pray for, listen to and learn from.  I have two sisters that I adore and who teach me much about life. I am a life-long youth pastor who is also responsible for ministry to children and families at my church.

Several things have converged in the past month to cause me to think about this subject more than usual.

• A recent middle-school youth trip had a 5:1 girl to boy ratio … and spending a week with 12 & 13-year-old young women will make you think about the world that they are being raised in and socialized into.
• My wife is the youngest of 3 girls and I have had the opportunity to spend time with all of my nieces (ages 5-22) this Summer.
• Many of the church’s families are all girls.
• I read articles like this one addressing how to talk to your daughter about modesty and healthy sexuality.
• Trying to navigate wedding rituals when so many of the ceremonial elements are from a bygone era.
• Flipping through the most recent edition of Esquire magazine (I know) there were a series of powerful letters to the editor. Apparently in the previous issue a reader had written about having only daughters and no sons after learning that his final child will be a girl too.

There was something about those letters that hit home with me. The women who wrote in to the editor chastised the man for his lament while praising their own fathers for not taking on that attitude.

The reason that those notes probably hit home was that my wife and I had always planned on having only daughters. After nearly a decade attempting to navigate the world of international adoptions we finally (due to health reasons) had to surrender the dream a couple of years ago.

It doesn’t mean that I stopped thinking about what it takes to raise girls though. I want to provide good resources to the families in my life who are doing so.

I am, however, a little unsettled by this thing about having only girls.  There is something there that unnerves me. I think it points to something deeper …

I brought this up to someone I trust and she said that it is because ‘what young girls need isn’t strong male role models – so men aren’t sure what that means for them’.  I pointed out that it wouldn’t be a bad thing if young women had strong male role models in their lives. She strongly suggested that was not the solution or the primary concern – that seeing women in different positions of society is a bigger issue.

There is something about the way we construct or frame gender in our western culture that is too narrow to provide  clear expectations for a father of daughters. This lack of clarity is only compounded when you consider how radically nearly everything related to the family has been affected over the last 50 years.

We live in a new era where the boundaries are quite different from what they were for many of our mothers and especially our grandmothers.

I throw this out in the hopes that you have A) some thoughts about navigating this odd section of society and history B) some good resources you might be able to point me to. Thanks ahead of time. 

God as She-He-They

Originally posted at Homebrewed Christianity as “She Who is Not”

Earlier this week I had a post about language and God talk that incorporated C.S. Lewis’ poem “A Footnote on All Prayers”.  Part of what came out of that was an exchange with J.W. about pronouns, the Bible, and Inspiration. I wanted to transfer some of that over here (I have edited it for clarity) in order to open up the conversation to more people.

J.W.: So, what does your god look like? And how is that look any different from Piper’s or Driscoll’s?

Me:
Thanks for asking! Actually there is quite a substantial difference. Let me point out just a couple of things to start:
A) I don’t believe that language about God is univocal (as I have said). SO we begin in humility understanding that all our words, metaphors and concepts are OUR best attempt.
B) I believe that langue (since it is not univocal) functions relationally. When Jesus uses ‘Father’ language, he is talking about the WAY in which relates to a father. Not that God’s ontological being is Father in an exacting and representative way. It is an expressive use of language. That is the nature of language.
C) The way that Scripture is expressed is historic. I believe that the Bible is Inspired by Holy Spirit. That means that Holy Spirit was at work in the authors and ultimately in those who collected and validated the canon. (I confess this by faith). Those authors were historically situated and particularly located. They expressed their thoughts in their best language in their best frameworks. We see that historical locatedness and account for it when we engage their writings.
D) Whether you call it ‘original sin’ (I don’t) or ‘human nature’ or (my favorite) relational brokeness and conflicting biological impulses … humans have a problem. We are not 100% whole. Something is wrong (we don’t even do the good we WANT to do). That means that in every epoch and era there are things in place that are not perfect. Those show up in scripture – since it is a snap shot of its environment. The Bible is fully human (and I believe fully divine in a Process sense) but it is not ABSENT of humanity. It is full of humanity.
So If you take just those 4 things in contrast to Piper and Driscoll, then my God talk is:

• in Humility not certainty or pushy
• Relational not static or exacting
• Historical not trans-historic
• Human not un-human

Does that help? SO that is my starting point. From there I diverge wildly from the other two.

J.W.
Well, first of all, thanks for a response.
Second, no offense, but you use an awful lot of words to not say too much. Or, to say the same thing over and over while denying that you are saying one thing, yet actually affirming another. Since I don’t have any real idea what you believe Piper and Driscoll believe, I still don’t know that you are painting a different god or not.
You start out saying that all expressions of God are only a best attempt, but then you claim to believe the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. So, which is it? Our best attempt, or Holy Spirit inspired? See the problem there. It’s either one or the other, can’t be both.
Certainly the Bible is written situationally. God could have inspired men to write it so it only made sense at one point in the entire course of time, or He could have inspired it so that it meant the same thing from beginning to end, from the beginning of time to the end of time. And written so that ordinary people could figure it out with a little help from His Holy Spirit. Which is what I believe. You seem to believe that only post-modern thought with a lot of help from certain philosophers can figure out this whole humility, relation, human thing. Sorry, way too many creeks have flowed over their banks throughout history for me to believe that only recently have we been smart enough to figure this whole mess out.
God (Holy Spirit) inspired the whole Bible. He could have very easily caused His writers to use words that wouldn’t mean anything to their (at the time, current) readers, but would only matter eons later. IF that is what He intended.
Again, you haven’t showed me anything but dichotomies, and nothing of substance that disproves anything Piper et al believe-which I still don’t know what you believe they believe.

Me:
1) I did use a lot of words, but it was to say quite a bit. Unfortunately it was not what you were looking for so you think I didn’t say much. I assure you that I say quite enough in my 300 words to get in a lot of trouble in many circles!
2) You are 100% wrong that “It’s either one or the other, can’t be both.” Inspiration is not the OVERriding of human intent – it is the filling UP and expanding of human intent. Inspiration does not make something inhuman. You are thinking of something else not inspiration. Then you accuse me of dichotomies? Weird. I am talking about a participatory-relational model that transcends either/or thinking. You must be confused.
3) Here is an example of the difference (which you apparently were not able to pick up on): It is equally a valid to call god She as it is to call god He. Because in the end, god is neither. Those are pronouns that stand in for their antecedent but which do not entirely explain god or contain god’s ontological reality. God did not give Christianity a masculine feel. We did. God is God that is beyond our biological categorizations and anatomical classification. God is not defined by those – we simply conceptualize God and these terms and portray those conceptions in our language.
This is the nature of language. It is symbolic – analogical – and metaphorical.  That does not mean that we are not saying anything when we talk about God. We are. It does not mean that there is no inspiration. There is. Those are not mutually exclusive.
To quote Elizabeth Johnson in She Who Is :

Words about God are cultural creatures, intwined with the mores and adventures of the faith community that uses them. As cultures shift, so too does the specificity of God-talk.

To call God She is just as accurate and as inaccurate as calling God ‘he’.

 

Women on two sides of the world

Time magazine has had two really interesting articles recently. The provide a fascinating contrast and raise some significant question about gender & power.

How Pakistan’s Floods Have Made Women Too Visible [LINK]
http://www.time.com
The public mixing of the genders is leading to enormous tension and fear that violence may break out as men try to defend conservative ideas of honor

The State of the American Woman [LINK]
A quiet revolution has changed the status of American women; so what’s new now? Plus: a TIME opinion poll on gender

My thought revolves around the idea that  generically many of us would agree that humility and modesty are good things (?) – but are these the ramifications of men being in charge of women’s modesty…   I got some interesting responses (on Facebook) to both that idea and the articles themselves.

– No. These are ramifications of men “protecting” their property and keeping it from making them look”bad”.
– Men shouldn’t take charge of womens’ modesty. Women should take charge of their own modesty; unfortunately, many just don’t care.
– Modesty, at it’s heart, should have to do with each sex respecting the other. It is only good and helpful when it is a woman’s choice and men are not enforcing it. It is not a man’s job to enforce female behaviors.

about the article:

– So, we’ve traded oppression for increased stress and responsibility. It is a great advancement from property to personhood, but the relationships still need tons of work. Regarding the unhappiness of American women, options are good (in terms of what we “produce” with our lives), but we should maybe pick a few things from the smorgasboard instead of striving constantly for the “I can do it all” (Wonderwoman) award…a tough discipline when you have high expectations of yourself…

– hmmm…so many thoughts on this one. I think the takeaway point is it’s NOT about who has power…it’s about constantly giving away what power people DO have to those who DO NOT have around us, regardless of sex,gender,race, or creed.

My question is ‘what about when power is not freely given away?’