Tony Jones » theology

Kagan Is Wrong about Umpires

Tony Jones — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 13:12:45 +0000

Pre-Modern Umpire

One of my senators, Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota), asked Elena Kagan yesterday about, among other things, the question of judge-as-umpire. It seems that Chief Justice John Roberts, during his own confirmation hearing, was asked about whether a Supreme Court justice is very much like and umpire, and he responded that, yes, they are. Umpires don’t set the rules of baseball, just enforce them; and judges don’t make the laws, just adjudicate them.

At the risk of boring you, dear reader, let me remind you once again that I umpired baseball for twenty years. That experience has served me well on many occasions, and I’ve even written about it in a couple of my books (e.g., The New Christians).

Modern Umpire

For the most part, I think that Kagan has comported herself extremely well in the hearings. I’ve been able to catch bits and pieces on NPR, and I think she’s been uncowed by the Republican and Democratic grandstanding senators.

However, I do have one nit to pick. In disagreeing with Roberts’s statement that judges are, indeed, like umpires, Kagan said,

“The metaphor might suggest to people that the law is a kind of robotic enteriprise. … That it’s easy, we call ball and strike and everything is clear cut that there is no judgment in the process. I do think that’s not right. It’s especially not right at the Supreme Court level, where the hardest cases go.”

Aaaaargh! Anyone who thinks that umpiring a baseball game is a “robotic enterprise” has not only never umpired a game, they’ve likely never watched a game.

Postmodern Umpire

It’s true that umpires do not write the rules, any more than judges write the laws. But, like a judge, there is a great deal of judgment and interpretation in the application of the rules. Experience matters, and nothing is more valuable in the adjudicator of the rules/laws than commonsense. If there’s one difference, it’s that judges usually get to think about the case for 90 days before committing themselves to a ruling, whereas umpires need to make immediate decisions on every play.

More on my thoughts on umpiring, interpretation, hermeneutics, and the tradition of Christian theological reasoning in this post on my paper that was rejected by Wheaton.

Don Browning Has Died

Tony Jones — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 14:27:32 +0000

Don Browning, 1934-2010

Thanks to Andy Rowell for pointing out to me the news that Don Browning, a giant in my academic field of practical theology, has died. Browning was the author of the ur-text of PT — A Fundamental Practical Theology — and he taught at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Here is how he was remembered by collegues at that school,

“He had an amazingly capacious mind that could see how religious and moral questions need to be explored from a variety of vantage points,” said William Schweiker, the Edward L. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor in the Divinity School and the College. “He could pinpoint the strength and weakness of an argument and indicate this in a forceful, but gentle way.”“It’s going to be impossible to find someone else to do what he did,” said Jean Bethke Elshtain, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics in the Divinity School. “He represented something unique. He had an unusual combination of expertise. As a scholar of the family, he believed you had to look at history, you had to look at sociological context, you had to look at law.”

As a colleague, “he was absolutely wonderful. He was thoughtful, engaged and attentive,” Elshtain said. “If you wanted to construct an ideal colleague, he would be my image.”

Some Inside Jokes for the Theologically Educated

Tony Jones — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 11:40:32 +0000

At Faith and Theology, Kim Fabricius and Ben Myers have posted a bunch of clerihews about 20th century theologians. Pretty funny, if you’re into this kind of thing. Here’s a taste:

Rudolf Bultmann
One day began
To study the Gospel of John; and found, to his satisfaction,
That pretty much every word was redaction.

Hans Küng,
When he was young,
Rose to the top. Almost.
Now he is toast.

And my two favorites:

C. S. Lewis
Must have smoked cannabis
With Narnia creatures to write the banality
Of Mere Christianity.*

“Jürgen Moltmann,
Can
The world,” we ask, “live without hope?”
“Nope.”

Be sure to read the comments, too, where some readers have posted a few more gems.

HT: Christian Century

*I realize that some readers consider it a cardinal sin to say — or even think — anything negative about C.S. Lewis. Well, sorry, but he’s overrated. So are The Beatles.

God Is Not Apophatic (Because I Can’t Say “God Is Not Love”)

Tony Jones — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 18:33:50 +0000

Over the past couple weeks, I’ve been exploring apophatic statements about God. I am, as I’ve admitted, drawn to the apophatic. I suppose it’s because that I struggle intellectually with the whole concept of God and particularly with statements that anthropomorphize God — which is just about every statement that I ever hear uttered about God.

As I have written posts about what God is not, I’ve known that there’s one statement that would be the zenith of apophatic theology. And I’ve also known that if I cannot write a post in defense of that statement, then I’d hit the limit of apophaticism. That statement is:

God Is Not Love.

And I cannot affirm that. Try as I might, I cannot figure out how to justify that sentence. Maybe Pete can, but I cannot. (Pete, are you listening?)

But, maybe this is exactly the beauty of apophatic theology, which is meant to remind us that God is not sum-up-able. God cannot be definitively articulated, not even by apophatic theology.

Can God be articulated by God?

N.B., This post is part of a series exploring apophatic statements about God.

God Is Not Static

Tony Jones — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 11:10:31 +0000

One thing that I do not understand about the hyper-Reformed is this contradiction in their theology. One the one hand, they maintain that God is impassible — God does not change and, even more troubling to me, God does not grieve. But on the other hand, they often proclaim that God’s wrath burns white hot at me because of my sin.

Well, I’m not the first to proclaim the very opposite, but I’ll reaffirm it here: God Is Not Unchanging. And the corollary, God is not impassible.

The biblical narrative is clear that God changes God’s mind — in fact, it happens explicitly several times in the Hebrew Scriptures — and God indeed grieves. But, most significantly, in Jesus, God took the initiative to change the entire dynamic in the divine-human relationship. The Christ event was nothing less that a 180-degree change in God. (Okay, maybe not 180 — maybe more like 94°.)

N.B., This post is part of a series exploring apophatic statements about God.

God Is Not Emergent

Tony Jones — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 12:36:22 +0000

I had the unhappy experience of listening to yet another online conversation yesterday in which two erstwhile and, I would have assumed, friends of emergent went to great lengths to distance themselves from emergent, taking pains to say that they are not affiliated with “the capital ‘E’ emergent brand.” Meanwhile, on the Huffington Post, Phil Shepherd says,

In the years of unpacking my faith journey, I found that I was not alone in this conversation. In fact, that there were others all around the world who were going through the same type of deconstruction that I was! The emergent conversation (not labeled with this title until some years later) was a life raft for many of us.

Well, whatever emergent Christianity is — dead or alive, a marketing brand or a conversation — God is not it.

Emergent is, and has been, the banner under which some of us have gathered as we’ve searched for a new way to go about living faithfully. It’s a way that involves intellectual challenge, the pursuit of ancient spiritual disciplines, the formation of new faith communities, the revitalization of conventional churches, and, most significantly, friendships.

But each of these characteristics is obviously human. The emergent way of Christianity is just as humanly constructed, finite, and open to deconstruction as any other way of faith. And this is the very thing that God is not. God is not deconstructible. God shows no favoritism to emergents.

N.B., This post is part of a series exploring apophatic statements about God.

God Is Not Just

Tony Jones — Thu, 27 May 2010 14:09:52 +0000

Definitions of “just” and why God is not that:

1.) merely: and nothing more; “I was merely asking”; “it is simply a matter of time”; “just a scratch”; “he was only a child”; “hopes that last but a moment”

God is not merely anything. God is always the unexpected more.

2.) precisely: indicating exactness or preciseness; “he was doing precisely (or exactly) what she had told him to do”; “it was just as he said–the jewel was gone”; “it has just enough salt”

“Precise” implies the ability of something to be pinned down, scrutinized, and measured, which God most assuredly is not.

3.) only a moment ago; “he has just arrived”; “the sun just now came out”

If God is a moment ago, God is also the next moment; God is both the distant past and the eternal future.

4.) absolutely; “I just can’t take it anymore”; “he was just grand as Romeo”

God’s absoluteness demolishes all absolutes, including God’s own absoluteness.

5.) equitable: fair to all parties as dictated by reason and conscience; “equitable treatment of all citizens”; “an equitable distribution of gifts among the children”

Although we wish God to be, God is not equitable. The rain does, indeed, fall on the just and the unjust alike, but God’s creation is rife with creatures who are preternaturally endowed with more resources than other creatures. Humankind’s history is a string of stories about the struggle for limited resources, not to share them equitably, but to hoard them and lord them over others. And, like it or not, God allows this pattern to continue unabated. Even the biblical narrative is one of unmerited favor upon some and destruction of others.

6.) barely: only a very short time before; “they could barely hear the speaker”; “just missed being hit”

God may be barely God, but God is also exceedingly God.

7.) fair: free from favoritism or self-interest or bias or deception; conforming with established standards or rules; “a fair referee”; “fair deal”; “on a fair footing”; “a fair fight”; “by fair means or foul”

One word: Israel.

8.) exactly at this moment or the moment described; “we’ve just finished painting the walls, so don’t touch them”

God may be temporal, but God is not able to be pinned down to a moment.

9.) good: of moral excellence; “a genuinely good person”; “a just cause”; “an upright and respectable man”

Here, of course, is the real rub, for this is what Christians most often mean when we say, “God is just.” But good is by definition a relative descriptor, in the mix of “good, better, best.” One man’s good is another man’s “not-good-enough.” You give me a working definition of “good” (or, for that matter, “equitable”), and I’ll give you a half-dozen biblical examples of why God is not good, by your definition.

N.B., This post is part of a series exploring apophatic statements about God.

Back Out

God Is Not on the Side of the Poor

Tony Jones — Wed, 26 May 2010 12:17:11 +0000

It’s often said that God is on the side of the poor/oppressed/marginalized, and, indeed, there is much in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures that suggest that God has an eye out for those who who have less voice in society than others. But YHWH is more than happy to use rich kings as well as naked prophets in the Hebrew Scriptures, and Jesus embraces tax collectors and fishermen alongside the blind and lame in the Christian scriptures. The rain falls on the just and the unjust alike.

To the statement, “God is on the side of the poor,” one can ask, “How poor do I have to be for God to be on my side?” Because poverty — or marginalization or oppression — is always relative. I may be poor compared to my neighbor, but I’m rich compared to a person living in Appalachia, who is rich compared to someone in Burundi, who is rich compared to a serf who lived in 1243. Compared to a first century tax collector, I am not poor.

The other problem with claiming that God is one someone’s side, over against someone else, is that it gets to sounding a bit like members of a sports team who claim, upon winning, that the victory was somehow authored or blessed by God. Most of us scoff when one team claims that God is on their side. But how different is it to claim that, based on our own human measurements of poverty, that God favors one group of people over another?

Rather than claiming that God is on the side of the poor in an unqualified sense, better to note that we are all poor, relative to God. Or just to state that God is on the side of everyone.

N.B., This post is part of a series exploring apophatic statements about God.

God Is Not Male

Tony Jones — Tue, 25 May 2010 12:09:02 +0000

I’ll begin my explorations into the apophatic by stating something that God is Not, and something that I doubt will generate too much consternation among readers:

God Is Not Male.

Since God is also not female, it’d be even more accurate to say that God Is Not Gendered.

I think this sentiment is more palatable these days than it was fifty years ago because we are now aware of the complexities of gender. The meanings of words like “masculine” and “feminine,” “manly” and “womanly,” have been pretty thoroughly deconstructed. Thus, it’s really not even accurate to say, “God has characteristics of both genders,” since that sentence is basically meaningless. God is strong, which is masculine? God is sensitive, which is feminine? The ridiculousness of these sentiments quickly becomes clear.

Which makes this a good introductory salvo into the apophatic. We know only gender. Even the aforementioned complexities (homosexual, queer, bi-sexual, transgendered, intersexed) are understood based on the poles of the two genders. But God fits neither of the genders nor the complexities in between.

Therefore, we are left with nothing kataphatic to say, nothing positive to claim, when reflecting on God and gender. Instead, we make the apophatic statement, God Is Not Gendered.
N.B., This post is part of a series exploring apophatic statements about God.

A Little Post about God

Tony Jones — Mon, 24 May 2010 16:29:51 +0000

I’ve been thinking about God lately, and I cannot help but be continually pulled toward an apophatic relationship with God. That is, the more I’m drawn to thinking about God, the more I am convinced of the unknowability of God. And so I wonder if I took on the challenge of Maimonides and spoke about God only in the negative, only stating what God is not.

I’m ready to dive into this, but I’m also struck with the challenge as a parent. I don’t know that it’s fair to my young children to speak to them only of what God is not. Nor do I think a pastor could get away with this for very long. Apophatic sermons, while probably more theologically accurate than kataphatic sermons, can probably tend to get dreary.

I think that Pete Rollins has made the most productive step that an apophatic preacher can make, and that is to truck primarily in the genre of parable.

Me? I think I’m going to spend the next few posts writing about what God is not.
N.B., This post is part of a series exploring apophatic statements about God.