Consider? “How can we sing the songs of the Lord in a foreign land?” “How can we sing the songs of the Lord in a foreign land?” Psalm 137.4 [What follows is based upon my reading of three essays (as well as the Book of Jeremiah) that I believe are critical for anyone, let alone anyone involved with a cultural critique from a denominational perspective, of what passes today for “culture.” The pieces are “On Creative Minorities,” by Jonathan Sacks; “What Would Jeremiah Do?” by Samuel Goldman; and the “Benedict Option,” by Rod Dreher.] The 2015 Concordia Theological Seminary Symposium topics have been posted on the seminary’s website. Under “Lutheran Confessions,” the ominous sounding topic is “Culture: Friend or Foe?” Thus far specific topics and speakers have not been announced, so one may hope-perhaps in an act of self-delusion-that the topics will in fact be timely, that is, actually relevant to the culture of the 21st century and will not simply be a forum in which favorite hobby horses are ridden, and the preaching is done to the cheers of the choir. Further, one may hope that the speakers will actually be knowledgeable in their fields-dare I say even “experts”-and will go beyond the predictably boring and mundane “speeches” given by those seminary professors who believe themselves to be cultural warriors. Finally, one may also hope that this type of topic will not be “Luther-ized,” that is, that it will escape being reduced to a picture book type of catechetical “study” (or a series of theses!): “Luther and Hobby Lobby,” or “Luther and the Gay Saxon” for example. From my perspective, anyone who is invited to speak on this topic should be intimately acquainted with the Book of Jeremiah, for in reality the question asked by the Psalmist is more appropriate (and important) than the question posed by the Symposium. “How can we sing the songs of the Lord in a foreign land?” implies that in fact such songs can indeed be sung, something Jeremiah makes perfectly clear. Even the question, “Culture: Friend or Foe?” begs a negative answer, and presumes that a church or a Christian people cannot sing songs in foreign lands; something which God would take exception with, if the prophet Jeremiah is to be believed. The question can never be asked in such a way as to imply that which is impossible, or, to support the erection of Christian ghettoes (the “Benedict Option”); nor can the answer be found in the presumption of a Christian “majority” for that assumes a power and influence that harkens back in time to (at least) medieval Europe and presumes that there is such a thing as a unified Christian Church (or LCMS polity) which history has taught us that there isn’t. If the question remains strictly at the Symposium level, the result from Lutherans is a circling of the wagons and a collective bashing, bemoaning, and bewailing of countless cultural sins, but with neither good answer nor solution. Paradoxically such a question denies human anthropology, as it confers “life”-not unlike Dr. Frankenstein-to those things that man has done, and in essence is content to argue in the specious realm ambiguities, or the generically Protestant realm of “sin” from the safety of an office. It’s also worth noting that the heaping of burning coals or the laying of blame on others is not something you find in Jeremiah, in fact Nebuchadnezzar is referred to by God as “my servant,” who will even control the “wild animals” (27.6). The “disaster from the north” is coming for a very specific reason, and the fault is not that of something called “society” or “culture,” but very much a repeated disobedience on the part of Israel; people are responsible what will come, not “culture.” To make the argument that CONFESSING CHRIST IN A CONTRARY CULTURE does, namely that “The Church finds itself surrounded by an increasingly anti-Christian culture and society” is true, but what this workshop or others like it won’t address is what I consider to be a core reason why this “attack” takes place, and the answer is the same today as it was for Jeremiah: the church, us, we are the reason for such an assault because we have repeatedly failed in our obedience of God. Perhaps the worst part is that we seem to be so smug in theological sloganeering that we’ve allowed the superficiality of a faith disconnected from scripture and life, a faith based largely upon an ideology to effectively blind us to ourselves. So we move from workshop to workshop, conference to conference, blaming society, demanding to be a majority, demanding that the government acquiesce to our cheapened morality, demanding that God intervene, totally oblivious to any idea that we may have simply “changed our gods,” and this “anti-Christian culture and society” is the result. God may well laugh at even some of the most respected RSO’s within the LCMS. The issue has never been society or culture, but has always been us. The question then really is what the Psalmist asks: “How can we sing the songs of the Lord in a foreign land?” What we in the LCMS need to do is to realize that we have not been able to answer that question effectively, and to do so, requires a monumental shift in how we think and how we perceive ourselves, to say nothing of answering the “why” of our existence in this life. The answers need to be concrete, not littered with Lutheran euphemisms, and there needs to be an actual open discussion of the topic, for far too often we like to presume that our moral/ethical/scriptural view is universal among pastors and laity…it is not. We also must begin to actually believe the scriptures we confess; currently we do not. We continue to seek solutions that are extra-scriptural for a problem that we refuse to see ourselves complicit in.[1] And as Jeremy A. Kee points out “By depending on the law, man has no need to get his hands dirty in the mud that is modern moral and ethical debate. The law says what the law says, and thus ends the debate. The problem with this reality, a problem scarcely acknowledged by modern man, is that such are laws written by men in order to govern. This leaves them as inherently flawed, however well-intentioned, and ultimately destined to failure. Yet it is from such laws that man so very often determines right from wrong. The law has become man’s ethic and his morality. No longer do he measure right and wrong against what has always been held to be just so, but instead he bases right and wrong on a law which, should it become too disagreeable to the population, can be rewritten to reflect an ethic or a morality more to his liking. It is a beautiful system in its craftiness, but terrible in its practicality.” “5 Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. 6 Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease.7 But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” Jeremiah 29.5—7 Jeremiah is arguing that the answer to the Psalmist’s question is “Yes.” According to Sacks, “Jeremiah was introducing into history a highly consequential idea: the idea of a creative minority,” and he is right. Sacks goes on to argue that this possible, though certainly not easy, if “a unique configurations of ideas” are in play. The first: Monotheism, if in fact God was everywhere, then it hardly made a difference which river anyone would sit by; he could be accessed anywhere. The second: Sovereignty of God, because a people may be defeated, may be taken into captivity, may be sold off as slaves, does not mean that their God is also captured, or held hostage, or sold as a slave. Babylon-or in our case “culture”-was merely an instrument of God’s displeasure. Defeat of a people does not mean defeat of a God. Finally: God is faithful, that is, no matter what may happen, God will keep his covenant with Israel (or us). So according to Sacks (and Jeremiah) “You can be a minority, living in a country whose religion, culture, and legal system are not your own, and yet sustain your identity, live your faith, and contribute to the common good, exactly as Jeremiah said. It isn’t easy. It demands a complex finessing of identities. It involves a willingness to live in a state of cognitive dissonance. It isn’t for the fainthearted. But it is creative.” (Then) Cardinal Ratzinger would also agree. The question for the workshop/Symposium attendee is the reversibility of our deeply and deepening secular society. Can it be done, or is it simply an inevitability as Spengler argues: civilizations are born, they grow, they reach maturity, “they age and decline and die. There are no exceptions.” Ratzinger argued that the answer was yes, but only if believers looked upon themselves as a “creative minority,” a phrase he took from the historian Arnold Toynbee. Of course telling a church body that numbers around 1.2 billion worldwide that it must see itself as a minority wasn’t-or within the LCMS, isn’t-an easy sell, but then a particular people need not see themselves this way; there are other solutions. One alternative, according to Ratzinger is to simply accommodate secularism. To put it a bit differently, it is to allow the embrace the other gods. We do this on a daily basis, though we pride ourselves on the selectivity of the embrace. Naturally in the best Protestant tradition we beat our breast and cry out “Woe is me” after the fact, but there are those gods that we simply can’t live without and in fact find nothing inherently wrong with, capitalism for example. A second alternative is to become a religious extremist, though that might be a stretch for generic Lutherans for whom just making it though the Sunday Liturgy often feels like a jihad. A third alternative is the “Benedict Option,” where in Christian groups withdraw into protected ghettoes, shunning the world and those things (or people) it finds objectionable to its dogma. Sacks notes (and there were a series of articles written on the topic), that this has happened in the realm of Jewish Orthodoxy. A good argument could be made that this also occurs in those parts of Eastern Orthodoxy that are more ethnic in their orientation than they are liturgical, or, have accepted ethnicity as Liturgy. In Rod Dreher’s piece, he tells the story of a Roman Catholic community that has done the same. You find this within the LCMS too with the formation of micro-synods all of whom proclaim to be more faithful to the Confessions than you. I believe there’s a third alternative, and its one we saw enacted during the Hobby Lobby lawsuit. Here a church body vehemently denies that it is a minority and attaches itself to a particular political party that it believes will work to enact legislation it believes to be “fair” or at least in its best interest. In other words, it is a jettisoning of all things messianic and an adoption of a political point of view or ethic as a new or replacement Gospel. It is little more than the story of Jeremiah all over again.[2] Or…be a minority. Tonybee’s argument according to Sacks goes something like this: civilizations are “provoked by challenges-and the evening news provides no end of such challenges-“An individual or small group then comes up with an innovative solution, the inspiration or discovery that opens the way to prosperity or victory. This is the birth of the creative minority.” As Aesop, Chaucer, Shakespeare and perhaps most famously the poet Thomas Gray have taught us, “all the glistens is not gold.” When such a minority, “having enjoyed success and power, ceases to be creative…It then becomes a dominant minority, in power not because of what it is doing now but because of what it did in the past.” Realistically, the minority can no longer justify its position and societal breakdown occurs, alienating the majority. The result is schism. Those on the “inside” take solace in their failure and rejection by creating a universal church; those on the “outside”-“who were once in awe of the established power now lose their fear of it and engage in acts of violence and terror.” Sacks frames Tonybee’s argument in terms of the Jewish people through history, but there are lessons in his Jewish observations for Western Christians too. Sacks asks a series of “What if” questions and in closing I’ll paraphrase several of them: “What if” the LCMS “believed they heard God calling on them to be a creative minority that never sought to be a dominant minority?” That is to say, “what if” we believed that while God is universal, his love “is irreducibly particular?” “What if” we actually believed that “Every time you try to act like your neighbors [the Israelites for example, or even our own embrace of selective secularism]…you will be defeated by your neighbors. Every time you worship power, you will be defeated by power. Every time you seek to dominate, you will be dominated.” “What if” indeed. Pastor Ken Kelly Jr. [1] I mentioned scripture once in one of these discussions and was chided for it. I was told by a seminary professor that scriptural arguments were “too fifties.” Upon consideration, if this is the attitude of the Lutheran church at large, what hope can there possibly be? [2] See Kee’s excellent piece: theimaginativeconservative.org/2014/04/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn-remembering-god-man-forgot.html homofactusest/2014/08/28/how-can-we-sing-the-songs-of-the-lord-in-a-foreign-land/#respond
Posted on: Fri, 29 Aug 2014 12:50:37 +0000
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