David Brooks Respects the Future and Misses the Point

In response to the Snelling family tragedy, David Brooks writes,

        Either Snelling . . . lost control of his faculties, or he made a lamentable mistake. . . Our job is not to determine who is worthy of life, but how to make the most of the life we have been given. . . . But who is to say how Snelling would have felt four months from now? The fact is, we are all terrible at imagining how we will feel in the future. . . our capacities for imagining the future are . . . horrible in moments of stress and suffering.  Given these weaknesses, it seems wrong to make a decision that will foreclose future thinking.  It’s better to respect the future, to remain humbly open to your own unfolding. . . .If you look at life through the calculus of autonomy, then maybe Snelling made the right call. . . . But if you look at a life as one element within a mysterious flow, . . . Charles and Adrienne Snelling still had a few ripples to create.

In present-day U.S. realities, there is no return from Alzheimer's; after age 80 the outlook for an autonomous, productive, and meaningful life in the absence of some form of dementia is bleak at best, even for those with the means to pay for long-term, humane, enlightened, assistance.  To suggest that anyone in the circumstances faced by the Snellings had “a few ripples to create” in the “mysterious flow” of life, is naive at best, cruel at worst.

Brooks declines to present the religious arguments against murder and suicide, “many of which are based on the supposition that a life is a gift from God.”  But larger theological minds than Mr. Brooks’ have gone far beyond such simplistic pietisms and wrestled with the “courage to be” – to live fully and completely in the face of the knowledge that one day we will cease to exist.  Mr. Snelling stands accused by Brooks of either a profound and callous self-centeredness, or romantic delusion.  But neither may have been the case.  Instead, in the face of the failure of both society and the religions that claim to nurture and guide it, Mr. Snelling looked into the possibility of non-existence and chose it. 

That choice shows a trust in the nature of life and the universe that is close to the trust that Jesus taught and embodied.  Progressive, liberal religious people – Christians particularly – should look to Jesus’ relationship to God beginning with Matthew 6:25-34.  Jesus says, “don’t fret about your life . . . there’s more to living than food and clothing . . . Take a look at the birds of the sky . . . the wild lilies . . . the grass in the field, which is here today and is thrown into an oven tomorrow.”  Go on from there to John 14:1-4, followed by Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, 15:51-52.  Read these passages in the context of today’s cosmology – what we now know about the nature of the Universe, including the laws of physics, not the 1st century cosmology of a triple-decker universe with God above, earth in the middle, and hell below that conventional religion insists upon to its continued irrelevance. 

Jesus taught a seamless relationship among the spirit of life, the natural world, and humanity, and he trusted that relationship to the point of his own unjust death at the hands of Roman occupiers.  Paul writes, in the new translation by the Westar institute scholars:

        I am going to tell you a wondrous secret: We are not all going to die, rather we are all going to be transformed, in an instant, in the blink of an eye at the sound of the last trumpet-signal.  The trumpet will sound and the dead will be raised incorruptible and we [too] will be transformed.  Because this perishable man must be clothed with the imperishable, and this mortal man must be clothed with immortality.  And when the perishable is clothed with the imperishable and the mortal is clothed with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: Death has been engulfed by victory.  Where, O Death has your victory gone?  What’s happened, O Death, to your fatal sting?

21st century cosmology is clear:  neither matter nor energy can be created or destroyed, but only transformed.  We should have the same confidence in God that Jesus did: the same confidence in justice-compassion, in the spirit of life, and the nature of the universe itself.

In this Holy Week that celebrates the liberation of Passover and the incarnate promise of Easter, instead of concluding that Mr. Snelling “either lost control of his faculties, or made a lamentable mistake,” progressive spiritual leaders should grant him the courage to look into nothingness and encounter life itself.

Two Adams: An Answer to Brooks’ “Jeremy Lin Problem”

1 Corinthians 15:42-57;Philippians 2:1-11

In a provocative essay in today’s New York Times, David Brooks raises a spiritual dilemma.  He proposes that humanity lives in a tension between two moral universes.  One is a “sporting ethos,” which pervades and defines all areas of competition.  The “primary virtue is courage – the ability to withstand pain, remain calm under pressure and rise from nowhere to topple the greats.”  The second universe is the spiritual/religious morality that demands self-sacrifice: the last shall be first; the suffering servant is the savior; the weak and disenfranchised embody the most powerful force for change. 

Brooks refers to Jewish theologian Joseph Soloveitchik, who “argues that people have two natures. . . ‘Adam the First,’ the part of us that creates, discovers, competes and is involved in building the world. . . . [and] ‘Adam the Second,’ the spiritual individual who is awed and humbled by the universe as a spectator and a worshipper.”  Brooks suggests that the anger people feel when either sports or politics mix with religion rises because we are uncomfortable with both the experience of invincible physical power, and the experience of transcendent self denial.  The anger arises, Brooks says, because “people . . . want to deny that this contradiction exists . . . and live in a world in which there is only one morality, one set of qualities and where everything is easy, untragic and clean.”

If he had ended the piece there, he would have deserved an A+.  Instead he dilutes his challenge with a cop-out: “life and religion are more complicated than that.”

In the Apostle Paul’s 1st letter to the Corinthians, chapter 15, Paul lays out a theology that for centuries has made seminarians’ heads swim, and lay-folk nod off in the pews.  Now comes a new translation by Westar Institute Scholars Arthur J. Dewey, Roy W. Hoover, Lane C. McGaughy, and Daryl D. Schmidt: The Authentic Letters of Paul: A new reading of Paul’s rhetoric and meaning (Polebridge Press, 2010).  This translation pulls Paul’s theology down from the mind-numbing theological stratosphere into the here and now – which according to the scholars was where Paul was in the 1st century – here and now (in his own time and place.)  So when Paul gets going about “sin” and the “perishable” inheriting the “imperishable” he is not talking about going to heaven when we die if and only if we’ve been believers in Jesus’ “resurrection.”  He is talking about the “corrupting seduction of power” [hamartia for any Greeks reading this].  For Paul, this force is so strong that it becomes personified.  Think about how power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  That begins to get at what Paul was referring to. 

He wasn’t talking about the physical decomposition of human bodies after death, that will magically take on new “spiritual” bodies in heaven.  In 1 Cor. 15:45, he was talking about that same first Adam that Brooks does in his essay when he quotes Joseph Soloveitchik: “the part of us that creates, discovers, competes and is involved in building the world.”  The second Adam, according to the Scholars Version, “became a life-creating power . . . the body fit for life in God’s new world.”  The difference is that for Paul, that second Adam (which was Jesus, the Anointed One) is a prototype for how to bring about God’s rule on the planet.  For Paul, it is not enough to be “the spiritual individual who is awed and humbled by the universe as a spectator and a worshipper,” as Brooks (and Soloveitchik) describes the second Adam.  Paul’s second Adam is an activist who accepts that the way to overturn the inevitable injustices that come from the seductive power of corruption is to radically abandon self-interest.

For Christians, Jesus was the person who managed to contain the supposedly conflicting paradigms of 1st Adam (warrior, athlete, competitor, entrepreneur) and 2nd Adam (self-sacrificing servant, pacifist, humanitarian).  In his letter to the Philippians, Paul says, “I appeal to all of you to think in the same way that the Anointed Jesus did, who although he was born in the image of God, did not regard ‘being like God’ as something to use for his own advantage, but rid himself of such vain pretension and accepted a servant’s lot.”  Jesus was willing to go all the way to death at the hands of the representatives of the “first Adam,” who constructed the systems of Empire, and fell prey to the seductions of earthly power.  That is why – in 1st century Paul’s cosmology – “God raised him higher than anyone and awarded him the title that is above all others. . . Jesus the Anointed is lord. . . .”  small “l” – not a titan of Wall Street, not the Hollywood star, and not the emperor of the known universe.  An executed criminal is the model for how to save humanity from itself.

This is what is so annoying – even enraging – about combining politics or sports or business with religious or spiritual conviction.  That second Adam insists on distributive justice-compassion for the universe s/he holds in awe and wonder.  The problem is that for the work to be legitimate requires a radical abandonment of self-interest.  Like Mr. Lin, most of us have a hard time getting past that old devil hamartia.

Who ARE These People?

In the latest issue of Westar Institute’s periodical The Fourth R (for “religion”), long-time editor and member Tom Hall argues with Vanderbilt Divinity School Visiting Scholar Gerd Lüdemann about who can claim the name of “Christian” in today’s post-modern, post-Christian context.  Hall demands, “Who says we must ‘save’ the doctrine of the risen Christ?  Who says we may not disavow clearly obsolete elements of ‘the faith of most early Christians’?”  Professor Lüdemann fires back: “After the bodily resurrection and other supernatural propositions are recognized as fictions, the heritage that remains is simply Judaism.  So why shouldn’t Christians join the local synagogue and become Jews?”

Unfortunately, The Fourth R is not yet published online, and I can’t quote much of it (“fair use,” and all that).  But the question raised is at the heart of Christian identity crises today.  People who have joined the 21st century in terms of cosmology and want to distinguish ourselves from biblical literalists (fundamentalists) can choose between “liberal” and “progressive.”  But what about theologically conservative Christians who staunchly support all of the social justice positions of the political left?  Should they give up the designation “evangelical”?  Is it fair that they get lumped in with the rest of the libertarian right?

My favorite quote from the online discussion at Sojourners God’s Politics is: “With a glass of champagne in one hand and a smile on his face, Rob Bell, former pastor of Mars Hill church in Michigan, answered, “An evangelical is someone who, when they leave the room, you have more hope than when they entered.”

Biblical Literacy: Who Cares?

Atheists care.  Mormons care.  “Evangelical” “born again” Christians don’t care.  “Spiritual not religious” refugees from organized Christian churches don’t care.  Unitarians don’t care (unless they are atheists).  Keli Goff ranted on Dylan Ratigan and the Huffington Post that:

        . . . an overwhelming majority of those who believe in God are ignorant of basic Biblical facts, and facts about other religions. A 2010 Pew study found only 2% of those surveyed could answer 29 of the 32 questions asked correctly. Most could answer about half. This means that people who aren’t well-versed in their own religious beliefs, or anyone else’s, are making decisions in the voting booth fueled by prejudice that isn't even well-informed prejudice.
       
        . . . Atheists were among the top scoring groups on Pew’s religion pop quiz.  Mormons also scored well. . . . So . . . If most of us are not knowledgeable enough of our own faiths to truly know if another faith is at odds with our own, then how can a vote based in part on someone else’s designated religion be rooted in anything other than prejudice?

More important than voting based on religious prejudice is indifference to Christian fundamentalist Zionism, and the fervent desire on the part of Christian fundamentalists to establish a theocracy in the United States. Christian Zionism  poses a direct threat to world peace because of its belief in the literal return of Jesus to establish a “new Jerusalem” and usher in the "Kingdom of God."  Christian Zionism is at the root of right-wing Christian foreign policy espoused by all three Republican candidates still in the race for the nomination.

Liberal and progressive Christians need to bone up on Revelation, the Revised Common Lectionary, and the Gospel of John (see John Shuck’s sermons, and my Liberal Christian Commentary Archive), and then join the Westar Institute in its continuing, paradigm-shifting work on the historical Jesus, the development of early Christianity, and – most recently – the Bible itself.  Want more help?  ProgressiveChristianity.org provides resources, guiding ideas, and spiritual networking opportunities for progressive individuals, churches, and organizations.