I knew it was coming: the Piper tweet, this time quoting Job in response to the Oklahoma tornado. As the dean of the neo-Calvinist movement, John Piper likes to push the envelope with his commentary on God’s role in natural disasters. He did it about a year ago when tornadoes hit the midwest. In 2007 after the Minneapolis bridge collapsed, he wrote that he and his daughter discussed how God must have done it so the people of Minneapolis would fear Him because our sin against God is “an outrage ten thousand times worse than the collapse of the 35W bridge.” Piper would say that he’s just being Biblical and that it shouldn’t be surprising that speaking Biblically would make people feel uncomfortable. So how do we talk about God’s role in tragedies?

Piper’s perspective on God’s role in disasters has two components: 1) Every event that happens is orchestrated by God for the purposes of His divine plan; 2) Violence within nature reflects God’s infinite anger over human sin, which is primarily understood in Anselmian terms as an abstract offense against His honor. In Piper’s post on the Minneapolis bridge collapse, he cites Luke 13:1-4 where Jesus uses tragedies in His day to issue a warning to his listeners to repent.

At that very time there were some present who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. He asked them, “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did. Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them—do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.”

It’s a pretty strange passage. When Jesus says “perish just as they did,” what is he saying? Is he saying you’ll die too in general or you’ll die in a similarly gruesome way? Piper eisegetes his Anselmian view of sin onto the text by making it about whether humans deserve to die as a punishment from God (“Jesus implies that those who brought him this news thought he would say that those who died, deserved to die, and that those who didn’t die did not deserve to die”). But taking the text at face value, there’s no reason to understand “perishing” as a divinely instituted punishment for sin rather than just a natural consequence of it (e.g. getting tangled up with bad people and dying a violent death as a result). Jesus wasn’t carrying the book of Romans around with him to make sure that his teaching was “Biblical.”

Regardless of what Jesus is saying in that particular passage, there are plenty of examples in the Old Testament of misfortune being proclaimed as the manifestation of God’s wrath and punishment for sin whether it’s a drought or an epidemic or the invasion of an enemy army. The ancient Israelites had no intellectual resources for thinking about disaster as anything other than a personal expression of anger from God. This puts us in an awkward place as Christians living in an age when scientific disciplines like meteorology exists.

Does the authority of scripture force us to say screw meteorology, tornadoes are a warning from God to bring the world into repentance? Or do we say God used to send tornadoes to punish Israel for its sin because the infallible Old Testament prophets say things like that, but now tornadoes happen because of atmospheric thermodynamics? Piper at least recognizes the inconsistency of trying to say that nature only began to behave according to predictable scientific principles after the Bible was written as a clumsy means of rescuing the Bible from being in error. In Piper’s perspective, if Jeremiah and Amos and all the rest were infallible, then the way we interpret disaster should emulate how they interpreted it. Thus he writes about the Minneapolis bridge collapse:

The meaning of the collapse of this bridge is that John Piper is a sinner and should repent or forfeit his life forever. That means I should turn from the silly preoccupations of my life and focus my mind’s attention and my heart’s affection on God and embrace Jesus Christ as my only hope for the forgiveness of my sins and for the hope of eternal life. That is God’s message in the collapse of this bridge. That is his most merciful message: there is still time to turn from sin and unbelief and destruction for those of us who live. If we could see the eternal calamity from which he is offering escape we would hear this as the most precious message in the world.

I imagine that this view is repugnant to most people. Is it because we have gone apostate and are no longer appropriately terrified by God? That’s what folks like John Piper would say. But there’s a subtlety to John Piper’s ideological stance here. God is not a terrifying mystery to Piper, because he knows the exact “meaning” of the collapse of the Minneapolis bridge. John Piper’s God may be a horrible Godzilla, but the prophetic authority Piper gives to himself means that he is sitting on Godzilla’s back holding the reins.

What’s far more terrifying than an angry, dangerous God with predictable motives who offers a canned salvation formula by which people can get right with Him is an unpredictable universe whose violence we do not try to explain even though we stubbornly cling to the belief that somehow a loving Creator is in charge of it. It is God’s unpredictability that makes Him truly sovereign.

The ancient Israelites grasped for prophetic explanations to natural disasters as a means of coping with the terror of an unpredictable universe. If Babylon sacked the city of Jerusalem just because they were the most powerful empire in the world at the time, then Israel’s God would lose all His authority and the Babylonian god Marduk would be the new God. Thus, Babylon had to be an agent in the hands of a God who was punishing his people for their apostasy.

Does it make the prophetic explanation of the Babylonian exile “false” to recognize that Babylon was going to conquer Israel regardless? No, but I believe the proper way to understand it is that God inspired His prophets to use natural disasters like war and drought to confront Israel about its sin. The events happened because of natural processes and human sociology, which are of course under God’s sovereignty and part of His creation, but the interpretation happened through God’s direct inspiration.

The question is whether in a scientific age, we should be using natural disasters to talk about sin. I don’t think that it represents a spiritual or moral regression for people in our day to find it unbecoming of God to crush elementary school kids in order to express His wrath against sin and instill repentance in His people. I believe that the reason God let the Israelite prophets talk about natural disasters the way they did is because He was meeting His Israelite people where they were. Even though God didn’t “make” the Babylonians conquer Israel, if the Israelites had not interpreted their Babylonian exile as God-ordained, they would have assimilated into Babylonian culture and ceased to exist as a people. So what if we understand the more “civilized” view of God’s relationship to natural disaster not as apostasy but as a greater fulfillment of the theology that understands God to be at His most persuasive and sovereign when He lets humanity crucify Him in the flesh?

I do think that as individuals, we can interpret our lives’ hardships in terms of our personal relationship with God. Psalm 119:71 says, “It was good for me to be afflicted so that I might learn your statutes.” I went through half a decade of severe depression in my twenties. Part of my meaning-making process has been to say that God blessed me with that affliction as part of the preparation for my pastoral vocation and in order to make me exouthenemenos, a “despised one,” a person without worth apart from the grace of God, inside of which I have infinite worth.

That story works for me; I could not cope with a story of my mental health history told entirely in biological terms. However, as a pastor, I do not give myself the authority to tell others how to interpret their tragedies. I can point them to the rich resources of God’s poetry in the Bible so that God can breathe into them the poem that fits. Raw experience is overwhelming to process; we need and we always will use some form of poetry to give our lives coherence.

The question is whether it’s good poetry or bad poetry. God’s poetry misapplied is bad poetry. The tragedy in Oklahoma is not a time to be making theological points about the sovereignty of God. I hope that the people of Oklahoma will find better poetry from God that breathes life and mercy and peace in a difficult time.

Sometimes you hear songs that only your eyes know how to talk about. I’ve spent all day talking with my eyes as I listen to a very beautiful album of songs by Zach Sobiech, a kid who died of cancer yesterday after recording an album in the final months of his life. Zach formed a band called A Firm Handshake with his lifelong friend Sammy Brown when he learned that he had less than a year to live. I’ve spent time that I don’t have trying and failing to summon up the right combination of adjectives to describe his music about living richly in the shadow of death.

One of the things that Christian hipsters and seminarians like to get worked up about is the way that many Christians have a Greek pagan view of the afterlife instead of a Christian one. Basically the Greeks believed in the immortality of the soul, that when we die, our soul leaves our body and spends forever in a non-physical reality. The Bible, on the other hand, describes the afterlife as a resurrection of the body in which all humanity is restored after a period of time to a completely physical but imperishable existence. Our Christian ethics professor in seminary told us that we shouldn’t tell bereaved people that their loved ones are “still with them,” but rather that, despite the fact that their bodies are decomposing in the ground, they will see them again at the end of time when they are resurrected (great bedside manner, eh?).

Sometimes I ponder the logistical problems of bodily resurrection. They are similar to the logistical problems Noah would have faced in getting a pair of each of the millions of species of animals, many of whom are natural predators for each other (some of whom only subsist as parasites actively destroying another animal’s body), into a boat the size of a football field in which they all would have had to eat and poop for forty days and nights plus the amount of time it took for the water to drain (the air in the hull would have been almost entirely composed of methane by the time they were done). The problem is that most of us learn Bible stories like Noah’s ark and Jonah’s three days of not suffocating or getting dissolved by stomach acid in the belly of a whale when we’re young enough to be oblivious to the logistical details of life.

Normally I’m good at just living in the story of the Bible and not worrying about this kind of stuff. I guess it’s just when people get very particular and emphatic and literal about bodily resurrection that I start to ponder considerations like the Earth’s finite surface area, the fact that only a very small percentage of the people who have existed throughout time actually speak the same language, etc. And I wonder how in the world I will find the people who matter to me in heaven, the resurrection, or whatever you want to call it.

Yesterday, I shared Thomas Merton’s thoughts on suffering and death, that our belief in the resurrection of Christ is what allows us to face our death with hope. That seems like the right thing to say and I do of course believe in the resurrection. At the same time, I find myself attracted to the innocent, hopeful uncertainty with which Zach Sobiech writes about the mystery of death. His song “Sandcastles” is about heaven:

I’ll collect some shells, and you move the sand.
We’ll build our little sandcastle in a far off land
where no one gets hurt and no one dies
and your tears are scared of leaving your eyes.
So grab the shovel and start digging deep,
cause our little sandcastle is all we can keep.
Our little sandcastle will probably never exist,
But I like to dream and build our lives in it.

I don’t think I could live if I didn’t trust that somehow I will spend forever with the people I’ve lost in a far-off land where no one gets hurt and no one dies. My trust feels about as tenuous as a sandcastle, but it’s a sandcastle that I’m guarding more fiercely than any 8-year old boy on the beach.

I’m not sure what justifies my belief that we’ll somehow end up together in the end and that the afterlife is not as bleak as the fundamentalists make it out to be. It’s perhaps very silly and romantic, but somehow I want to say that I can believe these things because of the existence of love. That’s pretty much what Zach says in his song Ames:

Our sleep will become deeper soon
more beautiful than the sun, sea, the moon
that’s ours, and no one can take it . . .

It might be time for me to go.
But that doesn’t mean you have to leave.
And winter might be giving us snow.
But who’s to say we can’t still believe?

Our engine will keep on turning,
and the stars will smile on us.
And even when we’re torn apart,
I will not lose this love.

It’s just an emphatic declaration: “I will not lose this love.” But it’s so flooded with hope. Somehow I prefer saying it that way to quoting Bible passages that are supposed to make other people say okay, well I’m supposed to agree with that if I’m a Christian, so I’ll just pretend like I’m not scared of death and not talk about it. Doctrine or not, scriptural proof-texts or not, best-selling heaven tourism books or not, death remains a mystery. Zach Sobiech’s songs make me smile and cry at the same time with beauty that proves to me the existence of an eternal life that must be behind them.

I preached this past weekend on two songs that seem to be vying for the attention of American Christians: the song of scandal that dominates our 24 hour news cycle, and the song of Pentecost through which the Holy Spirit uses God’s people to testify to His deeds of power. The reason that we can’t hear the song of Pentecost is because we’re so thoroughly immersed in the song of scandal. Think about where your mind was this past week and what you watched and shared on social media. Were you testifying to God’s deeds of power or were you sharing pictures of Umbrella-gate or another scandal? To tune into the song of Pentecost means assuming that we are surrounded by prophets and that each of us has a prophetic vocation. Listen to find out more:

The word of the Cross is foolishness, says St. Paul, to them that perish. Yet among those to whom the Cross was folly and scandal were ascetics and religious men who had evolved a philosophy of suffering, and who cultivated self-denial. There is much more in the word of the Cross than the acceptance of suffering or the practice of self-denial. The Cross is something positive. It is more than a death. The word of the Cross is foolishness to them that perish–but to them that are saved “it is the power of God” (1 Corinthians 1:18). 77

To take up my cross and follow Jesus is not only self-negation but also the ultimate liberation. To embrace my cross is to scorn death and social rejection. When I try to measure my cross in terms of its suffering, I am turning it into currency paid in the expectation of future compensation.

Merely accepted, suffering does nothing for our souls except perhaps to harden them. Endurance alone is no consecration… We can deny ourselves rigorously for the wrong reason and end up by pleasing ourselves mightily with our self-denial.

Many Christians suffer from a martyrdom complex in which they prove themselves through their suffering. This is a very dangerous way of living that results in deep bitterness.

To believe in suffering is pride: but to suffer, believing in God, is humility. For pride may tell us that we are strong enough to suffer… Humility tells us that suffering is an evil which we must always expect to find in our lives… But faith also knows that the mercy of God is given to those who seek Him in suffering, and that by His grace we can overcome evil with good.

Another way of saying this is that the only positive of suffering is that it destroys our delusion of self-sufficiency. People who have to cry out to God for mercy are more likely to become merciful people, but only if the suffering really breaks them. People whose suffering never makes them feel inadequate are shaped in the opposite way; they have little patience for other people’s pity parties. Their suffering becomes a trump card: I got through it, so why can’t you?

Suffering can only be consecrated to God by one who believes that Jesus is not dead. And it is of the very essence of Christianity to face suffering and death not because they are good, not because they have meaning, but because the Resurrection of Jesus has robbed them of their meaning.

Our appropriate posture towards suffering is not to brag about it or resign ourselves to it, but to shake our fist at it in defiance. As Paul says, “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?”

The God of the American evangelical gospel is mostly a duality of Father and Son with the Holy Spirit basically filling in the gaps of the story kind of like the way that God fills in the gaps that cannot be explained by science in modernity. Evangelicals tend to frame the problem of Christian salvation in terms of a fundamental dualism to God’s nature (wrath vs. mercy, holiness vs. love, justice vs. grace) that involves a Marcionist split between the Old Testament Father (who is wrathful, holy, and just) and the New Testament Son (who is merciful, loving, and gracious).

This Marcionist dualism (or shall I say bitheism) is expressed most clearly in the claim that while the gracious/merciful Jesus is the one who “eats and drinks with sinners” (Matthew 9:11), His wrathful/holy Father cannot tolerate the presence of our sin (He has an allergy), so He needs Jesus to fumigate our souls of sin with His blood. That way, He will only see Jesus instead of us and pretend that we never made any mistakes after we die and go to face Him.

In such a schema, the Holy Spirit’s sole purpose is to enable totally wicked and hell-destined human beings to get out of the doghouse with the wrathful Father by responding appropriately to the action of the merciful Son on the cross. A common piety for evangelical sensibilities is to say that salvation is not really about us; it’s about God bringing glory to Himself. In the post-Anselmian Western church, God’s glory is understood in terms of rectifying the dishonor that has been shown to God by human sin either through the sacrifice of Jesus’ cross or through the eternal damnation of sinners (it makes no difference to God which of these as long as the debt gets paid).

But what happens if we take the promise God makes in Joel 2:28 as our starting premise? “I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh.” I realize that all is the least favorite word in the Bible for many evangelicals (isn’t that universalism?). But suppose that God really is pouring His Spirit on all flesh. Does it seem very evident from looking around? I preached about this last night. We live in a world where God’s Pentecost is being perpetually sabotaged by Satan’s scandal. The pouring out of God’s Spirit doesn’t make the nightly news; it doesn’t make it into our Facebook status updates; because the scandals of our world are so much more delicious, and our consciousness has been almost entirely consumed by them.

Could it be the case that the problem is our lack of awareness of the Spirit that God is actively pouring out on our flesh? Look at what Peter says at the conclusion of his first Pentecost sermon when his listeners ask what they must do to be saved: “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:38).

Our sin is the obstacle that prevents us from receiving the Spirit that God is constantly giving. The same Greek word lambano is used for “receive” and “take.” One of the options that the lexicon offers is “to appropriate to one’s self.” So when Peter says “receive,” he is talking about an ability that we are given, not just a gift that is dumped in our laps, though the ability itself is also a gift.

To evangelicals reading this passage who define salvation exclusively in personal afterlife insurance terms, receiving the gift of the Holy Spirit is no more than a fringe benefit of salvation; the focus is on the forgiveness of sins (and the avoidance of damnation which has to be added/eisegeted parenthetically to that). But the most straightforward reading of Peter’s sentence would leave us with the conclusion that the forgiveness of our sins serves the purpose of enabling us to receive the Holy Spirit, which is our salvation.

This makes perfect sense if we read it alongside Romans where the law of the spirit is at war with the law of the flesh. If the flesh is death and the spirit is life, then receiving the Holy Spirit that has been poured out on our flesh signifies entering into eternal life. Crucifying our sin with Christ and emerging from His empty tomb in our new resurrected selves is what needs to happen so that… we can be kissed by the Holy Spirit’s Pentecostal tongues of fire that make us fully alive, eternal creatures who glorify God.

Our salvation is in fact about God’s glory, but it’s a much richer glory than the “glory” of a marketplace of honor where every debt has been paid. God is most fundamentally an artist. Like every artist, God is glorified by the beauty of His art. The early Christian saint Irenaeus captures the essence of Christian salvation in two sentences: “The glory of God is man fully alive. The life of a man is the vision of God.” Our salvation is to receive the gift of the One who not only sent His Son to crucify our sin and resurrect us from its shame, but is also pouring out His Spirit on all flesh that we might be made fully into His children and incorporated into the body of His Son. When Pentecost becomes our daily reality, we glorify God and enjoy the eternal life of delighting in His beauty.

It all started when T.C. Moore wrote the following as his facebook status update:

There’s a peculiar tribe of radicals discovering they are not alone. They come from all different traditions and expressions of the church, but they share many common characteristics:
Their message is centered on Jesus the Messiah; their definition of power is the cruciform love of God revealed on the Cross; they proclaim Jesus Lord and King, not Caesar; they won’t bow down to nationalistic idolatry, nor will they be co-opted by any of the powers that be; their Gospel is good news to those on the margins; they live in authentic community in eschatological hope; they embody the life of the age to come; they live as pilgrims and sojourners in this world, because God is building a new city among them; they live in solidarity with the hurting, and celebrate the new covenant with joy; God is using them to renew all things.

They are Jesus-disciples, and they are turning the world upside-down.

This sounded a lot like what 1 Corinthians 1:28 says, so I shared it with T.C. and Zach. Essentially what we’re talking about is a specific set of priorities in thinking about the shape of the kingdom of God and the vocation of Christian disciples. When Jesus calls us to take up our crosses and follow Him, He’s not just telling us to engage in “self-sacrifice” through accruing a certain quota of volunteer service hours or smiling pleasantly a certain number of times at people who are being unpleasant to us. Taking up your cross is not about carrying a heavy load; it’s about renouncing your social status.

To take up your cross in a literal, 1st century sense would mean to join the procession of those who have been condemned to die in their march out of the city gates, which in figurative 21st century terms would mean to join the company of those who are despised by the world, the modern-day equivalents of “the prostitutes and tax collectors [who] are entering the kingdom of heaven ahead of [those who think they are the gatekeepers of heaven]” (Matthew 21:31). I’ll let you fill in those blanks. It means that we sit at the feet of those who are despised by the world and allow them to teach and judge us.

In 1 Corinthians 6:4, Paul makes a very interesting statement that I happen to think has been mistranslated by just about every English version of the Bible. The Corinthians had been in a power struggle which has gotten ugly and turned litigious. Particularly scandalous to Paul is that believers have gone outside of the church to the pagan courts to rule in their disputes. Paul says in Greek, βιωτικὰ μὲν οὖν κριτήρια ἐὰν ἔχητε, τοὺς ἐξουθενημένους ἐν τῇ ἐκκλησίᾳ τούτους καθίζετε.

The NRSV translates this: “If you have ordinary cases, then, do you appoint as judges those who have no standing in the church?” The NIV says, “Therefore, if you have disputes about such matters, do you ask for a ruling from those whose way of life is scorned in the church?” It is very telling about the Bible translators of the NRSV and NIV that they could not conceive of the possibility that when Paul uses the phrase ἐξουθενημένους (“despised ones”), he might not be making his own moralistic judgment about the people he’s talking about. They must not have looked back to 1 Corinthians 1:28 where Paul uses the same word in a slightly different form, ἐξουθενημένα, to talk about the people whom God has anointed to “bring to nothing the things that are.”

If we take Paul’s statement at face value without making a moralistic judgment about the ἐξουθενημένους, then what Paul is saying literally is this: “Therefore if you have disputes about daily life, then let the despised ones in your church be the judges.” Recall that 1 Corinthians is the book where Paul exclaims, “Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” (1 Corinthians 1:20). We think we’re so sophisticated, but the truth is that outsiders who have no status and thus no artifice could probably do a better job of resolving our silly squabbles with one another better than we could. And it’s their lack of worldly dignity and anxiety over appearances that makes the despised ones people we should listen to and take seriously.

When Jesus says, “Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant,and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all” (Mark 10:43-44), He’s not commanding us to put on some latex gloves and dish out soup for poor people once a month so that we can feel good about ourselves. He’s telling us to put ourselves beneath “the least of our brothers and sisters” with whom He directly identifies Himself (Matthew 25:40). Let the despised ones be your judges!

Jesus is the king who makes Himself the despised one (Philippians 2:7) so that His disciples would learn to “do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit [but] rather, in humility value others above yourselves” (Philippians 2:3). To follow our despised messiah, we need to proactively examine ourselves for “selfish ambitions” and “vain conceits” that are corrupting our motives for what we do. The freedom of discipleship requires our utter abandonment of worldly dignity, which all too often has a lot more currency inside the church than without. We need to be unashamed to be despised by others even within the church who have turned church into a place where worldly status is affirmed and reinforced rather than subverted and eschewed.

In any case, T.C. and Zach and I decided to band together in some fashion with other bloggers and rebel Christians who understand their Christian vocation similarly and are willing to be despised. I’m not sure where this will evolve. We’ll have to listen to the Holy Spirit. When John Wesley decided on April 2, 1739 to preach outside of the official Anglican pulpit in the streets and fields of England, he wrote in his journal: “At four in the afternoon I submitted to be more vile, and proclaimed in the highways the glad tidings of salvation.” Wesley was a despised one; there have been many others.

Oh and the Hebrew on the emblem is bani b’li shem, which means “sons with no name,” a phrase that expresses the aristocratic presumption that if you don’t belong to a family with a name, you’re clearly a bad or at least untrustworthy person. In the South particularly, we talk about whether so-and-so is “from a good family.” Job uses this phrase in Job 30:8 to describe the filthy peasants whose company he has been reduced to after he loses his princely wealth and status. Basically, it’s another way of saying ἐξουθενημένα. How does the NRSV translate this phrase? “A senseless, disreputable brood.” Yup. That’s us!

I’ve been engaged in solidarity work with Latin America since I graduated college in 2000 through various positions in NGO’s, labor unions, campus anti-sweatshop campaigns, etc. Through this work in conjunction with its social justice-oriented faith-based supporters, I was introduced to the liberation theology of Gustavo Gutierrez, Leonardo Boff, Jon Sobrino, Jose Miguez Bonino, Elsa Tamez, and others. It was huge for me to hear a different side of Jesus’ cross as solidarity with what liberation theologians call the “pueblo crucificado,” the idea that Jesus died not only to pay for individual peoples’ sins but also to show the victims of the world’s structural sin that He absorbed the full weight of their oppression into His flesh and He was standing with them.

Though I’m not as familiar with emergent theology as I am with liberation theology, it seems from what I’ve encountered that emergent theology has been heavily influenced by liberation theology though of course it’s been appropriated for a different purpose given the particular white Christian theological battle into which emergent theology is deployed.

I don’t have time to do justice to the history of liberation theology, but it basically rose up in the context of the Roman Catholics’ second Vatican Council in the late Sixties. There was a movement early on to establish kingdom-oriented Christian Base Communities on the local level where people would live in conformity with the model of Acts 2 where the disciples shared their possessions and made sure that everyone in their community was cared for. But the Christian Base Community movement never really seemed to catch on too well.

Then in the 1980′s, two things happened at the same time. First, the US government got heavily involved in fighting communism in Central America, which involved supporting military dictatorships that massacred their people in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador and supporting a rebel group called the Contras that engaged in acts of terrorism and sabotage to overthrow the socialist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. At the same time, a massive influx of right-wing Pentecostal missionaries from the US flooded Latin America. There were confirmed meetings between the Reagan administration and Pentecostal church officials and a lot of rumors about the level of coordination between them, though it’s an overly cynical error to lump the Reagan Contra regime and the Pentecostal missionary movement too closely together.

In any case, today Latino liberation theology seems to have become a theology that purports to be derived in the experience of the poor in Latin America when it really comes from those members of the Latin American privileged class who want to support the poor, while Pentecostalism has exploded as the form of Christianity that dominates the street of the pueblo. The relationship between liberation theology and the white emergentsia is like the relationship between hip-hop and suburban white kids. The crisis that Pentecostalism poses to the white emergentsia’s sense of legitimacy is analogous to the crisis white suburban teenagers would have if black people stopped listening to hip-hop and took up disco or something.

The Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios-Montt is probably the most famous example of Latin American Pentecostalism that makes white emergentsia cringe. He took over Guatemala in a coup in 1982, basing his policy on his apocalyptic interpretations of the book of Revelation. He would hold national prayer meetings in the soccer stadiums in Guatemala City while his troops were slaughtering indigenous rebels in the mountains. He’s finally under house arrest but has never had to really pay for the crimes against humanity that he committed which were all endorsed by the elders of his Pentecostal megachurch.

There’s a tendency for white emergentsia like me and Tony to assume that patriarchal, egomaniacal autocrats like Rios-Montt are quintessential representatives of Latin American Pentecostalism. That, I suspect, is the basis for Tony’s cringe-worthy paternalistic statement that he “think[s] the nascent Pentecostalism practiced in much of the Global South would benefit from being in dialogue with the older, more developed theologies of the West.” It doesn’t make his statement right, but I think it’s helpful to acknowledge the probable back-story.

It’s very easy for white post-evangelicals who organize the world into a Cold War between us and the fundamentalists (e.g. Tony’s statement that “conservative, Reformed, penal substitutionary, anti-gay, anti-women evangelicals have been consistently kicking our asses in the public square”) to appropriate a surface-level assessment of Latin American Pentecostalism in which it’s entirely a conspiracy of the most egregious Reagan era far-right culture warriors in Pentecostal-land like Pat Robertson to keep the brown people poor by hypnotizing them with cheap, shiny magic tricks.

Basically we superimpose our intra-racial white religious battles on the entirety of the rest of the world assuming that they have to be on our side or the other side and they have to share the existential concerns of white Christianity. It doesn’t occur to us that Latin American Pentecostalism may have been kindled by white right-wing (or perhaps not even political at all) Pentecostal missionaries but it doesn’t necessarily have to share their political perspective because of the entirely different context in which it has been planted.

White rich people are going to appropriate an apocalyptic theology that feasts on signs and wonders in a completely different way with completely different motives than poor brown people. It also doesn’t occur to us that this may be a legitimate movement of the Holy Spirit and not just a Ralph Reed-orchestrated conspiracy to turn Latin America into a giant oil field and coffee plantation for the Koch Brothers to own.

One of the reasons I can’t buy into the oversimplified suspicion of Pentecostalism any more is because God decided to make me start speaking in tongues last fall, which I still haven’t figured out what to do with. It’s completely out of sync with who I always thought I was. Plus, I’ve been introduced to Pentecostals in the US like Jonathan Martin and Brian Zahnd who are preaching a purer gospel than I’ve found anywhere else. I’m definitely very ignorant of what’s really going on with Pentecostals in Latin America, but God has made it impossible for me to see them as “the other side.”

So all this is just to say there’s a lot more to learn and a lot more context to Tony Jones’s comments than just “privileged white guy acting ignorant.” Did he make some boneheaded statements? Yes. Did he handle things with the right posture and tone? No, and I haven’t either on many occasions. So instead of using this controversy as an opportunity to showcase how much more progressive and enlightened you are in your anti-oppression training than Tony Jones is, let’s dig into the underlying issues and try to find what God has to teach us.

I guess I just needed to call myself out for being a hypocrite with how angry I get that our national media destroys our democracy by fixating on scandals to the exclusion of any intelligent policy conversation. Guess I’m the same way. I don’t understand why the latest imbecilic statement from my favorite Seattle megachurch pastor gets my blood pumping more than wholesome stories about people helping other people. But I don’t think I’m the only one. It’s part of the deformity we’ve received from our information age.

In any case, our congregation has a bunch of unglamorous but very useful mission projects that we’re doing for Change the World. Every year, we pack up thousands of dehydrated meals to send to Africa. We also collect items for school and birthing kits and put them together to send to the Global South. This year, I’m very excited because for the first time, we’re doing a project with our community garden we started two summers ago.

The bed on the left is dill and the bed on the right is cilantro. Those are our spring crops. We will be harvesting them and planting some summer crops like tomatoes and cucumbers this Saturday. Then we will take the dill and cilantro to the Robinson Square subsidized housing community in nearby Fairfax where a bunch of families from all over the world live. Places like Pakistan, Vietnam, Somalia, etc. I’m hoping that having herbs to cook with will be a nice treat for them.

Oftentimes when we share free food with people who need help, it’s cans of beanie weanie or spam and things like that we would never eat in our own homes. So I had a sense that our immigrant brothers and sisters at Robinson Square probably wouldn’t get a lot of dill or cilantro if they’re having to utilize the local food banks. I think God not only wants them to have food, but to be able to cook tasty food.

It’s not anything all that revolutionary or glamorous, but there’s a freaking boatload of dill in that bed. We may have to dry it and grind it into powder before we deliver it because it’s going to take up a lot of space otherwise. Will several pounds of dill leaves bring an end to world hunger? No. Will it cause the Palestinians and Israelis to make peace with one another? Not a chance. But it might bring a smile to a woman from east Africa when she gets to cook with it. And that changes the world.

I just came across this video from Nathan Blanc, a 19 year old Israeli who has refused the mandatory time of service in the Israeli military because of his objection to the occupation of Palestine. Israeli law does not allow for conscientious objectors so they are sent to prison if they refuse to serve. Hear what he has to say and judge for yourself, and then check out this link to an article about other Israeli youth who are picking prison over occupation.

The IRS scandal has to do with the open cynicism in the world of political “non-profits.” Basically you can get non-profit status for an organization that puts out political advertising during election season as long as your advertising has to do with “promoting social welfare” and not with supporting a particular candidate (wink wink nudge nudge).

If you’re promoting a candidate, then your organization has to report itself in a different tax category with a different set of regulations. So you circumvent this regulation by attacking the opposing candidate’s position on a particular issue and give your front organization a name like Americans for the Right to Eat Coal for Breakfast so that you’re not supporting a candidate per se; you’re just passionate about your “issue.” I can’t think of anything in tour political discourse more contrary to our “social welfare” than these attack ads.

The other thing that has destroyed our democracy is our media’s addiction to scandal. Instead of having intelligent (and boring) conversations about the relative merits of different policy, the pundits would much rather talk about political gamesmanship and strategy and turn the whole thing into a horse race. One of the fuels for this fire are the information leaks that the press is able to obtain from government officials “on condition of anonymity.”

Now maybe I just don’t have the right perspective on journalism, but I have a real ethical problem with anonymous sources. I don’t feel like there were as many anonymous sources 15 years ago in the news as there are today. And it seems to me that the increasing use of anonymous sources is directly related to the conversion of news into entertainment and the parallel conversion of governance into a horse race. The show Scandal is such a perfect illustration of our cultural ethos. It’s about a government that doesn’t do any governing because all that exists are scandals and press conferences and coverups.

The Justice Department investigation had to do with an anonymous source that leaked classified information about a foiled terrorist plot that was stopped by the CIA. There was a scandal when the leak happened because it seemed like a clumsy way for the administration to get credit for fighting terrorism. Now there’s a scandal about the investigation of the leak. So the political beneficiaries of these two scandals get to double-dip.

My friend John Meunier in the context of a completely unrelated discussion draws a distinction between polemical and constructive conversation:

Polemics — as I understand the word — implies a level of combative argumentation over a controversial topic in which the goal is to win the point. As I use the term “constructive,” I mean… the shared effort to inquire and learn in which all sides start with the assumption that they might in the end discover that their position is untenable or must be changed.

Our country’s political discourse has become entirely polemical. There is no longer a good-faith effort to seek solutions for our country’s problems constructively, which would require knowing that you are coming at these problems from very different perspectives but having the basic insight that you’ve got some blind-spots and things to learn from those who see the world differently. Instead, almost all of the energy is being channeled into pummeling the other side’s image through scandals so that they’re in a weaker negotiating position.

I’ve shared before that the Greek word for devil is diabolos which is a compound word built from the words ballo (to throw) and dia (amidst). People who delight in scandal are diabolical by definition. I don’t know how much uglier it will get. Rene Girard theorizes about how scandal escalates in a society to the point that a scapegoat is needed upon which all the collective fury can be released so that peace can be restored. The problem is Jesus already played that role, and so many of the people who love fanning the flames of today’s scandals the most are supposedly His people.