Tag: Richard Beck

“You may be good, but are you happy?”

This in a post from Richard Beck caught my attention last week:

There are so many ways we’re suffering due to disenchantment. We’re all feeling a bit lost and unwell in this post-Christian world. We might be good people, but we aren’t very happy. 

This is America in a nutshell, really. We may believe we are good people, but none of us are very happy. Oh, we try to convince ourselves and those around us otherwise. That’s the power of indulgence and consumption; these things serve as powerful veils to cover our emptiness. But, nevertheless, we can justify our emptiness as long as we can feel like we are morally superior to Them. Hence, the onset of over-politicization and Twitter mobs and cancelling and rampant self-righteousness and certainty.

Christianity is supposed to be an answer to this. Being Christians should be a joyous experience, full of grace and compassion and hope. It should not be as stultifying and rigid and mean as our politics have become. Cancellation and grievance has no place among disciples. Christianity is not a means to an end. It does not exist to help us achieve whatever political or social goal we have. Our faith is not a utilitarian faith. It’s not about the end point, but the journey. But for too many Christians today, that no longer is true. Christianity becomes important only to the extent that it can serve as a vehicle for social justice, or pro-life advocacy, or any other political ideology. That’s why Beck’s question is so important for Christians to ask themselves:

“You may be good, but are you happy?”

A little more happiness, and a little less stridency, would go a long ways towards healing our world.

The Cheap Grace of Donald Trump

 

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Trump and his court evangelicals

One of the Christian right’s favorite ways to excuse Donald Trump’s moral failings as a human being is to say that “God uses imperfect people.” You can read examples here, and here, and here. 

And I get it! God does use broken and imperfect people! I truly believe this; as a process thinker, I think God, in conjunction with each and every one of us, uses every moment of our lives – good, bad and in between – to create new possibilities and realities all the time.

But here’s the thing. I also believe that we are imbued with a sense of right and wrong. We have notions of human dignity and worth, and love for others, embedded within us, as part of the Imago Dei we all carry.

Because of these carried notions, and because humans are amazing, dynamic beings, we have the ability to react to situations, to learn, and the change. In fact, we have a divine mandate to do so. We must learn from our mistakes and shortcomings; it’s bred into our make-up. Human beings would have died out long ago if we didn’t learn and adapt.

In the Christian realm, the leeway we give ourselves and one another to learn and grow and have second chances is called grace. What sets Christianity apart is that grace is unearned, that we get it just because we are.

But, as St. Paul explained, just because grace is unearned doesn’t mean it is free of responsibility. Richard Beck writes, “Grace has been given to us...Therefore. And what follows Paul’s Therefore is a list of obligations and expectations. Like his contemporaries, Paul assumes that grace implies a return. Grace obligates us. Gifts–even God’s gifts–have strings attached.”

Grace without an imperative to change is Bonhoeffer’s cheap grace, “the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance….Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”

God may use broken people, but when God does, it is incumbent on us to acknowledge the grace that that is, and do better next time to not keep perpetuating our own brokenness. The excusing of Donald Trumps’s moral failings without requiring him to show any progress is cheap grace. It is an affront to the God who has shown us grace, but who also expects us to react to that grace, not just keep on what we were doing. The brand of American Christianity that keeps excusing Trump is a brand of Christianity built on a foundation of cheap grace; this foundation is like Jesus’ house built on sand.

I’m not saying Donald Trump can never make mistakes. Obviously, we all do and will. But if he keeps refusing to acknowledge those mistakes or make any changes, then it is the Christian duty of his court evangelicals to call him on it. And if they won’t do it, they are abdicating their Christian responsibility, and choosing power over Christ.

The Immanence of God

For a long time, I’ve seen God as a transcendent presence in the universe. I assumed God to be outside of our present reality, as a distant observer. I wrote about this in a post a couple of years ago, wrestling with deism and using the Clockmaker metaphor for my understanding of God.

But this conception of the Divine has never set totally well with me. Something seemed to be off about it, about a distant God. Because I have also always believed in the idea of God as in all things, in all of us and all of Creation. But I could never reconcile these two competing ideas.

immanenceRecently, that has all begun to change. It began with my reading of The Divine Relativity by Charles Hartsthorne. This work, a seminal text in the canon of process theology, posits God not as wholly supreme and dominant, but as relative and personal. Hartsthorne’s conception of God is one defined by its relation to Creation, and to us. God is not an omnipotent king, looking over the world with perfect foreknowledge and control over our actions, completely absolute and thus unable to be affected by us. Instead, God grows and changes in relation to us, based on our own actions. Now, this necessarily implies some sense of limitation on God, but that is an acceptable thought if you think of God choosing to limit God’s self in order to more perfectly be in communion with us.

Although the text was dense and highly academic, I really feel drawn to this conception of God. This still doesn’t mean I believe in a God who works active miracles and changes in the world; Harthsthorne thoroughly dismantles this idea as tyrannical and illogical, which I completely agree with. However, I do think God is relatable, and is affected by our ability to act and interact with the Divine Being.

My thoughts of this have continued to expand on this subject recently as a result of Richard Beck’s series on immanence and transcendence over at Experimental Theology. Beck dismantles the idea of a wholly transcendent God and really sums out my feelings:

The irony of transcendence, often celebrated in praise music as the “awesomeness” of God, is how it tends toward disenchantment. With God exalted as King ruling over and above creation, God is subtly pulled out of creation. Rather than indwelling God evacuates creation.

Transcendence also tends toward deism, furthering our disenchantment. When transcendence is emphasized, highlighting God’s separateness and Otherness from creation, God’s actions in the world are conceptualized as intrusions, miraculous suspensions of the daily flux of cause and effect. But as science has progressed these miraculous intrusions are harder to believe in. And when you starting doubting the miracles of the transcendent God you, by default, find yourself in deism. A God who is out there, somewhere, but a God who doesn’t miraculously intrude upon creation.

Basically:

Transcendence + Doubt (mainly in miracles) = Deism

I love this. This is exactly the dissonance and problem I’ve been struggling with in my understanding of God. And in his next post, Beck provides an answer to this problem: immanence. Or as he calls it here, a sacramental ontology:

In a sacramental ontology there is an overlap between God and creation–an intermingling of the earthly and the heavenly, the human and the divine, the mundane and the holy, the secular and the sacred, the natural and supernatural, the material and the spiritual.

With a sacramental ontology the world is “haunted” by God continuously from the insiderather than through episodic and miraculous intrusions from the outside. Creation itself, because it is “charged with the grandeur of God,” is miraculous, sacred and holy. Creation is an ongoing and unfolding miracle rather than a disenchanted machine occasionally interrupted–if God answers our prayers–by an external miraculous force.

To rethink a famous metaphor, creation isn’t a mechanism, a watch separate from the Watchmaker. Creation isn’t a machine. Creation is alive.

God exists in all things; not in the sense that all things are God, but in the sense that God is all-enveloping. Hartsthorne makes this distinction by replacing the term pantheism (all things are God) with panentheism (all things are in God.) God is not separate or distant; God is near, one with us and all of creation. God is personal and loving, not impersonal and dominant.

I’m still working this out in my personal theology, and how it affects everything. But I do know this: it reaffirms my commitments to liberation theology, universalism, social justice and environmental justice. It adds a layer of depth and sacredness to all Creation and all human beings. Sacred worth is all around us; we must do our best to preserve it where it is and revive it where it is fading. The Immanence of God deserves no less.