« September 2009 | Main | November 2009 »

I'm a bit confused this morning -- nothing new there. The intensity, however, goes deeper. I'm making progress in my writing the introductory chapter to frame the interviews I did several years ago with George Lindbeck, David Burrell, and Stanley Hauerwas. Hopefully I'll post some side observations. I'm now trying to read on linguistic philosophy as it developed in the middle of the 20th century and theology. How is it that language works?

The issue comes to mind a bit of traumatic experience from last night on the streets, and the complicated nature of life for those who construct homes without walls or roofs on the streets. It is the end of the month, so numbers are escalated -- we made 140 sandwiches, which was adequate for those in our little two-block "parish." With darkness coming earlier and it getting colder (for San Diego), I'm trying to get us out on the streets earlier -- but we've not quite had the numerical strength we need from the congregation and friends. Three of us distributed the sandwiches and 150 bottles of drinks in the area.

I had exhausted my supply and was talking to two persons who live there who really have become my friends -- Ron and Anthony. Suddenly I was directed to an event about 30 feet away to my back where I saw two young men facing off. Someone told me that one had a knife and I walked to intervene (I know, dumb middle aged white guy in a clerical collar -- but what was I supposed to do). Ron and Anthony suggested calling the police, but I asked not to as I walked and stood just to the right, between the two men.

As I listened what was going on, B.Lee. had grapped the cross of Mark and wanted to take it from him. B.Lee is a young, African American who was not regularly part of the neighborhood, but had recently and occasionally taken to protecting Norma -- a young woman who lives "down the road" there. Mark is a white member of the Navy, stationed in Coronado, who attends the Rock and sometimes by himself goes downtown to give small "treats" to those who live on the streets. Apparently (and this is my reconstruction based indirectly on what I heard, not necessarily what happened), Mark had shown Norma attention and used some more aggressively evangelical language and B.Lee had felt it necessary to intervene. Seeing a large crucifix around Mark's neck, he had grapped it with this right hand at arms length and then put his left hand on a pocket knife in his left pocket.

When I got there, Mark had his eyes shut, praying focally, and B.Lee was staring at him waiting, occasionally speaking. I spoke with both the men to discern what was going on. I offered to buy B.Lee a crucifix or Mark a new one; Mark did not want to give his up because it had been given to him in Texas. I gently but firmly rebuked B.Lee about scaring people and trying to take something that wasn't his. He told me that if he had taken the crucifix, he would have destroyed it. I apologized for any wrong done to him in the past by the church.

Eventually B.Lee stood down and I encourage Mark to leave, and if wanted to join us on Tuesday nights, and shared briefly some wisdom about not being alone on the streets but as part of the church (again, I didn't see the interchange that began the interaction, but I don't think Mark realized that he was a guest in others homes; for him it probably looked like "public space" where "poor people" lived). B.Lee stood stoically on the sidewalk which had cleared out around him.

As I walked back to Anthony and Ron, they rebuked me. "We should have called the police. It's fine for you; you get to go back to your home tonight. We have to stay here with this guy with a knife still around us." Ouch. I walked back to B.Lee to encourage him to move on. Meanwhile, one person called the police, some words were exchanged, and a brief fight broke out with a friend getting a nasty bump on his head from the sidewalk. I tried to intervene with another man, a friend of B.Lee yelling, "Preacher, this ain't your fight". B.Lee took off running, and the police pulled up 15 seconds later to talk to the person (name withheld for protection) who had called, who got in the police car to go look for B.Lee -- as three or four more police cars pulled up.

As a Christian who believes the non-coercive, non-resistant authority of the church is the first option over temporal authority, I did what I thought was correct. Yet I also recognize I complicated things for the poor who live there, who have set up their own patterns of dealing with conflicts, who live life between the coercive violence of the streets and the coercive violence of the temporal authority. I pray for B.Lee -- with whom I developed a respect for -- I don't think that he was threatening to knife Mark, but had his hands on it to cut the shoe strings that supported the crucifix around his neck. The knife's presence surely made people uneasy -- and understandably so. I also pray for those who were most affected by my intervention -- when I could go home, they had to sleep with half an eye open in case B.Lee had vengeance on his mind.

The layers of tragedy and ambiguity caused by the presence of someone like me there on the streets has made me pause. I obviously have much more to learn. I know that those on the streets live caught between the irrational violence of the streets and the reactive, impulsive irrational violence of the temporal authority. I guess we all do. It's just that walls and roofs give us physical barriers that mask the vulnerability in which we all live.

Language works -- including the language of the presence of the church in the form of a middle aged white guy in a clerical collar and a young naive white male evangelical -- in very embodied contexts that are dynamic and changing and complicated. One muddles through, confessing one's sins, amid the complexity and fragility of such contexts, praying that God preserves others from the harm of one's good works.

Posted by johnwright at 8:52 AM | Comments (37)

I've been much too tardy, as usual, in my blog. I hope to give another update soon -- both from the streets and the sabbatical. The last few days, however, I have found myself inextractibly pulled into a discussion on the Wesleyan Theological Discussion group netserve. The issue has been the language of "co-creation," very important to relational and open theists and process theologians. It takes us to a core issue. I could not resist responding. I thought I'd post it here as well.

It is a fascinating datum that the issue of "co-creation" brings up such interest on the board. It brings out lurkers, even me, who have vowed to limit posting. It is more interesting to see that the issue particularly engages thinkers from the Church of the Nazarene on the list-serve. Amongst the "Wesleyans," this issue has a particular sociological locus among the Church of the Nazarene. My guess is that this locus comes from the particular influence of Mildred Bangs Wynkoop that has always been more extensive in the Church of the Nazarene than other holiness ecclesial and educational institutions.

Why does such a phrase invoke such response and why would even anyone care if Wesley can be invoked to legitimate it? It seems to me, that what is at stake reaches to the core issue of the struggle within the evangelical Wesleyan tradition whether it is going to face the "immanent frame" from within a modernist/postmodernist perspective of a play within immanence where "transcendence" finds its end in the continued endlessly "new and improved" movement of history forward toward the kingdom of God (i.e., the mediating Protestant theologies/ecclesiologies of the 19th and 20th centuries) or whether we will face the "immanent frame" within the ontological strangeness to modernity/postmodernity of the historic Christian tradition of the radical, non-contrastive transcendence of God that is required for the revelation of Jesus so that Mary is the Bearer of God, and the Kingdom of God is not something we build, but inherit.

The issue seems to be whether the evangelical liberalism that became prominent in the last half of the twentieth century via the movement to the "relational theology" that fit with the church growth movement can sustain and thicken its modernist/postmodernist intellectual commitments and remain evangelical (it seems to me this is why the question of appeal to Wesley arises) or whether catholicity and the historic grammar of the faith given to the saints frames our witness with all its non-modernist "baggage" in providing an alternative language from that provided by the cultural immanent frame.

We live in a culture where Being has become emptied of its Otherness in the paradox of Transcendence/Immanance revealed in Jesus; in the historicist commitments of the immanent frame, being is now the becoming of history as "god" and "nature" push history forward together through a dialectical process, that, for Christians, may be represented positively in Jesus or other similar type of humanist liberationists movements. Whether this is a baptizing of Whitehead or Hegel or Derrida or Foucault or Zizek or Marx or Thomas Friedman or the Chicago School or George Bush or Barach Obama, the underlying cultural grammar seems to me to stay the same. It is the impulse that Charles Taylor so brilliantly analyzes in A Secular Age that has its roots in reforming Christian movements around the turn of the millennium that have wrought its colonial havoc throughout the earth and initiated ironically the very secularism in which it seems that we live and move and have our being.

Why does it matter? Christian Smith in his new Souls in Tradition on emerging adults in North America notes that the default language of this generation is that provided by Protestant liberalism - even in evangelical churches. He writes, "while listening to emerging adults explain their views of religion, it struck us that they might just as well be paraphrasing from classical liberal Protestant theologicans, of whom they have no doubt actually hear, from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The likes of Adolf von Harnack, Albrecht Ritschl, Wilhelm Hermann, and Harry Emerson Fosdick would be proud. People, it is clear, need not study liberal Protestant theology to be well inducted into its worldview, since it has simply become part of the cultural air that many Americans now breathe" (pp. 288-89).

This morning I was reading through a student essay at the end of the most recent "Viewpoint," the public relations , constituency publication of Point Loma. Like those whom Smith interviewed, the student, an intern for PLNU's Centre of Justice and Reconciliation, adopted the language of the American progressivist social gospel gleaned here at PLNU without even knowing the historic contingencies and baggage that goes with it, "The kingdom of heaven is one of justice, and we who follow Christ are to bring that justice to those who are dying for it." She invoked the chapel theme, "On Earth as it is in Heaven" as legitimation. The Bush administration could not have waxed better Wilsonian propaganda for the invasion of Iraq. We have met the Protestant liberals, and they is us.

I think that the attention this topic has witnessed here shows that we, the "evangelical Wesleyans" are at a cross roads in our movement towards mainline North Atlantic liberal Protestantism (that includes parts of American evangelicalism in opposition to its voluntarist doppelganger, Calvinist/Puritan evangelicalism). The evangelical, experiential use of "more subtler languages" in the mediating theologies of the past generation (themselves ambiguously formed by the Romantic impulses within the late 19th century revivalism/camp meeting movement) has now sunk in institutionally and culturally sufficiently that bolder, less evangelical and historic Christian language may be offered - particularly if appeal to Wesley can justify this language.

Romantic "hard core" revivalism is dead, thank God, in North Atlantic societies except in a few cultural niches. Which will it be for the future? Wesley the theologian of "natural relationality" of the modernist/postmodernist immanent frame or Wesley the theologian of Divine Transcendence/Immancence that has come to us as utter gift in Jesus Christ as witnessed to in Scriptures through whom God by the eternal Spirit calls us to participate in the very eternal Love that is God through the sacramental system of the church catholic. These are two very different ontologies with very different consequences for decades to come.

A prayer/editorial comment to close the post:

"May God who created all things through the Divine Word save God's creation from white people like me who want to co-create to bring God's justice to pass on earth. Forgive us from our white man's burden that has caused God's creation to suffer from the violence of our hubris, those whom we have killed for our imposition of justice, as we have taken upon ourselves the white man's burden/duty to co-create with You to bring your kingdom to pass.

God, have mercy; Lord, have mercy. "

Posted by johnwright at 1:56 PM | Comments (81)