Shane Claiborne's Partial Jesus for President

I recently read Shane Claiborne's Jesus For President and liked it very much. The one major place it did not connect with me is in its incomplete presentation of Jesus on the kingdom of God. I think Claiborne presents an awesome partial gospel; viz., Jesus' kingdom concerns for the poor, and Jesus' upside-down kingdom when it comes to the issue of power. And he's living this out in real time, which gives him massive credibility and authenticity. To follow Jesus is not just a nice theological theory for Shane. It's with this in mind that I offer a few thoughts to, I hope, supplement his Christology and theology of the kingdom.

My one comment is that Shane says little about Jesus' continual demonstations of healing and deliverance. For me, as someone who believes in these things and find them central to Jesus and the kingdom, I find their absence leaving Shane's Christology incomplete. If Jesus were president, would he not both proclaim the kingdom of heaven and demonstrate that kingdom with signs, wonders, healings, and casting out demons? Jesus' healings and demonic deliverances lie at the heart of the gospel of the kingdom. There are Jesus-followers who affirm this and live it out and also live out Jesus' mandate to care for the poor and the sick. For some examples, see Donald E. Miller's Global Pentecostalism: The New Face of Christian Social Engagement - look at the chapters of Florence Muindi and Jackie Pullinger, for example.

There's a cnn.com piece on Shane today. I'm so thankful for him and how God is using him. From the article:

"Claiborne is touring the country, packing churches and community centers, in support of the book he and Chris Haw co-authored, "Jesus for President." "This whole project is about the political imagination of what it means to follow after Jesus," Claiborne said. "The language of Jesus as Lord and savior is just as radical as it would be to say 'Jesus as our commander in chief' today.""

Yup.

Self-Refuting Loops & the Mind-Consciousness-Brain Problem

Mind-brain-consciousness studies are huge and getting huge-er. Is the "mind" nothing but the physical activity of the brain? Is conscious awareness nothing but the physical activity of the brain? Yesterday's Wall Street Journal moves in that direction.

It seems that "researchers now can detect our intentions and predict our choices before we are aware of them ourselves. The brain, they have found, appears to make up its mind 10 seconds before we become conscious of a decision -- an eternity at the speed of thought."

If that's true, then what of "consciousness" and "free will?" ""We think our decisions are conscious," said neuroscientist John-Dylan Haynes at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, who is pioneering this research. "But these data show that consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg. This doesn't rule out free will, but it does make it implausible.""

Free will... is implausible...??? Which brings me back to the same old thing related to what Steven Pinker called the "hard problem" of first-person subjective awareness. If the 10-second theory is correct then Haynes's "decision" to state "We think our decisions are conscious" was itself already a done deal in the physical brain.

My own belief is that with this kind of thinking we'll always run up against a self-refuting loop. This gets expressed in the WSJ article's last sentence: ""We are trying to understand who we are," said Antonio Damasio, director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California, "by studying the organ that allows you to understand who you are.""

Leadership In the Church

I really like this quote from Dan Kimball's They Like Jesus But Not The Church:

"We strive to establish an Ephesians 4:11-12 culture in our church, in which the majority of the people, not just the paid staff, will be organized, in the good sense of the word, to care for, shepherd, know, and guide people in the church. We strive to create a culture and structure in which the paid staff focuses on empwoering people for ministry. If we are successful in doing this, then those who are a regular part of the church should have most of their needs met, since the church is functioning as a community not dependent on the paid staff and higher levels of leadership. We won't have to battle levels of hierarchy, since the leadership is spread out, making access to decision-makers all the more easy. We still have structure and levels of leadership, but leadership's goals are to see people owning, sharing, and developing the vision of the church using their gifts, personalities, and skills. We guide but try our best not to control." (P. 85)

Youth Are Not Flocking to the Mega-Churches

I'm reading Dan Kimball's They Like Jesus But Not the Church. Kimball points out that mega-churches have a lot of baby boomers but younger people are mostly absent from them. He talked, e.g., with the college pastor of a church that has well over 10,000 people in it. But the attendance of those under thirty is "rather dismal."

Kimball quotes Reggie McNeal, who writes: "We are witnessing the emergence of a new world... The phenomenon has been noted by many who tag the merging culture as post-Christian, pre-Christian, or postmodern. The point is, the world is profoundly different than it was at the middle of the last century, and everyone knows it. But knowing it and acting on it are two different things. So far the North American church has largely responded with heavy infusions of denial, believing the culture will come to its senses and come back around to the church."

McNeal writes: "The American culture no longer props up the church the way it did, no longer automatically accepts the church as a player at the table in public life, and can be downright hostile to the churches presence. The collapse I am talking about also involves the realization that the values of classic Christianity no longer dominate the way Americans believe or behave."

How true. I know this personally from teaching 8 years now at Monroe County Community College. For most of today's young students, the "church" is not even on the radar screen of options for them as they ask questions about the meaning and purpose of their lives.

The Brain/Mind Problem: How Little We Actually Know

Check out this essay in The Wilson Quarterly by Charles Barber - "The Brain: A Mindless Obsession." There's a lot of neuro-activity going on out there, but in spite of the excitement and hype and neuro-everything claims the truth is we know hardly anything about how the brain works. Barber's analysis makes us look like medievalists when it comes to understanding things like depression, or how Prozac actually works. Among other things this is due to the outrageous complexity of the physical brain.

Barber writes, re. psychiatric disorders: "if anything has been gleaned from the last two decades of work in the genetics of psychiatric disorders, it is that the origins of these maladies are terribly complex. No individual gene for a psychiatric disorder has been found, and none likely will ever be. Psychiatric disorders are almost certainly the product of an infinitely complex dialogue between genes and the ­environment." If in fact such a "dialogue" is infinitely complex we can never expect to gain a complete or perhaps even a near-complete understanding.

Another quote, to give you a flavor of the essay: "The state of the art right now is that we can read brains—to some very crude extent—but we can’t even begin to read minds. Wall Street Journal science writer Sharon Begley has coined the term “cognitive paparazzi” to describe those who claim they can. “What does neuroscience know about how the brain makes decisions? Basically nothing,” says Michael Gazzaniga, director of the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind at the University of California, Santa Barbara."

And: "There are currently no standard ways of treating or assessing mental illness based on brain images. The only unequivocal clinical use of imaging is in detecting raw abnormalities. “The only thing imaging can tell you is whether you have a brain tumor or some other gross neurological damage,” says Paul Root Wolpe of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Bioethics. The unfortunate fact remains that the most accurate way of gauging the thoughts and feelings of others is simply by asking them what they are thinking and ­feeling.
Steven Pinker, again: “We are still clueless about how the brain represents the content of our thoughts and feelings. Yes, we may know where jealousy ­happens—­or visual images or spoken ­words—­but ‘where’ is not the same as ‘how.’”"

When might we expect to understand "how" the brain works? "The brain is the most complicated object in the universe. Nobel ­Prize–­winning psychiatrist Eric Kandel has written, “In fact, we are only beginning to understand the simplest mental functions in biological terms; we are far from having a realistic neurobiology of clinical syndromes.” Neuroscientist Torsten Wiesel, another Nobelist, scoffed at the hubris of calling the 1990s “The Decade of the Brain.” “We need at least a century, maybe even a millennium,” he said, to comprehend the ­brain."

Finally, look at this quote from Francis Crick, reducing "mind" to the physical activity of the brain: “‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: ‘You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.’”"

But if that's true, then Crick's claim that the mind is nothing but the physical activity of the brain is itself nothing but the physical activity of the brain. What could it mean to argue for the "truth" of such a theory?

Buddhism & Monism: A Response to S. Dhammika

(Linda on Mackinac Island)

Yesterday Buddhist scholar S. Dhammika made the comment below re. my monroenews.com blog post “Buddhism as Atheism.” I’m grateful he responded. Here’s his comment, plus my comment back to him. This discussion gets really technical. One reason it does is because Buddhism is so counter-intuitive to Western thinking.

If you want to read further, note two points:

1) S. Dhammika agrees with me that Buddhism is atheism. Of course he is correct about that.

2) S. Dhammika does not find my understanding the Buddhism is metaphysical monism sensible.

I think he is incorrect about that.

S. Dhammika writes - “I am a Buddhist convert from Christianity and have been for 36 years, I have a degree in Buddhist studies, I read the scriptures in their original language and have written some 15 books on the subject. I can assure you, Buddhism is atheistic, in the sense that it gives no significance to the concept of a supreme deity. As for being ‘metaphysical monism’ you have completely lost me there. What one or One? I know of no place in the scriptures where the Buddha says anything like that or that this idea can be intimated from what he said. But keep trying and you’ll get there one day.Kind regards."

Here’s my counter-comment back to him:

”S. Dhammika – thank you for responding. I am certain that you understand the Buddhist scriptures far better than I do, so I’m listening to what you have to say. But I’m a bit surprised that you feel lost re. the idea that Buddhism is metaphysical monism, also called dialectical monism. Let me explain.

Dialectical monism is based on the idea that duality and unity are identical - unity always appears as duality, and duality is always reducible to unity. As the Heart Sutra says, “Form Does not Differ From the Void, And the Void Does Not Differ From Form. Form is Void and Void is Form.”

But note that unity is primordial. Duality is an epiphenomenon of unity. Unity is the reality, duality an appearance, or epiphenomenon. Unity, in Buddhism, prevails. Ultimately, everything that is, is One. Surely Buddhism, as a philosophy, is monistic rather than Western-philosophical/Cartesian-dualistic.

So what about our dualistic experiences, to include our experience of an “I” that now sees objects outside of my own “self?” Here is where I find Buddhist philosopher Owen Flanagan helpful. In The Problem of the Soul, he likens the philosophy of phenomenology to Buddhism’s philosophy or worldview. Flanagan writes, “Many Buddhists are master phenomenologists.” (209) This means that Buddhists concern themselves with appearances, and not with any things that might or might not correspond to those appearances outside of their minds “in an objective world.”
Note this Flanagan quote, which expresses Buddhist philosophy well: “What Buddhism calls “bare attention,” which is hardly bare, involves scrupulous attention to the way things – both the world and our own minds – really seem. Bare attention allows things to reveal themselves as they seem when carefully attended to, and it yields and grounds these observations. But it provides no grounds for speaking about much more than appearances.” (211)

Here the Western subject-object experience evaporates, and experience becomes non-discursive. Here is where Christian mystics like Thomas Merton find connections with Buddhism, and where Heideggarians find “Being” as similar to what Buddhists seem to be saying.

It’s this view of ultimate reality that I find interesting but ultimately incoherent, and false. Surely, it is debatable. And, it’s about a philosophy, or a worldview.

Blessings to you,

John Piippo”

N.T. Wright/Colbert Interview Transcript

Jake Bouma has posted the entire Wright-Colbert interview transcript here. Thanks Jake for doing this!

N.T. Wright on The Colbert Report

I know it's a bit late but I just found out that N.T. Wright is on The Colbert Report tonight - 11:30 EST.

Freedom & Authenticity

(Sunset in Monroe - 6/17/08)

“Freedom” is always relative to constraints. There is no such thing as freedom without boundaries. Boundary-less “freedom” is “anarchy,” which is a severe bondage and a great limiting of freedom.

One example of freedom-with-constraints is the game of chess. Arguably, chess is the greatest board game of all time. The reason for this is, precisely, its rules. I’ve never heard a chess master complain about the rules of chess being too limiting or constricting. In chess, it seems as if no two games, at least among chess masters, are the same. It’s a brilliant set of constraints that allow for such great freedom.

The same is true of sports and science and culture and life itself. It’s true of your personal life. Are you a free person? This question is about one’s inner self, and is not, essentially, about external constraints. One could live in America and be in deep inner bondage; one could live under a repressive government and be free within. Every government constrains. All constraints bring greater or less freedom, running on a continuum between bondage and liberation.

The answer to your own inner freedom relates to the kind of things that constrain your heart, which things have to do with the purpose of your soul. Find out who made you and for what purpose you have been made, live within these purposeful parameters, and you will experience freedom. You will also be who you were intended to be, which is to say you will live authentically. (Note: if atheism were true there would be no constraints, and hence no true freedom.)

Jesus said “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” In Luke 4:18 Jesus spoke his own life-purpose as he said: "The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed.” Paul wrote, in Romans 8:21, that one day “the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.”

You are a child of God. Created by God. Made by God and for God. Find your true identity and the result is “glorious freedom.”

Authenticity & Freedom

(The Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island)

The word “authentic” comes from a Greek word, autos, which means “self.” We get a lot of other English words from autos, like “automobile” (a self-driven vehicle), “automatic” (runs by itself), “autograph” (a self-writing), and so on.

We could translate “authentic” as meaning “the real thing,” “the genuine article.” When it comes to Christianity, an “authentic” Christian would be someone who actually, genuinely, follows after Jesus. An “inauthentic” Christian would be someone who fakes it in front of other people (like on a Sunday morning) but in their own home or in their workplace is someone different.

My own feeling is that who you and I are in our own homes is who we really, authentically, are. And who we are when no one is looking is who we truly are.

It’s important to note that authenticity is not about perfection. No one is perfect (Jesus was, we’re not). It’s what we do with our imperfections that gives clues to authenticity. For example, I’ve at times met people who are self-admitted jerks who pride themselves by being consistent in their jerkiness. Authentically, they are the real thing when it comes to being rude or abrasive. A difference between them and a real follower of Jesus would be that the authentic Jesus-follower would be internally broken and saddened by their non-Jesus character and would cry out for more heart-transformation.

The question of authenticity thus has two components: 1) the goal - “real-ness” = “Christlikeness”; and 2) integrity - which means the reality of a growing Christlikeness is evidenced in every environment, whether alone or with others, whether at home or in the sanctuary.

The result of authenticity is nothing less than freedom. Acting and faking it takes a lot of energy. It’s a tiresome thing to try to be someone you were never intended to be. And “freedom” is not just being anybody or anything, but being like Christ, who was the truth, and whose truth sets us free.