One of the key turning-points in anthropological scholarship was the shift from voyeuristic accounts of primitive savages to taking native practices seriously (eg, Howard Bell Wright’s The Shepherd of the Hills v. Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God). I say this because I know it is true, and I want you to know that I know it’s true. But I can’t help but feel toward TBN the way Wright felt toward the Ozark folk culture: it may be beautiful in places, but it’s got a long way to go before I’ll call it sophisticated.

Put somewhat less offensively, my attitude is similar to that of A.J. Jacobs toward snakehandlers in The Year of Living Biblically. After visiting a church centered around this practice, Jacob observes:

I wish Jimmy [the snakehandling pastor] would stop handling snakes. My college antrhopology professors would be appalled. . . .But I still have my risk-reward mind-set, and here the risk to Jimmy’s life cannot outweight the reward of transcendence. . . .I want Jimmy to find transcendence through dancing or hymn singing or Sufi spinning. Anything. (299)

My experience of TBN is not unlike Jacobs’s experience of snakehandling: in isolated spurts, as a detached and critical outsider. The network has been on my mind an awful lot recently, too, because of a couple books I’ve read: Jim and Casper Go to Church by Jim Henderson and Matt Casper and Salvation on the Small Screen? 24 Hours of Christian Television by Nadia Bolz-Weber (the latter, incidentally, sports an endorsement by Jacobs on my edition).

These books both have interesting gimmicks, but they are not equally endowed with quality prose. Henderson and Casper (respectively, a leader in the Christian house church movement and an atheist family man), well, go to churches across the United States and write their honest impressions of each. Bolz-Weber watches 24 hours of TBN with a diverse cloud of witnesses in her living room—and it really is diverse, from conservative Church of Christ congregants to gay rights advocates to lapsed Jewish atheists. They’re answering different questions: one asks how Christians are perceived by outsiders and the other asks whether “Christian media” (or, as Bolz-Weber renders it, “the Christian-industrial complex”) contributes anything positive at all to the world. They cover some of the same ground—both books examine the Dream Center and Joel Osteen. As alluded to before, one is clearly a better book than the other. Henderson and Casper really have a rapport, but their transcribed conversations are almost always a little excruciating to read. It’s as if they’re trying to be chatty and to “keep it real” (yes, dear reader, they do utter that phrase to each other), but it hardly ever works. Bolz-Weber, however, is witty and direct and authentic. Her book bears all the marks of a careful revision to make the words just sing.*

Both books were helpful in helping me figure out my stance toward TBN. I’ve usually regarded it, looking down my nose of course, as below me. I thought I could ignore it as simply unsophisticated. But here’s the rub: that’s not what a responsible Christian should do. TBN is theologically unsophisticated and, as demonstrated by Henderson and Casper when they visit Lakewood and throughout Bolz-Weber’s account, oriented toward building and expanding its (and its presenters’) richesse. It is also an essential mover and shaper of ideas about Jesus for millions of people in the United States and around the world. For many people, it is the public face of evangelicalism in particular and Christianity in general. And as Bolz-Weber states,

While maintaining that the properity gospel, the rapture, and Christian Zionism (all TBN fare) are up there with the selling of indulgences and the existence of purgatory as the stinkiest Christian ideas in history, I still must admit that God’s redeeming work in the world does not happen only when we get all the theology and method right. (5) 

Bolz-Weber says, essentially, that God is working through TBN, and it’s a claim that Henderson employs throughout Jim and Casper Go to Church when Casper raises a particularly good question about seemingly bad Christian practices. People are being served, imperfectly, but they are being served nonetheless. I can buy that.

The problem that this admission raises, however, is that TBN is popular among people who feel disconnected from the world. Bolz-Weber constantly wonders about the shut-ins who give their SSA checks and inheritences to TBN, and these people have stayed in my mind. Why are they tithing to TBN? Because they have no other place to tithe. No other place that they identify with so completely that they want to give monetarily. I know—I’m overgeneralizing. It would be naive to say that most or even a third of committed TBN viewers-supporters do not belong to some church. It would be even more naive to say that these viewers-supporters do not tithe to their own church. These people exist, but I’m not concerned with them at the moment. There are a great deal of people who are actually alone, untouched by the church except through TBN. And Christians have a responsibility to ask why. Why are people being abandoned by the church in the world to be sucked dry by the church of the airwaves?

The perceived benefit from giving to and consuming TBN still remains a powerful counterargument. Why worry? There’s some good in what the network does. I can accept that. But my mind instinctively reverts to the Jacobsonian position: I wish they would stop watching TBN. And I wish the rest of us would find them and provide a real, full-Gospel alternative.

—

*She also has the best one-sentence explanation of Jean Baudrillard’s term, “simulacrum,” that I’ve ever heard. I didn’t think that was possible.

—

Bolz-Weber, Nadia. Salvation on the Small Screen? 24 Hours of Christian Television. New York: Seabury, 2008.

Henderson, Jim and Matt Casper. Jim and Casper Go to Church. Carol Stream, IL: Barna-Tyndale, 2007.

Jacobs, A.J. The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally As Possible. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007.

Bill Cork, friend and blogfather of “Refuge,” was the first on my blogroll to alert me about Fr. Albert Cutie’s entry into the Episcopal Church. Then I heard the iMonk, Michael Spenser (3 posts in a row I’ve mentioned him, I just realized), deliver an inspired rant on the issue. This is not an idle issue for me, as I am still about half-Catholic, and I count the Episcopal Church as my current spiritual home.

That said, I find myself pretty much agreeing with both Bill and the iMonk.

As Bill notes, it’s absurd for the Catholic archbishop of Miami to assert that Cutie remains bound by his ordination promise (not vow, that’s something different) to live celibately. It was equally ridiculous for the archbishop to assert that Cutie had separated himself from the Catholic Church. Not ridiculous for the same reason–ridiculous because, well, that was the point of being received into the Episcopal Church in the first place.

As the iMonk notes, it’s not a good thing that Cutie broke his promise to live celibately, but the discipline (not doctrine, that’s something different) of priestly celibacy is equally at fault. While I’m somewhat uncomfortable with the disrespect recently shown toward Catholicism I’ve seen online by triumphant Episcopalians, I think this issue cannot be brushed away. I think a great number of Catholics will try to say, “Well, he didn’t live up to his promise, so why should this be construed as a challenge to the discipline?” And there is a contingent of committed anti-Catholics (both liberal and conservative) who see every moral failure within Catholicism as a derivative of its distinctive teachings.* I don’t, by and large, agree with this group. Sometimes outliers are outliers; many individual cases of people failing to meet the Catholic Church’s more stringent standards are in fact individual, local, or regional failures. Cutie, however, provides a powerful example of how problematic celibacy is for the Catholic Church.

Think of it this way: thousands or millions of people will now assume that this man is morally bankrupt for having a family.

I know that statement seems to obviate his very real moral failure, but I don’t mean to. The priesthood entails a promise that is akin to marriage, and it’s just as binding, even from my perspective. He should have sought to laicize himself first, then exited the Catholic Church if he still felt called to ordained ministry. But I contend that he should not have had to make that choice, and it’s hugely disturbing to me that his family–that being a husband and father–is a source of scandal.

That, to me, is the bottom line: I have always opposed the continued discipline of mandatory priestly celibacy–including when I was in communion with the Catholic Church–because it devalues family life. I know that Christopher West and other Theology of the Body acolytes (both clerical and lay) will contradict me, say that father- and motherhood are equal to the celibate, ordained clergy, but I simply don’t buy it. The language of vocation at the parish level in the Catholic Church is that the priesthood is for those who want to give themselves fully to God–as if people who are married cannot. That the priesthood is for those who are called out of the world to minister–as if people who are married cannot. It’s the theology at the parish level that matters, not the abstractions at the magisterial level, and even the magisterial teaching shares many of these assumptions.

So I welcome Cutie into the communion that I share in every week. I welcome him because he’s a sinner, like me, who needs grace. I hope he finds it in his new spiritual home.

–

*And there is an proportionally equivalent contingent of conservative Catholics who claim that every moral failure within Catholicism supports its distinctive teachings. Eg, the claim by some that the priestly abuse scandals were the result of liberal teaching on sexuality in general and birth control in particular.

I first read Brennan Manning’s The Ragamuffin Gospel when I was still a more-or-less devoted-but-frustrated Catholic, unknowingly leaning toward the emergent church. I didn’t know then why I liked it so much, and I think the reason I didn’t know is because I was an intellectual Catholic or a Catholic intellectual, 1 of the 2. Still not entirely sure when I gave up and stopped being Catholic, but I guess I could do no other, at some point. Anyway, back to the topic sentence: I read it and absorbed the basic message, because my devotion to Rich Mullins (which persists to this day) prepared me to receive it. Here is said basic message:

When I get honest, I admit that I am a bundle of paradoxes. I believe and I doubt, I hope and get discouraged, I love and I hate, I feel bad about feeling good, I feel guilty about not feeling guilty. I am trusting and suspicious. I am honest and I still play games. Aristotle said [and, if I may interject, so did Swift] I am a rational animal; I say I am an angel with an incredible capacity for beer.

To live by grace means to acknowledge my whole life story, the light side and the dark. In admitting my shadow side, I learn who I am and what God’s grace means. As Thomas Merton put it, “A saint is not someone who is good but who experiences the goodness of God.” (25)

Here is what I could not understand at the time: the experience of God and the doctrine of Christianity are 2 different things. The doctrine of sanctification (or justification), both Catholic and Protestant flavors, does its best to convince people that once they’ve done X, they are saved and no longer have to deal with the guilt of sin. Confession to a priest or to God clears it up, and we can be happy again. Hell, it might even get easier along the way.

Didn’t you know that virtue is formed purely by good habits?

Yeah, call me when that works out for you.

And the postmodern snark returns. I’m not really as angry as my snark implies, but I’m just now understanding how screwed up I can be. I continue to believe that religious literacy is essential, and I’m not impressed with churches that don’t teach their doctrine, including, yes, their very own doctrine of sanctification (or justification). But Manning and other wily postmoderns (ha!) have shown me, over several years, that knowing a doctrine does not necessarily lead to the assurance of salvation or the removal of guilt, even if the doctrine itself is actually true (which I do not dispute).

I know this is true because I’ve never had a spiritual experience while reading a doctrinal work. This includes works of mysticism (eg, St. Augustine’s Confessions and St. Theresa of Avila’s Autobiography). But I felt an overwhelming, almost out-of-body connection to the following sentences from Douglas Coupland’s Life After God:

My secret is that I need God—that I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem to be capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love. (359)

Life After God is an exploration of what happens to a generation (mine) when the assumption God is removed from it by the previous generation. Coupland charts the resulting spiritual emptiness and hunger for satisfying spirituality. I came to understand religion relatively late in my life (but not necessarily late for my generation); I feel I am only now beginning to understand God, and it’s been through unorthodox experiences initiated by artistic expression. When I read Coupland, I understood my brokenness better than before, and I wouldn’t have gained that understanding via a lecture on original sin.

This is why discerning bloggers and Truly Reformed pundits will always miss the point when reading Manning. I don’t think doctrine is unimportant, and I don’t think Manning does either. He’s a Catholic mystic at heart (stole that from iMonk), which means that he’s absorbed the portions of doctrine worth keeping and expresses it artistically. His books aren’t arguments for Grace, they’re examples of Grace working through a broken sinner to reach other broken sinners, all of whom don’t need convincing that they’re sick and can’t make it alone. They need to be shown.

–

Coupland, Douglas. Life After God. New York: Washington Square, 2005.

Manning, Brennan. The Ragmamuffin Gospel. Sisters, OR: Multnomah, 2005.

I went to a discussion held by a Catholic young adult group recently, and the topic was evangelism.  There were some good insights, but I came away less sure about the topic than I have been in the past.

A scene from my past gave me some insight into this subject, though.

In high school, there was one Mormon guy in my grade.  Well, there might have been others, but I only knew one who was quite definitely Mormon.  I knew because he talked about it to people, not in a bragging way but the way you might talk about your family life or your favorite TV show–it was part of his life, and other people knew it was part of his life.  It never occurred to me until recently that he actually suffered for his faith, though.  And he did, in terms of social stature, in ways that I can only see after over 10 years of retrospection.  I remember two incidents in particular.

First, he took up our history teacher’s offer to leave the class when we were watching a sexually explicit scene from Legends of the Fall.  He left to snickers from his classmates.  I don’t remember his comportment while leaving the room.  But here’s the funny thing: he didn’t have to do that.  The teacher didn’t require us to obtain parent signatures.  I don’t think my parents ever knew, because I don’t remember telling them.  This was unusual at my school–when we watched Schindler’s List in another history class, every student was required to obtain a release from parents.  But in this instance, when his parents wouldn’t know–only he would know–he chose to leave the class, regardless of what other people thought.

Second, there was the poll he took of other guys that several of us uncomfortable.  As part of a social studies project, he asked guys randomly if they masturbated.  He recorded the yes or no answer.  He elicited weird looks, particularly because none of us expected that he would ever mention sex to anyone else.  We all figured him for a prude.  And if we would have asked ourselves why he was conducting the poll, we might have assumed he was being judgmental.  But that would have been dishonest of us, because after the initial shocked reaction, he always said, “Come on, everyone does it,” implying, of course, that so did he.  This wasn’t an attempt to get blackmail but an honest, straightforward, intellectual inquiry into the sexual mores of his classmates.  He was curious to find out what his classmates honestly thought, and he followed that interest to its most uncomfortable extent, for us anyway.  It’s tough to fit this into the evangelism model, and I realize it’s stretched.  But I see it this way: we all knew he was Mormon, and we all had some perception of his church as morally repressive.  But he defied our expectations not by contradicting his faith; rather, he explored what the rest of us thought and felt without judgment or malice.

From talking about his faith plainly to leaving the room for an R-rated movie to inquiring about his peers’ sexual assumptions, this guy got something right about living God’s word in the world, without pretension or apology.  There’s something to be said for that.  I guess I’m saying it now, over 10 years later.

This is a short note, and I’m sure the one preacher (that I know of) who reads this blog doesn’t have this issue: but I have to say that it bothers me how little I hear the story of the text in a sermon.

I can’t count how many sermons I’ve heard wherein the preacher starts with the text(s) of the day and moves on to

• a theological concept
• a slice-of-life story
• a saint story
• a reference to vapid, superficial entertainment (think of all those who thought it made them “hip” to somewhat-praise The Da Vinci Code from the pulpit)

The 1972 documentary Marjoe follows Marjoe Gortner as he takes the viewer behind the scenes of the Pentecostal tent revival circuit.  That description is paraphrased from the IMDB plot summary, and it doesn’t even approach a good description of the film.  Marjoe is part character study, part investigative journalism.  We get a close-up view of Gortner’s strange life, from his manipulation by his parents to be the “youngest ordained preacher” at 4 years old to his hippie lifestyle as he presented himself to congregations as a mature man of the cloth.  At the same time, the filmmakers show candid conversations with high-profile pastors as they count money and talk about their extensive foreign properties.  The brilliance of the film is the way these two purposes interact–we are inclined by the corruption we see behind the stages of the revival tents to perceive Marjoe as heroic but we are disturbed by his character flaws and blatant self-interest.

There is a certain segment of Christianity in general and in any denomination that seeks to reduce charges of sinfulness and corruption–Catholic Answers is famous for this, as demonstrated in its tract, “The Inquisition” (filed, notably, under “Anti-Catholicism”).  That segment of Christians and Pentecostals would be hard pressed to work around Marjoe; the film doesn’t show anyone other than Marjoe admitting to using evangelism as a business, but all the evidence is there.  This is shown marvelously when Marjoe guest-preaches and exhorts the congregation to make a “donation” for handkerchiefs that offer spiritual benefit.  During the laying-of-hands segment after his sermon, he and the lead preacher go into a back room and count money.  The film cuts between the counting of money and the Spirit-stricken congregation–then, the preacher hands Marjoe a stack of cash.  For some, this is evidence enough that Christianity has always been about collecting money from the less fortunate, but I think the corruption is more subtle than that.  What the filmmakers have shown is a symbiotic relationship; the guest preacher, especially a celebrity like Marjoe, brings in a crowd who is willing to part with some cash.  That’s why the guest preacher gets a “cut,” and that’s the problem.  An honorarium is a set amount, so the guest preacher is not impelled to force further payment; but the corrupt lead pastor brings in Marjoe hoping he’ll convince the congregation, explicitly or implicitly, to give abundantly and then rewards his guest according to the results.  It is the subtlety of this corruption that convinces me it is both ingrained and widespread.  Marjoe is, therefore, not a film about a select group of nasty preachers and their enablers.  Rather, it is about a corruption that reigned and continues to reign in American Pentecostalism (witness Senator Grassley’s investigation of six televangelists).

But corruption mainly occupies the first third or so of the film–the rest is about Marjoe.  We pity him at the beginning as scenes of his preaching at four and five years old are interspersed with images of him in his mid-twenties, when the film was shot.  He tells us that he was programmed by his parents to preach for money, and we believe him.  What’s more, I think the filmmakers revealed the extent of his programming, though unwittingly.  I think that the filmmakers, good skeptics that they are, believed that just showing a five-year-old claiming to be a preacher would be evidence enough of such programming, but their audience includes believers in miracles.  Who is to say that God may not call a young child and gift him with inspiration?  But that supposition is refuted before we even hear from grown-up Marjoe, when four-or-five-year-old Marjoe declares that he is convinced–not he believes–that the Bible is the Word of God.  The line between conviction and belief is fuzzy at times, but few (if any) four-or-five-year-olds would have the intellectual capacity to honestly assess the evidence and come away convinced in the veracity of Scripture.

As the film examines the grown-up Marjoe, our pity doesn’t fade entirely, though it is significantly complicated.  The filmmakers are shown in the film, laughing along as Marjoe makes fun of the congregants that he hoodwinks, but there is no direct commentary or voiceovers from them.  After a couple of scenes in the beginning, the filmmakers disappear from the film altogether, lending the film’s focus entirely to its titular subject.  We see Marjoe at his best and worst–he claims he is “over” his parents’ manipulation of him because he believes they will receive bad karma as a result.  Obviously, Marjoe is emotionally shallow to still want his parents to suffer and spiritually shallow enough to believe in a complex Hindu principle without any education in that religion.  Later, we see him justify the film’s morally ambiguous setup–no one, including his father at one point, knows the film is an expose or that Marjoe no longer believes in what he preaches.  He’s “bad, but not evil,” and he wonders aloud what he’ll do afterward.  He mentions he would like to go into film, and we should all raise an eyebrow at that point.  Clearly, there are other motives than journalistic honesty at work in the film.  In short, Marjoe is shown as a human being with good traits and bad (but not evil) traits.

Given the film’s emphasis on corruption and on Marjoe, one wonders why there is so much footage of the revivals, on the performance of the preachers and the crowd interaction and reaction.  I suspect there is a strong element of debunking that’s intended here; maybe, like Marjoe, the filmmakers are convinced that the “work of the Spirit” in Pentecostal congregations is mostly the result of a warped crowd mentality.  But I think there’s something more going on, because the filmmakers do not just focus on the parts he tells them to; they fix the camera after they’ve been touched or “baptized in the spirit.”  They show the choirs dancing without suggestion from the pulpit and the people along with them.  Marjoe’s girlfriend states on camera that she can’t believe that the crowd, deep down, believes they are having a genuine spiritual experience, and Marjoe reduces revivals to the same status as rock concerts (a way of “getting off”).  So it seems that the filmmakers are concerned with a question that Marjoe dismisses: can we take these spiritual experiences seriously?  Even if the ethical questions are silenced (they aren’t in the film, but let’s pretend they are for a moment), the question of individual authenticity remains.  The congregation believes Marjoe, believes in God’s power to heal, and the congregants are never presented as stupid or as dupes.  They are presented as they are, and extensively so.  The film left me wondering about these congregants, whether they would feel cheated or satisfied that God had spoken to them, somehow.  That I couldn’t get them out of my mind, that I couldn’t resolve them away with theological or psychological explanations, is an indication of that Marjoe succeeds, and succeeds abundantly.

A while ago, I read Brian D. McLaren’s A Generous Orthodoxy as a sort of theological test. Could I support his values and, by extension, the emergent church as a whole? In the end, my faith decisions were determined by community rather than theology–almost always a better determinant. McLaren’s book made me think a great deal about a lot of important issues, but I’m not sure I can give it as enthusiastic an endorsement as, say, Brennan Manning’s The Ragamuffin Gospel.

I should say, first, that I think McLaren’s book is well-written, and that is not ordinarily a qualification for writing a Christian book. Whether academic or not, most books published by Christian publishing houses are painful to read for a variety of qualitative reasons that I won’t go into here. So it is no small thing to say that McLaren’s writing style is lively, informative, passionate, and rarely cheesy. He avoids exclamation points (the most overused punctuation mark in Christian literature) and says exactly what he means.

And because he’s so clear about what he means, there’s a lot to think about after finishing the book. I think the first, most important point to make about McLaren’s theology in this book is that it’s not established. He’s not laying down a theological system or a way to structure a church. Rather, he’s asking the most important question facing the modern Church–do our practices and beliefs serve the church (small c) or the Gospel? Are we so concerned with being Christians (i.e., operating within a particular denominational identity to the exclusion of others) that we aren’t doing the sorts of things that exemplar Christians would do?

McLaren highlights this point by distinguishing orthodoxy from orthopraxis. He does not say that orthodoxy is unimportant (it is, after all, in the title of the book), and he does not propose abandoning theological truth (or, rather, Truth). He proposes instead that we tie our conception of orthodoxy to the resulting orthopraxy, or lack thereof. If a theological system does not lead us to do the sorts of things Jesus would want us to do–serving the poor, serving our neighbors, building stable communities–then it’s not worth the effort. Insular churches that speak a great deal about what a Christian should be without any connection to their community and the world at large are of little value, in the terms that McLaren sets. Thus, a “generous” orthodoxy is one that leads to orthopraxy; it is an orthodoxy that demands that Christians be Christians.

This point is the strongest in the book because it is so self-evident, though the results do not necessarily favor either side. One could point, for example, to the public vilification of homosexuals by religious and political leaders as failed theology. Certainly, the pop theology of conservative Christianity that treats these people as subhuman is a failure both for Christians and for the world. But we are also led to ask about the astonishing rise in priestly vocations in dioceses that uphold traditional Catholic orthodoxy–which includes relatively conservative teachings on sexuality. Clearly, these are separate teachings, the former based on hate and grand-standing and the latter based in a complex theological framework (that, in my view anyway, has some serious problems). We can complain about the failures in charity by protesters and politicians, but we must also ask why conservative men and women are drawn to a lifetime of service. It’s a terribly complex issue, and I certainly can’t resolve it. It’s a credit to McLaren that he doesn’t try to resolve it either–again, his work is about setting some general foundations for a “new kind of Christian.”

It is this “new kind of Christian” idea, though, that is (for me, anyway) the weakest point he makes. It’s worth pointing out that he does not believe in reducing all Christianity to “mere Christianity;” instead, he attempts to take from each Christian tradition what will serve a generous orthodoxy in the terms he has defined. I’m not sure if the term has been coined, but I see him as a theological integrationalist. It’s a bit difficult to describe unless you go to an emergent church with this idea. I’ve been to two–Ecclesia in Houston and Mosaic (my current home church) in Austin. At Ecclesia, you’ll see iconography, and at Mosaic, you’ll see Catholic devotional candles; at both, you’ll see PowerPoint presentations and rock-alternative music. Attendees and staff wear whatever they’re wearing. At Mosaic, the liturgical seasons are marked, especially Advent and Lent; Catholic call and response (”The Lord be with you. And also with you.”) also figures prominently here. International and community issues figure prominently in nearly every sermon, and Mosaic in particular is opposed to rampant commercialization. The churches are sometimes called interdenominational rather than nondenominational because they take from a variety of traditions. It’s an exciting thing to be a part of.

But as much as I support the efforts of Mosaic and Ecclesia to bridge the gap between Protestantism and the older traditions of Catholicism and Orthodoxy, I’m not sure I agree with McLaren’s take on it. I think the main problem is that he doesn’t appreciate the importance of difference–because even Mosaic asserts its strong Baptist roots. This leads him to conclude that evangelism in non-Christian areas of the world should seek make the people “followers of Jesus” while retaining their identities as Hindus or Muslims or whatever. As if you could be both–but it sort of makes sense because the subtitle to A Generous Orthodoxy* states that he believes himself to be nearly every type of Christian at once.

The problem is, of course, that you can’t be every kind of Christian at once, as hard as you try. Mosaic may incorporate Benedictine and Franciscan spirituality into its idea of orthodoxy and orthopraxy, but it has not ceased to be Baptist. To try to escape the fragmentation of Christianity is an illusion. We can try to get around it, but we can’t deny it. If these separations are so profound, how can we expect or hope for people of other religions to be both one of us and one of them at the same time? McLaren dreams big, but this point is the greatest flaw in his argument.

But then again, it really isn’t an argument, is it? It’s more of a meditation with internal arguments about what Christianity is and should be. McLaren is not a rule-setting postmodern, the type that demands that everything be changed because Derrida said so. He’s not a hippie grown up to pastor a church where they sit around and talk about helping the poor without actually doing anything. He’s a passionate, reasonable Christian and that perspective shines through every page of A Generous Orthodoxy, even those that I take exception to.

*Why I Am a Missional, evangelical, Post/Protestant, Liberal/Conservative, Mystical/Poetic, Biblical, Charismatic/Contemplative, Fundamentalist/Calvinist, Anabaptist/Anglican, Methodist, catholic, Green, Incarnational, Depressed-Yet-Hopeful, Emergent, Unfinished Christian (On the title page, the commas are plus signs.)

I remember the first time I read Shakespeare.  It was Romeo and Juliet, in junior high, in the wake of the awful Baz Luhrman adaptation.  Over the years, I have grown to hate the perception of the play as romance (it is, after all, a tragedy), but the experience was valuable nonetheless–it was the first time I noticed artificial dialogue.  That is not to say unrealistic dialogue or awkward dialogue, but dialogue that noticeably differs from regular speech patterns to make an artistic point.

I think we’re mostly used to realistic dialogue, which is itself a misnomer because all speech is (or should be) condensed and enhanced when it is translated into an artistic medium.  Stephen King and Elmore Leonard are authors that come to mind–they take speech patterns of a group of people (say, Mainers and crime bosses) and imitate them effectively in novel form.  The effect is to make the characters believable as regular people; the characters are artistic creations, yes, but we generally need some connection with them.

Artificial dialogue is much more difficult.  Few people spoke like Shakespeare’s characters, even the clowns, but they’re never flat or unrealistic.  Prospero’s rage and Romeo’s damned love* are completely believable within the space of the plays.  The artificial dialogue, with its brilliant turns of phrase and poetic rhythm, succeeds in probing the deepest parts of our selves, the parts of our selves  that we hide in what we say to others.  Artificial dialogue is almost always** more effective at probing the human self than realistic dialogue, but is significantly harder to pull off.  Most of the time, the result is hopeless pretense.

I’ve lately been noticing artificial dialogue in my reading and viewing.  I’ve been reading Douglas Coupland’s first novel, Generation X (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1991) and I recently saw John August’s directorial debut, The Nines.  I haven’t finished Coupland’s novel, but the first third or so epitomizes the ideas of the generation he’s examining without actually mimicking its speech patterns.  A great deal of it is realistic, but much of it is not:

Well, Dag.  I see a farmer in Russian, and he’s driving a tractor in a wheat field, but the sunlight’s ogne bad on him–like the fadedness of a black-and-white picture in an old Life magazine.  And another strange phnomenon has happened, too: rather than sunbeams, the sun has begun to project the odor of old Life magazines instead, and the odor is killing the crops. (7)

What amazes me about passages like this is that Coupland maintains a tension between showing the spirit of the generation (narratives, impressions, doubts) without the pretense and hesitation of the generation’s actual speech patterns.  His characters’ speeches to each other are highly poetic and deeply insightful, but only because they don’t actually represent reality.

I’ll blog about The Nines later on.  Any other examples you can think of?

*Note: Not Romeo’s sincere, mature love but his damned love–damned from the start because he’s still a boy infatuated with the pretty women around him.  Juliet is much the same.  I’d even be willing to make the case that the impulse driving them together is primarily sexual and only secondarily emotional.  “Star-crossed lovers” is a deeply ironic phrase, and it is a misreading to interpret it as straightforward (as is supposed by the popular culture markers surrounding the play).

**I would make an exception for cultures in which people generally say what they mean.  Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, a book I have recently fallen in love with, uses highly realistic yet brilliantly poetic dialogue because the culture she’s examining airs its anxieties out loud.

I’m not a theologian, not even a lay theologian, but I’ve been interested in a while in how Christians say things. Take them for what they’re worth:

• Bible–I hate this word, possibly because it’s so overused in Christian discourse, partly because it gives the image of one cohesive work. I prefer Scriptures, with the appropriate adjective (see next bullet), because the term indicates multiple documents collected for a purpose.
• Testament–I don’t like the term “Old Testament,” except in literary or historical discourse. In modern religious discourse, I’d prefer we use the term “Hebrew Scriptures.” “Old Testament” is at best paternalistic and at worst disrespectful. For me, “Old Testament” is only acceptable when discussing historical theology; for example, when we’re talking about apologetics based primarily on typology, it wouldn’t be accurate to discuss the apologists’ opinion of the “Hebrew Scriptures” because those Scriptures are primarily used to prove the truth of Christianity. We would be beholden to the apologists’ terms, not our own.Similarly, I prefer “Christian Scriptures” to “New Testament,” mostly for symmetry. I dislike the terms, “First Testament” and “Second Testament” that are being used by some publishers because they set up the question, “Is there a third testament? A fourth?”
• Apocrypha/Deuterocanonicals–You’ll only see “Deuterocanonical” in Catholic and Orthodox discourse because it’s a much kinder term than “Apocrypha” for the books of the Hebrew Scriptures that have been excluded from the canon by Jews and most Protestants. But if we shift to “Apocrypha,” we run into an interesting problem–how expansive is that term? I suppose we can distinguish the Apocrypha (uppercase) from apocryphal writings (lowercase). The latter term would include gnostic writings and various others deemed heretical or noncanonical by the Church Fathers. Even with this distinction, I almost always ask myself “which apocrypha?” when I see that term used. My sympathy is with “Deuterocanonical” when referring to works that have been canonized by some branches of Christianity and “apocrypha” when referring to works that haven’t been canonized by any. But I think that’s more or less a lost cause at this point. Such is life.
• Denomination–I was once told that Catholicism is a denomination, and that set me to thinking about what the proper term is. In my conception of the Church, there are three branches: Catholicism, Orthodoxy (capital “O”), and Protestantism. I suppose you could restrict Protestantism to mainline churches and separate off Evangelicalism and Charismatic Christianity. I’m not in favor of that, though, because there’s too much overlap; I prefer Protestantism as one branch. But I digress.Within branches, I would separate groups according to the preferred lingo of its members. Thus, Catholicism has rites; Orthodoxy has rites and churches; and Protestantism has denominations, congregations, and conferences. I suppose you could make the case for dioceses and eparchies being equivalent to denominations, but I wouldn’t make that case. Dioceses and eparchies mostly exist as administrative divisions.

  Returning to the issue of overlap, I’d like to point out that my neat division is not perfect. Where does one place the Polish National Church (broke off from the American Catholic Church over property rights)? I suppose you could include radical traditionalists in Catholicism, but I think it’d be difficult to argue that the Polish National Church belongs in that branch when it self-styles itself as a denomination. But can it be placed in Protestantism? And what about Catholic Charismatics? They have a foot in Catholicism and a foot in Pentecostalism (which would fall under my Protestant branch). Just goes to show that any division of parts within Christianity fails in the end.

We have tickets for the 11:50 showing of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and we may catch a glimpse of the Remus Lupins before the event. I must say that although I’m not a Potterhead (you won’t see me costuming for any book, no way, no how), Pottermania is rather contagious. I think I’ve taken to it so well because it’s mania over a literary universe. It’s not like The Da Vinci Code (based on myths and half-truths) or Left Behind (based on bad writing and bad eschatology)–those enamored by Rowling’s novels do not pretend that the series has any truth to it. People are into Harry Potter because the books are fun to read, the movies are fun to watch, and the universe is complex enough to discuss.

The very nature of the fan base, in fact, refutes the prudish religious attacks on the books. This is not a people who are practicing spells on each other or cursing others; this is a people who really want the answers to questions that are, in the end, meaningless. Is Snape good or evil? Will Harry snuff it, and will he take Voldemort down with him? Do McGonagall and Dumbledore have a secret affair? Any proper examination of the Harry Potter fan base must take this into account: though they may take it too far sometimes, these people are not taking these books seriously. It’s entertainment they’re after, not deep truths.

So I look forward to enjoying Harry Potter the Fifth with other fans, reveling in unreality for two hours and hoping to God that I can wake up in time for work tomorrow morning.