recent reading: theology in the context of world christianity

I think this is the last of these for now, though of course if I don't blog about something else before the next relevant book I finish reading, that will prove wrong.

Theology in the Context of World Christianity:

This is a book for theology students, and Tennent is not only an orthodox Christian -- which I am not, at least in some respects that orthodox Christians would find important -- he is a relatively conservative one, and his skepticism where progressive Christianity is concerned is frequently clear. Nevertheless, that doesn't take anything away from the many valid points he has to make about the growth of Christianity in what this book calls the "Majority World," which you may more familiarly know as the Third World and which in my encyclopedia work is often called the Global South.

I've blogged about this book before, last week. Moving on from there:

"These new Christians believe the Bible [which is to say, incline more toward literalism and authoritarianism], are Christ-centered, and are supernaturalistic ... in contrast to their Western counterparts, they have 'a much greater respect for the authority of scripture' and 'a special interest in supernatural elements of scripture, such as miracles, visions, and healings.' They also believe in the 'continuing power of prophecy.'"

While on the one hand this rise sounds similar to the religious revivalism that punctuated American religious history until culminating in the takeover of American Protestantism by charismatic, Pentecostal, evangelical, and fundamentalist elements, the important context here is that these are "revived" Christians, these are converted Christians, Christians living in cultures much more religiously pluralistic than the United States, Christians who have chosen this flavor of Christianity over other religions, rather than simply over other flavors of Christianity. The religious history of the United States is so incredibly and improbably diverse within the bounds of Judeo-Christianity that it is easy for Americans to lose sight of how different Christian life is when you have, instead, many religions and fewer variations within Christianity.

"Five trends in the theology of Majority World Christians:

"1: These believers accept the authority of Scripture and, by Western standards, hold a theology considered conservative, orthodox, and traditionalist;

"2: Majority World Christians are more likely to be morally and ethically conservative;"

And yet ...

"3: These new, younger churches are more likely to be sensitive to the Christian responsibility to address issues related to poverty and social justice;

"4: These younger churches are experienced at articulating the uniqueness of the gospel in the midst of religious pluralism;

"5: Majority World Christians are more likely to grasp the corporate (not just individualistic) dimensions of the teachings of the New Testament."

"These younger churches are experienced at articulating the gospel in the midst of religious pluralism. Many of the younger churches are springing up within the larger context of the sometimes dominating presence of some non-Christian religion, such as Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism. ... They often approach the continuities with less defensiveness while, at the same time, are surprisingly frank and candid about the glaring discontinuities that inevitably arise when other religions fail to recognize the true dignity of Jesus Christ."

"Many of these new Christians cannot be easily categorized under any of the traditional and familiar headings of Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Protestant. These Christians had no part in the European 'protest,' so it is difficult to call them Protestant. They are not related to the pope or the magisterium in Rome, so it is difficult to call them Roman Catholic. They are not submitted to the authority of any of the Eastern patriarchs, so it is difficult to call them Eastern Orthodox."

To be fair, this is true for many, many Christian movements in the United States from the 19th century onward, with the Latter Day Saints, 7th Day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Christian Scientists, and aforementioned fundamentalists and evangelical movements as the obvious examples. Nevertheless there is a good point to be made here, it has just been worded poorly: these younger "Majority World" churches are in many cases independent or have only tenuous formal connections to western ecclesiastical organizations.

"The delegates to the Council of Nicea and the Council of Chalcedon were seeking to be faithful to the hundreds of Christological 'pieces' found in the texts of Scriptures. It was their unenviable task to put the whole 'picture' of Christ together for the very first time in such a way as to find a perfect match for every piece. ... The proceedings of these councils did more to declare which pieces were not true pieces of the puzzle and should be discarded, then to provide a final, definitive statement of Christology that would silence all future discussions."

First of all, see what I mean about orthodox Christianities defining themselves by opposition, vis-a-vis what I mentioned in passing in my Qur'an in Conversation post? Second, this is mainly a reminder to myself to expand my reading to include more in-depth reading about the Council of Chalcedon, which lies just outside the time period I have usually focused on.

"Another example is reflected in the insightful question about Chalcedon raised by Millard Erickson: 'How do we integrate and understand a Christology 'from above' with a Christology 'from below'? In other words, the Council of Chalcedon was looking at the Christological puzzle from the upper side, that is, from the divine perspective of God's initiative in becoming a man. They did not deliberate or discuss how the incarnation is understood from the perspective of, for example, fifth-century Persian Christians who, at the time of this council, were being persecuted for their faith in Christ.

"Even these few examples reveal two important insights about Chalcedonian Christology. First, even if we accept, as the sensus communis has, that every single piece Chalcedon placed into the Christological puzzle was a perfect fit and every single piece they rejected was truly worth rejecting, we must still recognize that the puzzle is much bigger than Chalcedon or any other council could fully tackle. Second, as it turns out, the puzzle is more complex than an ordinary one because each piece of the puzzle seems to have two sides: an 'upper side' revealing God's perspective on Christ (eternality, Trinity, Son of God, etc) and an 'under side' revealing the human perspective on Christ (teacher, healer, friend of sinners, etc)."

"African Christology tends to be more holistic in the way it integrates the person and work of Christ. Its view of the person of Christ is constantly informed by what Christ has accomplished in history and what he continues to do in the world. There is a deep concern in African Christology to demonstrate that Christ is no stranger to the practical realities of poverty, illiteracy, ethnic tensions, colonialism, dictatorship, illness, disenfranchisement, and suffering, all of which Pobee and Akinade have aptly called Africa's 'multiheaded hydra.'"

"The second implication of Africans' starting their Christology 'from below' is that its overall approach is more holistic and integrative in explaining how the person and work of Christ apply to the whole of African life. ... The early preaching [by European missionaries] did not, for example, point out that Jesus was Lord of the crops or the one who provided protection during dangerous journeys or who assisted in the safe birth of a new baby. The nineteenth-century missionaries did not generally come from Christian traditions that practiced casting out demons or were accustomed to praying for God to bring in the crops, except perhaps during times of extreme drought. In short, the Jesus Christ who was preached was often a truncated Christ, not measuring up fully to the biblical picture of Jesus's life, work, and ministry."

"The second distinctive feature of African Christology is its conscious awareness of traditional Christological formulations from the West. Unlike Western theologians who often write in isolation from the wider global context, African theologians are keenly aware of the historic Western Christological focus on precise philosophical and metaphysical questions concerning the person of Christ. It is true that some African theologians are critical of the way the councils produced 'metaphysical rather than biblically functional images of Jesus,' or complain that the historic formulations are 'static,' and fail to 'touch the souls' of Africans or relate to the 'concrete lives of people.' But the overall tenor of African Christology is marked by a profound respect for historic Christian confessions.

"In fact, John Pobee encourages emerging African theologians to listen carefully to those who have gone before us so that we 'do not go hopelessly wrong.' He reminds Africans that they are not 'starting from scratch,' but that they must write in the context of the depositum fidei that should inform all African Christology. John Onai-yekan calls the classical formulations 'valid reference points' and argues that every African Christian should 'consider this classical Christology part of the common theological patrimony of the Church, of which we are full-fledged members.'"

Some of this can sound a little paternalistic, like the concern here is to make sure that new Christians don't "accidentally" stray from orthodoxy and wind up with a Christianity that's too far removed from western Christianity, but to be fair, it is true that in two thousand years of Christian history, chances are pretty good that past theologians have addressed -- and disputed -- and countered -- and doubled down on -- just about every question you can think of, and that there is little point in reinventing the wheel without at least consulting everybody else's wheel blueprints first. Even so, after reading a chapter on African Christology by a non-African, I sort of feel obligated to read some African theology by an actual African theologian.

Moving on from Africa:

"... two important branches of Vaishnava Hinduism are the Vadagalais and the Tengalais. The Tengalais teach that salvation comes through a total surrender to the sovereignty of Lord Vishnu and a full and complete trust in his bestowal of unmerited grace. Being saved and surrendering to God is like a young kitten totally dependent on its mother. We have all observed how a mother cat will pick up her kitten with her mouth ... as it hangs helplessly and in complete trust. The Tengalais say that the baby kitten is the perfect picture of grace ... so the devotee must totally surrender to the will of Lord Vishnu.

"In contrast, the Vadagalais teach that salvation depends on some exercise of our human will and our participation with God in his sovereign act of grace. Rather than a kitten, they use the analogy of the baby monkey. A baby monkey must actively cling to its mother as the mother moves around for food or shelter or seeks safety. The baby monkey is, for the Vadagalais, the picture of our participation with God in his sovereign work."

And some points about the Holy Spirit, in a chapter about the rapid growth of Pentecostalism in historically Catholic Latin America:

"This ambiguity [of the Holy Spirit] and neutrality is reflected in the Apostles' Creed (which is probably based on the earlier second-century Roman Creed) and the original Nicene Creed of AD 325, which simply states, 'We believe in the Holy Spirit,' without further commentary. In 381, a second ecumenical council met in Constantinople. The further deliberations on the Holy Spirit led the council to amplify and clarify the faith of the Nicene Creed so that it unequivocally declared the deity of the Holy Spirit. The Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed declares,

"'We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life, who proceedeth from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified, who spoke by the prophets.'"

"Because the ecumenical discussions about the Holy Spirit were focused primarily on its deity and relationship within the Trinity, there was a serious neglect of a full development of its work. Indeed, William Menzies points out that 'the ancient church from the second century through the ninth century was almost totally preoccupied with questions pertaining to the identity of Jesus Christ, so that what was said of the Holy Spirit was largely an appendage to theology, and was limited largely to ontology, the Being of God within his inter-trinitarian relationships.' That remained largely unchanged during medieval scholarship."

For context, the Holy Spirit is the source of "gifts of the spirit," i.e. speaking in tongues, prophecy, the casting out of demons, "faith healing," and the other distinctive features of Pentecostalism. There is a sense -- and this is me saying this, not Tennent -- in which what happened here is that Trinitarianism was established but the role of the Holy Spirit was so ill-defined (especially in Protestantism, which largely lacks a distinctive vigorous theology of the Trinity but usually preserves the concept of the Trinity) that the Pentecostal movement was able to find this conceptual gap in received Christian thought and wiggle into it, providing Biblical and theological justification for religious activities that are in other respects very foreign to the Christian experience of worship.

"The bhakti movement allows for Hindus to focus their worship on a particular god ... these Jesu bhakta [Jesus-worshiping bhakta] follow an ishta devata theology within Hinduism. The practice of ishta devata allows a person to worship a particular, chosen deity without necessarily denying that other gods exist."

INTERRUPTING BILL SEZ: This is similar, it sounds to me, to the term "monolatry," originally used in reference to classical Greek religious practice but also used in discussions of ancient Jewish religion, specifically the theory that the ancient Jewish religion shifted from the monolatrist worship of El (Yahweh) while acknowledging the existence of gods such as Baal, to a strict monotheism that denies not only the validity of worshiping other gods but the existence of those gods. The textual evidence for this is rampant, and it feeds into an alternate origin story for Israel: because there is no archaeological evidence for an Exodus (and because this lack of evidence is not easy to explain), a popular theory is that Canaan became Israel not through the invasion of Hebrews who had escaped bondage in Egypt, but through internal revolt as Yahwists overthrew non-Yahwists, whether by force or cultural shift.

So that was a total tangent.

"They are, therefore, allowed to focus their worship exclusively on Jesus and yet maintain their cultural and social particularities as Hindus. If asked, they continue to call themselves Hindus. They will not identify themselves as Christian, and many do not attend any church. This unwillingness to identify with the church or with baptism is not due to any shame about following Christ, but to strong cultural associations surrounding the terms ... many Hindus think that to become a Christian means using Western style eating utensils, eating beef, and drinking alcohol ... they do not understand why Christian women no longer wear bangles or participate in popular cultural festivals. In short, even if a Hindu is drawn to Christ, they may find membership in the church or the term Christian repugnant."

There's a longer and more complicated section on people in the Muslim world who, while worshiping Jesus, continue to identify as Muslim, with the note that there is not nearly enough research in this area.

So. Overall a very good overview with lots of things to explore more in the future.

pope francis

I'm not Catholic. I'm not even culturally Catholic really, although the fact that some of my formative years were spent in New Orleans, and my formal education in religious studies began there, is non-trivial. I was raised Congregationalist, which is about as far from Catholicism as you can get in the mainline Protestant denominations -- far from revering the Blessed Virgin Mary, Congregationalists don't even believe the virgin birth happened.

So that's my background. Now let's talk about the dumbass things I have seen people say in response to Pope Francis's visit to the United States.

Chronic migraines have me exasperated with a lot of the stupidity in my field of view; my tone reflects this.

1: Why does everyone care about the pope so much? I'm not even Catholic. Who cares what he says?

Well, you live in the fucking world, chuckles. Open the window and let the air in.

Francis is the spiritual leader to over 1 billion people, about 15% of the world. The Dalai Lama, in comparison, represents 20 million people at the outside. While the Catholic Church is not the political force it once was -- and ever having been that force is a subject of valid criticism -- the Catholic population is both widespread throughout the world and heavily concentrated in some areas, such that Catholic beliefs have significant political influence.

One of the things I will rail against over and over again in this blog is declining religious literacy. Declining religious engagement is a more complicated topic, and one in which I am a hypocrite -- I am not a churchgoer myself and can't fathom becoming one -- but it is definitely implicated in the decline of religious literacy. Religion is a key element of human culture, a key impulse in human nature, and may have been since before biologically modern humans even fucking existed. It doesn't go away just because science overtakes supernaturalism, nor is there reasonable basis to claim that religion depends on or extends supernaturalism.

That's another area for another time too, really, but the point is: the spiritual leader to a seventh of the world is someone whose views influence a great many people, and the views of a great many people are the musculature that bend the shape of the moment of that world that you get to experience, and what the fuck is wrong with you, you stomatous wet turd, that you think you can recuse yourself from caring about what happens in that moment?

If the President of France started making multiple speeches condemning, I don't know, Islamophobia and economic inequality, I would be interested and glad because these are utterances that can improve the world, and while I don't live in the part of the world that would be affected, because I am a living breathing human, I care about the lives lived in other parts of the world.

Francis is an especially newsworthy pope because of the ways he differs from recent predecessors. Though he is absolutely liberal in a Catholic framework, there's no denying that liberalism. Vatican II aside -- and most of its promises and intentions were never followed through, despite its reputation -- the general trend of American religion for the last five or eleven decades has been increasing conservatism and increasing alliance with political conservatism. The evangelicals succeeded in creating a political alliance with Catholics over abortion, which redirected Catholic political efforts traditionally spent on advocating for the poor, the sick, prisoners, and immigrants. (I'm not saying Catholics would not have wasted their time on the pro-life movement without evangelical involvement, don't worry.) Evangelical Protestantism has overtaken mainline Protestantism. In a handful of centuries we have shifted from a country in which church folk spent their time caring for the poor and pressuring the government to provide social services to one in which church folk are mobilized by -- let's call them what they are -- fuckstick evildoers to stop the poor from getting medicine.

So it is a good sign that there is a Pope who echoes the concerns of the Social Gospel, a Pope whose social and political priorities are aligned with what we like to think Catholicism has traditionally been associated with. This is a man with vast resources and vast influence. You have to be a dunce not to give a shit what he thinks.

That brings me to...

2) Fuck this Pope, he hasn't done anything about the sex abuse cover-up, abortion, or female priests.

Those issues are very important to me. There are a host of other concerns people have brought up in criticizing Francis, and I agree with many of those as well, but these seem to be the big ones -- the continued failure to do anything about the Church's orchestrated cover-up of rampant child sexual abuse, the Church's ongoing opposition to abortion, and the way it has dragged its feet on the inevitability of ordaining women as priests. (We are several decades into a severe shortage of priests, and the functional health of the Catholic Church depends on addressing it.)

However.

I voted for Barack Obama twice, in 2008 and 2012. My 2008 vote was predicated on several key issues, apart from being a vote against McCain/Palin: universal healthcare, serious finance reform, serious reform of higher education (including but not limited to the student debt crisis), the closure of Guantanamo Bay, and the de-escalation of our involvement in / instigation of foreign wars. In 2012 I knew I was only going to get one of those things, and voted to re-elect him anyway.

Yes, of course Obama has been a disappointment to progressives -- ironically, obviously, given how much idiot conservatives paint him as a socialist, when he has sadly turned out to be a centrist on most issues. Only some of this can be ascribed to Republican obstructionism. Some areas where he has failed to act pose disastrous consequences if they are not handled by his successor, and other areas simply reflect badly on us as a people.

So too with Francis. Neither Catholic nor non-Catholic voted for him, but that doesn't mean he doesn't represent an alternative to other possible Popes, and just as Obama's race signalled an end to a long-present barrier to entry, so does Francis's Argentinian nationality, which makes him the first Pope from the Americas or the Southern Hemisphere. Given the cultural differences in Catholic concerns throughout the world, this is not a minor thing.

While Francis has not abandoned many of the conservative positions of previous modern popes, he has not placed special emphasis on them either. He fails to give us the answer we want when talking about ordaining women, homosexuality, or birth control, but they're not part of his platform, as it were, either. (Abortion is another matter; his pro-life commitment is clear.) Meanwhile, he has advocated for the poor, condemned wealth inequality and the institutions that keep it in place, reaffirmed the Catholic opposition to the death penalty, reaffirmed evolution's compatibility with Catholic belief, and become the most prominent speaker on the necessity of addressing climate change.

He's a radical, as far as the far right is concerned.

As with Obama, he faces structural issues. I'm not saying that I believe he wishes he could be more progressive than he is. I'm not convinced that's true. But the Catholic Church by its nature moves slowly. Part of the decline of religious literacy -- or one of the factors contributing to it, maybe -- is that people have trouble perceiving in context the behavior of slow-moving institutions. Something as large and as old as the Church cannot pivot as quickly as we did from conservative Bush to centrist Obama any more than an elephant can do cartwheels. Change has to be understood in context and with an eye on the timeline. That's not always a great thing, though it has undoubtedly saved our asses a number of times in the past.

At his first consistory, Francis appointed 18 new cardinals, 16 of whom are young enough to vote in a papal conclave and who will likely be involved in voting for his successor. More than half of those 16 are from Third World countries, reflecting Francis's commitment to inequality and poverty issues. There are pretty good odds that whatever Francis doesn't get done will be followed up by the next pope.