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Adam and Eve Broke an Environmental Law

Nathan Aaberg —  April 22, 2017 — Leave a comment

How should Christians think about regulations and limits?

It’s a topic that needs addressing more than ever on this Earth Day, especially when President Trump plans slash environmental regulations and gut the Environmental Protection Agency. But if we’re candid, we must admit that Christians have long had blind spots the size of Texas when it comes to thinking about limits and regulations on our treatment of Creation and protecting the vulnerable in general. Too often Christians have come close to worshipping freedom more than we worship God, except when we’ve called for severe resrictions on a few highly emotional and very tangible matters like abortion and homosexuality.

I’ll start this brief (by my standards!) meditation by calling your attention to the story of Adam and Eve.

In Genesis 2:15 we read the story of God telling Adam and Eve that they are free to eat the fruit of any tree in the garden with the exception of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

This was an environmental regulation. This was a limit on the use of Creation, It was a limit to protect Adam and Eve, and, because of their charge to rule God’s world, the limit also served as protection for Creation.

As you read on, we find in Genesis 3:6 that Eve was particularly tempted by the fruit’s appearance that promised culinary pleasure and by the wisdom that she would gain by consuming it. There, in a nutshell, are the two factors that drove the Fall as Christians understand it and what continue to tempt people today.

Our appetites. Our desire for power.

Today’s technologically-amped, Internet-saturated, self-gratification-focused, sacrifice-allergic, corporate-dominated world provides more options to act more impulsively on our appetites and desire for power than has ever been seen history.

This, in turn, makes the question of freedom for individuals and institutions an ever more challenging one.

If we’re honest, we’ll admit that we are as tempted by our appetites and desire for power as Adam and Eve were. Limits are needed to prevent all of us, in our worst moments, from ignoring what is good for ourselves, our neighbors, and God’s earth.

Efforts to remove all limitations and permit everything ignore what the Christians call the Fall and Original Sin. Ironically, the design of the United States constitution is based in large part on an awareness that people will be drawn towards selfishness and acting on their worst passions. Its designers wanted to do two things – provide some idea of where the dividing lines between state powers and the federal government’s powers were (orderliness includes limits) and to frustrate the ability of majorities of people to easily use the tools of government to harm the interests of people outside of the majority. Checks and balances exist to contain and frustrate sinful people from doing the worst that they can do.

Balancing freedom with limits on the use of power is a very Christian approach.

That balance is seen, for example, in regulations God gives to the people of Israel for how they will live in the Promised Land. Consider Exodus 23:10-11. It reads, “For six years you are to sow your fields and harvest the crops, but during the seventh year let the land lie unplowed and unused. Then the poor among your people may get food from it, and the wild animals may eat what is left. Do the same with your vineyard and your olive grove.”

This forced fallowing would have limited the freedom of a landowner to maximize profit from a piece of land but it would have benefited the poor and local wildlife while also allowing the soil itself to renew itself.

Notice, too, how in a way similar to the description of the Fall the interests of God, people, and Creation are interlinked. This is common throughout the Bible. You cannot love God nor your neighbor if you trash God’s earth.

So pay attention to the words leaders use when they speak of rules and regulations and limits. Ask these questions:

What values do advocates for reducing or eliminating regulations directly or indirectly appeal to in their rhetoric? Is it love for God and love for our neighbors? Or is it freedom for the powerful to pursue their appetites and power in ways harmful to the the vulnerable and the commonwealth?  

Do the advocates for eliminating regulations accept one of the fundamental elements of the Bible – the Fall and our continued tendency to do wrong, individually and collectively? If they don’t, you have an approach to life and policy that is not Christian in its fundamentals.

Is the push for reduced regulations driven by corporations or people representing the interests of corporations? What complicates matters in thinking about limits and regulations today is the increasing complexity of our world and the dominating role that corporations play. Because corporations are increasingly seen as the vehicles for meeting our personal appetites and desires for power, we are tempted more than ever to give them as much power and freedom as possible.

And, like bacteria that adjust their environment to make conditions more conducive for their existence and less conducive for others, corporations strive to manipulate the regulatory environment to allow them to prosper as much as possible. The more powerful corporations get the more they either seek complete freedom or, perhaps worse, shape our legal frameworks in ways that work for their benefit.

Are those advocating and supporting the elimination of limits in the economic realm equally open to the elimination of limits in other areas of life?

The poster child for someone who called a spade a spade and then was slapped down is Tomi Lahren. This young conservative social media sensation said earlier this month:

“I am someone that’s for limited government. And so I can’t sit here and be a hypocrite and say I’m for limited government but I think that the government should decide what women do with their bodies. I can sit here and say that, as a Republican, and I can say, you know what, I’m for limited government, so stay out of my guns, and you can stay out of my body as well.”

The blowback from conservatives was fierce, and she was fired from Glen Beck’s Blaze TV network. They accused her of being shallow in her conservatism. But, in fact, she was only saying aloud what a radical devotion to freedom in other areas of life would naturally lead you to conclude about abortion – limits on it restrict one’s freedom and do so in an area most intimate to a woman’s life.

It is fundamentally hypocritical for Christians to advocate for strict limits on the application of power against vulnerable life in one area and to go along with the wholesale elimination of limits on the use of power against vulnerable life in other areas.

For example, this article highlights that testing in 2005 and 2006 found that the average baby just out of the womb had an average of 200 industrial chemicals in its blood. Scientists at one point had thought the placenta shielded developing babies in the womb but this is now clearly not the case. And a young, developing infant is more vulnerable to harm from these chemicals than an adult. Where are the Christians fighting to protect the unborn from a chemical onslaught? Did you know that only a small minority of the industrial chemicals being used today have been tested for their safety because of the laxness of the Toxic Substances Control Act? Logic would dictate that Christians calling for limits on abortion should also seek out limits on what the unborn (and the rest of Creation) are exposed to.

Are the regulations and limits in question overdone and crushing goodness and creativity? Fallen people running governments are also tempted, sometimes even out of good motivations, to extend the power of government too far and too oppressively. Business influence can also shape the framework of laws and limits so that they favor the interests of large-scale industry.

It’s time for Christians to be coherent in what we believe so that how we act in society is also coherent. All of life is filled with meaning by God. God is on the side of the vulnerable even as our creativity also comes from God. We need to recognize how strongly our appetites and our desire for power tempt us. We should not only accept balances between limits and freedom where they are needed to protect all that God values, especially the vulnerable, but also advocate for that balance.

We should, like the Psalmist in Psalm 119:97, recognize our fallenness and welcome limits that guide our energies in right ways:

“Oh, how I love your law! I meditate on it all day long.”

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Learning from Robert Marchand

Nathan Aaberg —  January 16, 2017 — Leave a comment

We have more to learn from Robert Marchand than just about the power of will and the importance of exercise to a long life.

Frenchman Robert Marchand, as you can read in this article, recently set the a world record for his age class – 105-plus years – by riding 14.010 miles in one hour. Ironically, as the video below also relates, a coach had told him many decades ago that “he should give up cycling because he would never achieve anything on a bike.”

 

The story within the story that caught my attention is a quote from his physiologist, Veronique Billat. She said, according to the article, “He could have been faster but he made a big mistake. He has stopped eating meat over the past month after being shocked by recent reports on how animals are subjected to cruel treatment.”

For the physiologist, the mistake was that Marchand had forfeited the chance to achieve even better performance by listening to his conscience. Without intending to do so, Billat has provided us with a metaphor for the myopic way of thinking and living that characterizes many of us today.

What matters most, she is asserting, is our personal performance. Or, taken more broadly, our personal benefit. Performance. Profit. Convenience. Power. Information. Pleasure. What we want and desire is primary. The other beyond ourselves does not matter and has no ethical standing.

Billat is not some French aberration to humanity. She is actually just a mouthpiece for what the dominant values and culture of our world, even of too many Christian circles, have long been. The possibility, for example, that there might be a moral dimension to how animals are raised for our consumption clearly doesn’t enter her mind. What matters is whether our needs are being met and whether we are achieving glory.

By contrast, Robert Marchand is remarkable for the condition of his heart.

Of course, I don’t mean just his physical heart that enabled him to put on another inspiring bicycle performance at an advanced age. I also use “heart” in the way the Bible often does – the center from which our will, emotions, desires, and thoughts are generated.

As we grow older, layers of rationalizations and justifications tend to build up on our hearts like barnacles on a ship. In the process, we lose the ability to respond to people and life around us out of simple love and kindness that is, in God’s original framework, what life is all about.

At 105 years, Marchand is still able to respond with a pure heart to new information about the impact of his choices on life around him. We don’t know how he learned about how farm animals are being routinely treated. But we do know that once the information entered his mind, his heart would not let him ignore the ethical implications. He changed a habit of his long life to maintain the integrity of his values.

What is interesting, too, is how Marchand’s character is both strong in its matter-of-fact compassion and its matter-of-fact determination to do great things with fearless tenacity and pluck. We see that in his performance, which clearly came out of a commitment to daily habits of exercise, good diet, and sleep. We also hear it when he says, “I’m now waiting for a rival.”

We tend to assume that a good-hearted, whole-hearted person will be a gentle, never-hurt-a-fly wallflower. This isn’t necessarily so. Vigor, sense of purpose, and energy are part and parcel of hearts that are fully alive.

We are meant to have strength-filled love and love-filled strength.

Robert Marchand gives us a sense of what that looks like. May we, with God’s help, come to have hearts like that, too.

 

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Food and the Whole Faith Church

Nathan Aaberg —  August 20, 2016 — Leave a comment

As I wrote earlier, Christians will not consistently care and act as if God’s Creation mattered, unless churches weave a whole faith into their worship, theology, and culture. I’ve set myself a goal of figuring out what that weaving would look like in what I call the “whole faith church.” This is another post in that series.

The first feature of a whole faith church that I highlighted was, perhaps surprisingly, a church in which membership would mean something. Membership would be the binding together of believers around a central faith in what God offers us and calls us to through Jesus. That faith would be inextricably bound up with a commitment, growing out of transformed hearts, to living out that faith together in concrete, tangible, accountable ways.

In this post I highlight another feature of the whole faith church. It is this:

A defining feature of a whole faith church will be that this community of believers will be fully committed to demonstrating the proper and attentive relationship between humanity and Creation in its common meals, including communion.

This means that the food of the whole faith church will come as much as is practically possible from farms where the land, water, and animals of God’s earth are stewarded in ways that God would find fitting of a good, loving shepherd and from farm enterprises which support a good quality of life for the farmers and their communities.

Because our food system is complicated, the practical application of this principle will be complicated and not always black and white. This will be a long-term odyssey that a whole faith church will need to address with loving kindness. Education and research will be needed. Farms visited. Thoughtful meetings held to discern how to make this work on a day-to-day basis in the local place in which a whole faith church is nested. In upcoming posts, I’ll dive into specific questions about how this feature of a whole faith church would be lived out.

A good starting point, however, for examining any food choice for the whole faith church would be to keep Galatians 5:22-23 in mind. In other words, whole faith churches would ask this fundamental question – does the food we are thinking of purchasing come from a farm which has been operated with as much love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control as is possible?

If you look into it, you’ll probably find that much of the food served in the common meals of a church, especially any meat products being served, does not measure up very well to that criteria.

You do not have to work very hard, for example, to learn that most pigs are raised in ways that are cruel and completely counter to the fruits of the spirit. Reading Pig Tales: An Omnivore’s Quest for Sustainable Meat is a good way to learn more about the natural capacities and intelligence of these animals and how much has been sacrificed to provide cheap pork. The Chicago Tribune ran a series recently on the cruel excesses of the increasing number of pig factory farms in Illinois. What’s more, there are clear links between the indiscriminate use of antibiotics (which promote growth) in pig factory farms here and in China and the rise of strains of bacteria that are resistant to every antibiotic doctors have in their arsenal. This resistance is leading to the misery-filled deaths of adults and children

If you do this research with an open mind and transformed heart, it becomes clear that the factory farming of pigs and their inhumane slaughtering in high-speed facilities is a cruel and unloving thing to do to the animals, workers, neighbors, communities, and waterways of any place. It is clear, too, that a Christian, and especially a church, could not in good faith knowingly choose to purchase and consume the meat of pigs produced from such a system.

That a church would do so is another example of human culture, economy, and convenience overwhelming a church’s commitment to not just believing but actually living as if God existed and that this is His world.

In a church’s life, more than in any other setting, the values of God should prevail.

For a whole faith church, that desire to have God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven will naturally prompt the church to think about food carefully. The idea is not to create a wide array of new rules and regulations. But the whole faith church will make it a habit to treat all of life as if it issued from God and as if it matters to God and as if our hearts should be engaged in all the ways we interact with life around us.

Creating and consuming common meals that are, at their source, in synch with the fruits of the spirit will ultimately be a life-giving habit and discipline for the whole faith church.

One literally life-givinging impact will be that the common meals will be better for the health of those who eat them.

The thoughtfulness that will go into the common meals will also make members of the whole faith church mindful of the value of God’s Creation to God.

The effort to create these meals will connect the church with farmers, like Steve and Marie Deibele of Golden Bear Farm, who are raising cows and pigs in ways consistent with the fruits of the spirit. This will be rewarding for everyone involved.

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Steve Deibele of Golden Bear Farm with his pigs that are raised with great care on pasture.

In following this discipline, members will be reminded, too, of their common hope for a new heaven and new earth where God’s shalom will prevail.

Creating and consuming these common meals will also, and perhaps most importantly, further inspire members to pursue their common mission of reconciling this challenging, complex world to God in every corner of their lives,

To paraphrase an insight from Stephen Webb in his book Good Eating, it will feel right in every way for a church to say grace over food that has some grace in it.

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Heaven Comes to Us: An Interview with John Phelan

Nathan Aaberg —  November 9, 2015 — Leave a comment

The Creation story and Revelations are the challenging bookends of the Bible. The first, at first blush, seems to run counter to science. The second makes the powerful claim that, among other things, this world will not continue on its present course for all time. Somehow and at some time, Jesus will come again to make all things new, and the spiritual dimension of God will fill all of the heavens and all of the earth. And come to think of it, that’s about as counter to a strictly scientific mindset as you can find as well.

In the churches I’ve attended, these two bookends – the beginning of the world and its new beginning to come – have received little attention, and by the lack of attention and transparent engagement, I’ve sensed an unspoken unease. I’m aware, on the other hand, of more fundamentalist churches that have engaged those bookends with fierce insistence on their literal truth in ways that show little engagement with the nuances of the texts and that are at odds with the themes and chords of the rest of the Bible.

For insight into what the Bible points to in terms of the future of God’s world, I’ve come across a book that I would heartily recommend – Essential Eschatology: Our Present and Future Hope by John E. Phelan Jr.. Below you’ll find an edited transcript of my recent conversation with him that explores some of the themes of the book. I believe you’ll quickly see why I wanted to talk to him.

John is currently the Senior Professor of Theological Studies at North Park Seminary in Chicago, which is the seminary for the Evangelical Covenant Church. In classic Scandinavian self-deprecation, he says of that title, “It just means I’m old, I guess.” Until 2010, he was the seminary’s president and dean, and in the 1980s, he was the dean of students. Between two distinct stints at the Seminary, he was pastor to congregations in Florida and Kansas. I first realized I had much to learn from John when I found myself cutting out his lucidly-written essays from the Covenant Companion, the Evangelical Covenant Church’s award-winning magazine, because I wanted to further meditate on his insights. He was kind enough to be willing to be interviewed.

Nathan: What inspired you to write Essential Eschatology?

John: It’s been a long interest of mine ever since I was a young boy. And over the years of being at the seminary, a lot of pastors and laypeople asked me if I could recommend a book on eschatology. I would usually say no, because I thought so many of the books did an inadequate job of really wrestling with the issues of the text or were too complex for many pastors and most laypeople to wrestle with or too much of the academic field. Because I thought the subject was, in popular culture, very much abused, I decided to do my part to try to bring clarity to it.

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Nathan: In your book you write that eschatology is at the heart of Christianity. Can you say more about that?

John: Jesus comes and talks about the kingdom of God: his message is that God was in the process of making all things new. Whatever else eschatology is about, it is about participating in God’s intention to redeem and restore and renew the world. That’s the essence of eschatology. At one level, then, we are called to work alongside of God for renewal of the creation. We have a part of that and that’s a significant part of what it means to be the church.

Nathan: You write, in a way that echoes NT Wright and others, that “our destiny is an earthly destiny.” What does the Bible tell you about the end of history and God’s coming?

John: I think you could make an argument that what is most important in the book of Isaiah is the hope for the peaceable kingdom, for the renewal of heaven and earth, for the restoration of God’s people to land and home and place. It is very earthy. You see that very profoundly outlined in the book of Isaiah. But then you get to the book of Revelation and you have a very similar kind of ending. As I’ve said before and as I say in the book, “We don’t go to heaven; heaven comes to us.” The new Jerusalem comes down and God makes his dwelling place with us. At the end of the book we end up on earth and not in heaven. I think that’s often been obscured or ignored.

Even in 1Thessalonians 4, a passage that is often used wrongly to speak of the so-called Rapture, you have the people go to meet Christ and then return to the earth.The image there is of the people of a city meeting an imperial visitor and welcoming him to the city. So even there it’s very clear that there’s an earthly destiny. Whatever else it means and however we understand it, at the end it means that God intends to make all things new.

Nathan: For me that sounds very compelling, but why do other interpretations that we often hear – for example, the Left Behind series – have so much power and popularity?

John: The great appeal of that approach is that it’s a compelling story. It’s an interesting narrative. I think it’s appealing for people to be part of the end group, part of those who are going to be snatched away from all of the difficulty and pain of the world and taken up to heaven. But there’s absolutely no Biblical basis for “the rapture. “ It’s simply not there. There’s nothing in the Bible that indicates a two-stage return of Christ. There’s ever only one. The notion that somehow that this secret rapture, which occurs in Christian thought only in the mid-19th century (never before that), has somehow become one of the dominant forces in thinking about eschatological matters among evangelicals is still quite stunning to me.

But it’s had a very good press. People have presented it very well. They’ve told a very compelling story, and not just with Left Behind but well before that. I remember as a child the prophecy charts and the conferences. And then you have incidents like the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, which seemed to be part of the fulfillment of the expectation of the Dispensationalists. Whether or not that was the case, there were things that people could point to. But it’s something that only works if you live within acertain framework of engagement of the text and if you come with some rather large and unsupportable assumptions.

What I’ve told my students over the years is that the problem with the rapture is that it’s not in the Bible. Maybe that’s simple enough. It’s an extrapolation from of a set of assumptions that the old Dispensationalists made about the Bible. It originally came from a vision that a woman had in the 1830s, and then it was imposed on the texts. And as I said one of the key verses in 1Thessalonians 4 has nothing to do with the rapture. For one thing there are all kinds of angels and trumpets and bells and whistles. There’s nothing secret about it at all. And then the Dispensationalists have done other things like in Revelation chapter four with John’s great vision of the throne room. And the angel says, “Come up here.” Well, they’ve taken that to be the rapture of the church. That’s John being taken on a heavenly journey. That has nothing to do with the rapture of the church. You see what you want to see once you’ve determined that you want to see it. I think, unfortunately, that is what has happened with the rapture.

Nathan: I know you’ve told me the story in the past of how you came from a more fundamentalist background and when you went to college you had an experience that changed how you looked at the Bible. Can you share that?

John: Sure. I was raised in the Plymouth Brethren, and the Plymouth Brethren is a group that has a significant part of its origin in the work of John Nelson Darby. Darby was, if not the person who originated dispensationalism and the precursor of the whole Left Behind series, the significant organizer and preacher of it in Great Britain, continental Europe, and the United States. This approach to eschatology was central to my upbringing. It’s what I knew from the very beginning.

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I ended up going to the Emmaus Bible School and signed up one semester for a course in prophecy. The regular professor that taught the course wasn’t teaching it that semester. Someone else was teaching it and he said, “We’re going to do something a little different.” Normally, when you study prophecy from a Dispensationalist viewpoint, it was more of a deductive thing – these are the assumptions on how we read this. You come in with a set of lenses, and there it is! He said “We’re going to study this inductively. We’re going to go to texts and we’re going to look at it as it stands – in Isaiah, Ezekial, Daniel, wherever – and we’ll see the system emerge.” And it didn’t for me. In fact, the more we read and studied those texts in their context the more I thought, “No, that’s not what its saying. I don’t think that’s right.”

That was an important class for me not just for that but for my whole thinking about how to read the Bible. It’s far too easy to read the Bible with your theological structures in place and lo and behold, what you think is there emerges, rather than reading it and asking as much as you can, “What was that context? What was that writer trying to say?” Which is not to say that that writer doesn’t say anything to you now. Rather it warns against imposing a structure which you’ve already determined as the way to read something and claiming that you found it there. Well, no. That’s not quite right. That was really a significant turning point for me, as I realized that not only did the system not arise there but later New Testament writers did all sorts of things with those texts that didn’t fit into that system either.

Nathan: I remember when a guest preacher spoke about the Second Coming at a church we were attending. He seemed to take a lot of pleasure in the redemptive violence that was going to come. There seemed something profoundly wrong in the emotional tone of that.

John: Yes. Think about Jesus weeping over Jerusalem rather than rubbing his hands in glee over what is going to be happening. I think there’s something quite ugly about the notion that we ought to rub our hands in glee over the anticipated suffering of our enemies. In fact, we ought to take passages that warn us about the impact of our actions to our own hearts and not be applying them to others. People who live in a kind of black and white world where there are friends and enemies and never the twain shall meet and who have this notion of God finally vindicating me, proving me right, can find themselves in the very ugly situation that you’re speaking of. I think the prayer of Jesus as he weeps over Jerusalem is a better model for us than the satisfied look at those we perceive as our enemies.

Nathan: Following up on that, can you talk more about God’s judgment being a good thing?

John: We often think of judgment in terms of punishment. We think of a law court. We think of a judge sitting at the bench handing down a sentence, having to go to prison, having to be executed, whatever it is. A judge in ancient Israel is not someone who punishes but someone who seeks to put things right. A judge in the Bible is someone who looks at a situation and says this is wrong and we’re going to put it right. We want to restore. We want to reclaim and renew. So the role of the judge is not simply to pass judgment or to do something to the offender but to look at the situation and ask , “How can I make this situation right?” In fact if you look at the law, a lot of the law is about what you do to set a situation right, not just what you do to punish an offender. I think the punitive way of thinking about legal matters is more of a modern than ancient.

You think of Solomon and the two woman claiming that they are the baby’s mother. Solomon wasn’t there to punish anybody. He was there to decide whose baby it was and to restore the baby to the mother. I think we need to look at our model of judgment and retribution and all that and think a little differently about it. Even in eschatological matters, to restore the people to the land, to restore God’s people to a relationship with Him is not a matter of punishment. Now bad things do happen to people, but that is a byproduct of setting things right and sometimes people resist God’s efforts to set things right. I think looking at that differently would be helpful for us so that we might recognize that there are people over there who might need things set right in them but there might be some things in us that might need to be set right as well. God as a judge is about restoring not just about punishing.

Nathan: You write that God’s coming “will involve all people and the whole creation.” How have Christians missed, overlooked, and ignored the value of creation to God?

John: I think this is one of the more difficult and frustrating areas for me. A lot of the eschatological theories in the late 19th century had a sense of the immediacy of God’s coming. In the famous book written at the end of the 19th century – Jesus is Coming Again – the author thought it was within a few years, so every ten years or so he updated his expectations. So when you couple that with the idea that the world is going to be destroyed, why care all that much about creation? Why invest all that energy to set something right or clean the air or purify the water if it was all going to be destroyed? So you have that certain area of Christian life, that eschatological expectation, that makes people indifferent to the creation.

I think the other thing is that on the more conservative evangelical side of things people have tended to also support our economic system. Anything that would limit the way you would use the world and its resources, not only ran against your eschatological expectations but your economic convictions. And so some folks would resist any kind of limitation on the way they ran their business or cared for (or didn’t care) for their farm and their land. On the evangelical side, then, there have been economic and eschatological and political reasons why people have resisted the idea that we should care for the environment when, again to go back to Isaiah, you have this notion of the peaceable kingdom at the center of what God is promising for his people.

Nathan: It’s striking to me that at the beginning of Genesis and at the end in Revelation you do have humanity, God, and Creation in some sort of unity.

John: Right. In Revelation you have this lovely picture of the water of life running through the city and these trees on either side producing leaves for the healing of the nations. So there is this healing relationship between the created order represented by the water of life and the trees and the nations, which of course means the Gentiles, the goyim. Those things are brought together in this beautiful image of the water of life and the trees of healing.

Nathan: You have some really interesting passages in the book about the American tendency to almost worship freedom in a way that is alien to the Bible. Please talk about the value of creation to God and our obligations to it in the context of the American belief in freedom as an ultimate value.  How should we think about our role in the world and freedom?

John: That is a very complicated question because in one sense, obviously, freedom is one of the great gifts and virtues of the Christian life. Freedom from sin, freedom to love God, freedom to pursue a life with God – all of those things are critically important. “The Son has set you free and you shall be free indeed.” The notion of freedom is really important in the New Testament and certainly in the Old Testament, where you have the great narrative of the liberation of slaves from Egypt being one of the overarching narratives of the whole text, that “you were once slaves in Egypt and God has set you free.”

But to use that image, freedom, in the case of the Israelites, did not mean the kind of individualistic, laissez faire notion of freedom that we have today, that I as an individual should to be able to do anything that I want. When they arrive at Mount Sinai they realize that freedom from Egypt had brought them into a covenant with God and that relationship with God needed to be maintained in relationship with their fellow Israelites. Freedom never implies a lack of any kind of obligation or relationship with someone else. It never implies an absolute moral and spiritual autonomy that we sometimes seem to imagine in our American notion of freedom. It never implies that we have no obligations to God, each other, or to creation itself.

Nathan: How can local churches and the Church be ambassadors of God’s reconciliation in a meaningful way when the world’s issues, including the destruction of creation, are so big?

John: That’s one of the most perplexing questions. I would even start back a step earlier. How can the church (either small “c” or big “C”) be an agent of reconciliation in the world when we can’t get along with each other? When the church is so divided and people are so angry at one another, it’s really difficult. Part of the problem there is that people haven’t figured out how to live with difference. Certainly in our country we haven’t learned to live with difference. We haven’t figured out how to live with the other, whether politically or socially or educationally, whatever the “other” is, and learn to accept that people will look at things differently and there’s going to be conflict. That doesn’t mean that it requires that we demonize the other. Reconciliation does not mean that I win and you lose. It means that we come together around something common with our differences and stay together in spite of our differences, something which the church and society have found is singularly difficult to do.

I think that there is no huge, top-down solution to this. There are no orders from headquarters, whatever the headquarters happen to be, that are going to enforce the reconciling work of God within our churches or through our churches. But it involves the ongoing, challenging, difficult work of first seeking reconciliation with one another and then asking how we might be agents of reconciliation within our communities. We Americans, whether we are conservative or liberal, tend to look for big solutions. Big solutions are not always available, and they’re not always helpful. I’m much more drawn to the smaller solutions, the local solutions that move individuals toward reconciliation with God and each other.

Nathan: You use the term “missional collapse” when you are talking about the church. What would a church look like, concretely, if it were doing the reconciliation that you speak of?

John: I think that a church that’s paying attention to its own community, to where there is brokenness within its own community whether you’re talking about the community of the church itself or whether you’re talking about the community in which the church is set down. It’s difficult to save the world if you can’t help and be a light in your own community. It’s difficult to do something really large if you can’t do something fairly small. Sometimes I think small things in communities – whether it’s a feeding programs or cleaning up a local park or helping out at the local homeless shelter or advocating for more green space – can seem small and insignificant but I think they’re quite significant. They help demonstrate the presence and power of God’s love. Jesus goes around casting out demons here and healing a blind man there – significant acts but there were lots and lots of demon-possessed people. Even in his case, it was kind of a local thing. Preaching in Galilee, in this backwater. He ended up in Jerusalem, that’s where he got killed, but that’s not where he did most of his teaching work. He did it in the area where he had been born and raised. Being alert to the local and the personal and to forming the community within the local area is the only place to start.

Nathan: Towards the end of the book, you have a section of a chapter that’s called “The Strange God of the Bible” that talks about how we have tended to create these philosophical constructs of how God must act and how God is and how the God of the Bible is different than that. Can you say something about that?

John: We really don’t like God to be free. We would rather God be tied up and predictable, and, unfortunately, that’s just not the way God is. That’s pretty abundantly clear if you read the Bible carefully. And if God isn’t free, how can God be God? God can do whatever God wants to do, and that can be rather uncomfortable, particularly when you look in the Old Testament where there are some cases where God changes his mind. And the other startling thing about the Bible is that God evidently expects us to take a role in all this in ways that we might rather Him fix it Himself. We have an overwhelmingly interventionist idea about God, when God actually appears, at times, to say, “It’s up to you.” And that can be very uncomfortable.

The other thing I say is that we can only speak of God by way of analogy. If God is God, God is transcendent and eternal and I am mortal and set here in the earth and limited by my mind and imagination. So whatever I say about God, the best thing I can say about God is always partially wrong because I’m speaking out of a human experience. If you and I have a common experience, I can say to you, “Well, Nathan, I know how you feel.” But that’s not true. You know that and I know that. I know there’s an overlap, right, but we’re different people, and even the same experience can cause people to feel differently. And if that’s true of you and me, if I can’t fully understand you and you can’t fully understand me, how in the world do we think we can fully understand God?

So I think some humility and leaving some space for mystery, which is not something people in our tied-up evangelical world often want to do, is really important. We want God to be consistent in the ways we want God to be consistent rather than God having the freedom to act and interact with His world. I think it’s all too often that evangelicals are deists. They want a god out there who’s pretty well settled and perhaps intervening now and then when we want Him to or controlling everything so we don’t have much responsibility.

I think that’s one of the great complexities that we haven’t quite reckoned with – a free God.

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Abortion, Power, and Vulnerable Life

Nathan Aaberg —  September 1, 2015 — Leave a comment

Having and living out a whole faith ultimately depend on our willingness to open our hearts. Are we ready to have our convictions reshaped by God, even those convictions that have grown out of our culture and are deeply rooted in our emotions?

We tend to pick and choose where God’s message applies and where it doesn’t. When it applies to something we intuitively care deeply about, we see things in intense blacks and whites. When it applies to something we don’t care deeply about because of our culture or self-interest, we ignore it or rationalize how we and our community are acting toward it.

Case in point – abortion.

The controversy over the Planned Parenthood videos has again brought abortion into the forefront. It has also again revealed how selective people can be in applying core ethical concerns. Pro-choice supporters, many of whom would rail against the mistreatment of minorities and the polluting of rivers, don’t want to squarely face the horror of the violence done against a baby in a womb. The ability of Planned Parenthood officials and their supporters to use abstract, technical language to talk around this reality is deeply disturbing.

But far too many Christians who are outraged by the Planned Parenthood videos and by abortion in general, ignore and even acquiesce to daily violence against poor, vulnerable communities and against God’s earth. In fact, many of the same people who are speaking against abortion in shrill voices are just as likely to be comfortable with and even to advance ways of using God’s earth that systematically cause suffering to people and vulnerable living beings.

Did you know that a child’s lungs begin to develop in the womb but are not fully developed until they turn eight years old? In what way is it right to desire to protect that child’s life and lungs in the womb but not when they are out of the womb and vulnerable to pollution?

Selectivity in where we advocate for love and compassion and where we don’t is like a tree that bears beautiful fruit on some branches but rotten, worm-filled, poisonous fruit on others.

To make this point, I want to share a list of ten ways in which abortion shares common ground with the violence done against Creation. I am not suggesting they are exactly morally equivalent and I recognize that I am ignoring many nuances. Nevertheless, I believe the extensive common ground should give us pause and compel us to desire to live out whole lives of whole faith.

The actual acts are violent and cruel: The references to the “crunchiness” of abortion and the awful images shown on signs at protests around abortion clinics jerk us out of an anesthetized calm and into the reality of the violence of abortion. What chance do soft skin and tissue have against cold, hard steel? A number of years ago, the culture critic and avowed atheist, Camille Paglia faced that reality directly when she wrote: “Hence I have always frankly admitted that abortion is murder, the extermination of the powerless by the powerful. Liberals for the most part have shrunk from facing the ethical consequences of their embrace of abortion, which results in the annihilation of concrete individuals and not just clumps of insensate tissue.”

For their part, confined animal feed operations sounds reasonable and antiseptic until you think about the experience of the animals and the lagoons of waste outside. And what about slaughterhouses where the speed of the killing line is debilitating to the workers and cruel to the animals? Or the testing of cosmetics and pharmaceuticals on animals or the ripping up of prairies with their rich plant and animal life to be farmed for ethanol and animal feed? Or mountains being leveled and forests cleared in the Appalachians with dire impacts on surrounding communities, forests, and streams?

A variety of abstract, intellectual arguments are often given by elite proponents to justify the violence being done: Here’s what Camille Paglia used for her justification for defending abortion: “The state in my view has no authority whatever to intervene in the biological processes of any woman’s body, which nature has implanted there before birth and hence before that woman’s entrance into society and citizenship.” In other words, nature unfairly failed to give women a say in the fact that they must be ones to bear babies so a woman is justified in having a child killed in her womb. Likewise, the promoters of commodity farming cry out that we must feed the world. This zealous, seemingly selfless mission is used to justify the worst features of commodity farming that result in dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico, nitrates in drinking water, the killing of soil life, and factory farms.

The inherent value of that life is denied either explicitly or implicitly: Isn’t it interesting that people justify abortion and destruction and violence to God’s world because the unborn child and the cedar waxwing and the rare plant do not have the same capabilities as an adult human? Yes, we must make distinctions, but the full value and worth of a living thing do not ultimately come from a living thing’s capabilities. They come from the fact that they are in some mysterious way God’s.

We don’t want to be confronted with the inherent violence and destruction of those acts, and the people carrying out the acts don’t want the world to see the full reality of them: Let’s face it. We avert our gaze from images of aborted babies and don’t want to look at videos of farm animals being abused. And people carrying out the acts typically want to make exposure to those realities and to the truth behind what is being done difficult. A great example has been the passing of “ag gag” laws which prohibit undercover investigations of farming operations (livestock operations, in particular) because undercover operations resulted in disturbing information and videos about how animals were actually being treated. These remind me of Herod imprisoning John because he called Herod to task for divorcing his wife and then marrying his brother’s wife.

Freedom and personal rights trump all other values: The right to do what one wants with what is one’s own (whether it be one’s body or one’s property) is asserted as the ultimate value by abortion rights advocates and by many people on the right side of the political spectrum. They both resent any restriction on what they do with their body, their land, their animals, and even their employees. Assertions of freedom and personal rights are, however, not really a justification of what is done. Instead they are a force field that negates the right of anyone else to make ethical judgments about what is done with those rights or to intervene on behalf of society’s common values.

It’s all too easy to move on as if the violence never happened: We so easily avoid the ghosts. Following violence there is a peace of sorts, and unless you use a moral imagination, the life that was or could have been fades quickly away as if it never was. And making the effort to hold onto the memory of a place that had been full of life or what the unborn child could have become takes moral energy and willingness to go into raw emotions that few of us want to deal with. One of the ways that the cross is so unusual as a symbol of faith is that it forces us to pay attention to the moment of violence and sacrifice in the story of Jesus and God. Perhaps it should even cultivate in us a heart that will not turn away from suffering and violence?

The acceptance of violence by the powerful against powerless life in particular cases contributes to a desensitization to other forms of violence in our world: I have heard the argument that routine abortion desensitizes us to a devaluing of life in general. That rings true. And how animals are raised, transported, and slaughtered in many cases around the country does, in my opinion, the same thing. It is an interesting and disturbing fact that many psychopaths first revealed their dangerous tendencies by torturing and killing animals. A cruel spirit that cannot empathize with the weak and vulnerable will show that cruelty to people and animals alike over time.

Science continues to give us an expanded view of the complexity of life even as applied science grows in its ability to carry out violence against life ever more surgically and effectively: We now know so much more about the life of the unborn child and its rapid development than we used to. Twins in the womb, for example, play with each other. Babies in the womb know when they are being sung to and when there is just background music. We know ever more about the intelligence and emotional life of many animals and other life as well. Did you know that octopi have 130 billion neurons and humans about 100 billion (and the majority of neurons of an octopus are in its arms)? We are also learning more about the complex life of soils and the dynamic interaction between soil life and plant life.

When this expanding world of scientific knowledge collides with our interests and desires, however, we tune it out. And when we learn in the Planned Parenthood video that there are ways to extract the body of a pre-birth baby intact after it has been killed so that its organs can be removed for donation, we are witnessing one of the fruits of applied science in an ever more sophisticated form. Similarly, applied science is offering us ever more sophisticated ways to get what we want out of natural life at tremendous cost. Sixty to 80 percent of pigs (as well as many cattle and turkeys) raised in the U.S. today are given ractopamine, a growth-enhancing drug, that many countries ban. It’s a beautiful thing if all you value is enhancing your profits by getting more poundage of pig for your dollar. But what about the pigs? This article notes that an FDA report has found that the drug can result in “respiratory disorders, hoof disorders, bloat, abnormal lameness and leg disorders, hyperactivity, stiffness, aggression, stress, recumbency (inability to get up) and death.” Human ingenuity combined with deadened hearts magnifies horror in this world.

The law tends to favor the powerful over the powerless. The baby in its womb.  A pig in a factory farm. An endangered species being poached or its habitat gradually cut up. A stream being filled with waste and toxic chemicals. None of them can vote or make political contributions. They cannot file briefs in court. They cannot speak. The law and politics do not serve them as well as they serve the larger forces in society that do vote, do make political contributions, can speak, and directly benefit from the way the system works today. The forces of the powerful have the perpetual advantage in the world of law.

A purely economic way of looking at life decisions and how our world works readily justifies abortion and many abuses of nature. It’s hard to make an economic case for having a child. And it’s even harder to make if you’re just barely getting by and if your family’s life is already hard and even dysfunctional. There’s a parallel there with how we tend to look at a field or a population of fish.  From a purely economic view, it’s hard to justify not transfroming them into things of use to people. Ironically, abortion clinics contribute to our GNP as do industrial agriculture and factory farms and extractive industriesy that deplete places and leave behind toxic legacies. Economic practicality has an inherently tension-filled relationship with Christian values. In other words, faith in the invisible hand inevitably will conflict with faith in our invisible God.

 

I’ve long been trying to understand what holds all of these commonalities together. A recent sermon I heard helped me do that. Amanda Rosengren, the associate pastor at the Church of the Redeemer we’ve recently begun attending, preached on the story of David and Bathsheba that you can find in 2 Samuel 11-12.

Amanda pointed out that the story of David and Bathsheba that prompts Nathan to confront David and the parable-like story that Nathan tells David to awaken his heart are both ultimately about the powerful abusing the powerless. The victims of the powerful – Bathsheba, Uriah, the poor man’s family in the story Nathan tells, and the lamb in that story – are profoundly vulnerable to the powerful. They are especially vulnerable to the powerful who feel entitled to use that power for their own benefit.

“Power, like money, is not inherently good or bad, it all depends on how it is used,” said Amanda. “In order to use rather than abuse the power we have, we first need to recognize it we need to “know our own strength.” Do we use the power we have to listen to those who lack it, or do we pay attention only to the powerful or those like us? After we listen, do we, like the prophet Nathan, use our power to speak on behalf of those who lack it, and to exert influence for the cause of justice for those who have been trampled upon? Do we have compassion for those who are victims, who are powerless, or do we blame them for their lack of power, or simply ignore them because we can? Do we use what we have been given to build up the community, or only for ourselves and what we want? Do you know your own strength?”

One of the tragedies of living in this broken world is that the complicated contexts people find themselves in can make the use of our power in a bad way seemingly the best option of many bad options. Can we live completely in loving ways without ever causing harm to others and other vulnerable living things? That is very hard. Even as we advocate for compassion and love, we must also have compassion and love for those who feel forced by reality to harm vulnerable life. And, yes, there are nuances.

Yet, we should be strong voices for the compassionate and thoughtful use of our individual and collective power. In all contexts. This means we must accept limits to ourselves and our desires for power and glory and wealth.

It is time for coherent, whole thinking and ethics across all political leanings in how we deal with all life. And whole thinking and whole ethics do not start from intellect and argument. They start from the heart. If we open our hearts to God through Jesus, our hearts will be transformed, every corner of them. Out of those transformed hearts will come a desire to use our strength and creativity for good and to avoid using it in ways that harm the vulnerable.

How can we help but be pro-life for all of life?

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