Last month I got to hang out at my favorite bar, Big Boss Brewery’s taproom, with two generations of indie Christian icons: Steve Taylor and Don Miller. They’ve teamed up to bring us Blue Like Jazz: The Movie, based on Miller’s nearly decade-long best-selling collection of vignettes of faith and coming of age. I interviewed them on behalf of the partnership between BLJ and the Wild Goose Festival, the arts, justice, and spirituality festival that’s helping create a world that’s recognized as wholly holy.

Here’s the trailer for the film:

And here’s the trailer for the Goose:

You should check out theaters in your area this weekend to see if Blue Like Jazz is playing; supporting an independent production like this in its opening weekend is crucial for its overall success. And you should really join us this June 21-24 at Shakori Hills campground in North Carolina. We’re going to have so many amazingly gifted artists, musicians, community organizers, spiritual wisdom-holders, ragamuffins, agitators, and ne’er-do-wells. And most of all, plenty of new friends and community that you can take with you. This week only, enter “bluelikejazz” at checkout, and get 15% off any Wild Goose registration! Our way of saying thanks for supporting good films and good festivals.

Without further ado, here’s the 30-minute interview between Steve, Don, and myself. I think we all had a good time.

(Remember: “miller” will let you watch this video.)

Love might be winning, but my waistline isn't.

It’s 11:20 PM; I just wrapped up another stressful day of work. And now, almost automatically, I find myself microwaving and eating a bowl of ramen noodles – two bowls to be exact.

What am I doing?

I’m not in college anymore.

I should know better.

I do know better.

So what gives?

Tonight is just the latest round in my life-long tug of war with food, fitness, and health. What is it that Paul says? “I don’t understand myself at all, for I really want to do what is right, but I don’t do it. Instead, I do the very thing I hate.”

Yeah. That’s me.

I know “the good I ought to do.” I was raised in a family that ate “all-natural” food back in the 80s when it tasted like cardboard – I actually enjoyed carob chips! And my wife is an excellent cook; we eat mostly organically-grown and/or locally sourced foods – fresh! Not canned! We don’t drink carbonated sodas. I snack on apples.

And I love my life; there’s so much to be thankful for. I have a beautiful wife and an amazing four-year old daughter; I’m part of some vibrant faith communities. I do meaningful work; I’m a successful multipreneur (which is ADD-speak for having lots of interlocking gigs and businesses). And yet, there is this core of self-sabotaging behavior that works its way around food and eating. It looks like this: I eat really well all day long, but then “cheat” “just once.” This “cheating” works its way into a habit over a couple of weeks, and the next thing I know my clothes are fitting tighter. Then I work out harder, try and eat better, and a few pounds melt away. But then, they come back.

Sound familiar?

Here’s the thing: I know a lot about what makes for a good diet. And I’m even blessed to be someone who can afford to eat a good diet in the convoluted foodscape that is 21^st century America. I don’t need more food rules; I actually need food grace. I don’t need a complicated set of dos and don’ts; I need a re-start button. I want to drink deeply from the fountain of Life, and let my body and mind be renewed and rebuilt on a molecular level.

Thankfully, I’ve discovered something called Living Fuel, a remarkable whole-food based superfood meal replacement that keeps friends of mine 10-15 years older than me in amazing shape. I’ll be saying more about this in my next health-related post, but for now suffice it to say that I have a grand ambition: Lose 80 pounds and be in the best shape of my life – body, mind, and soul.

In the coming months, in addition to blogging about faith and culture as usual, I’ll also be blogging more about health and fitness. Because it’s all related, isn’t it? It’s a step into greater vulnerability to be sure (kinda like that post I wrote a year or so ago where I confessed to you all that I’m nuts), but if Mike Morrell dot org ain’t the place to come clean with you, I don’t know where (online, at least) I would. Because good theology, spirituality, strategic foresight and cultural analysis isn’t done in some kind’ve gnostic vacuum: I’m a body as well as a brain – what bodies do, matters.

So – this should be a fun next few months. Please feel free to keep me in line if you feel like I’m becoming an info-mercial, or dangerously mirroring those seductively-slick media barrages about the ‘perfect body.’ I want to do neither, and yet I do want to honor bodies, and embodiment, as I seek to incorporate a more integral life practice.

Feel free to weigh in with wisdom and encouragement in the comments!

In the meantime, I leave you with some weight-loss wisdom from KC Craichy, the founder of Living Fuel:

This continues my series on Cynthia Bourgeault‘s recent day-session at the Servant Leadership School of Greensboro. You can start reading right here, or scroll below to see the previous sessions. 

Regular centering prayer encourages our direct knowing, without which there is no actual living Jesus tradition.

While we call Jesus our ascended master, our risen Lord, we act like we’re absentee landlords. Why do we invoke Eucharist in third person as though he’s not here?? Why not second person? Surely he didn’t go away when he died!

[Mike's note: I love how Cynthia says Jesus “is” and “does” rather than “was” and “did” like so many of her fellow progressive Christians, who do indeed see themselves as absentee landlords presiding over a Jesus Christ estate sale!]

Surely our hearts can pick up a connection with our living master if we’re only shown how.

The heart is the original spacecraft, for time travel – connecting us with all that is true, beautiful, and real.

Recognition of power is a profound kriya; Peter walking on water is the perfect example of this. If we want this connection in a similar fashion, we have to become serious students of the heart.

Nondual consciousness must be carried by the heart. Orthodox (Eastern) Christians have known this from the start. “The mind must be in the heart.” If you talk to a good Buddhist, they’ll say they know through the mind, but this carries inherent limitations. Unitive oneness, compassionate action, the grace & clarity we attribute to the saints – this is never attained by the mind alone.

In utero, the heart & brain begin as a single organism (according to an embryologist she spoke to). There can be a feedback loop between the two of them. We are becoming students of the magic of this extraordinary cardiology, opening up a unitive way of seeing.

(A humorous aside – Cynthia visited some older monks who knew Thomas Merton. Their take on Merton: “Oh yes. The little silence he knew, he spoke about very well.”)

I’m not trying in any sense to trash the mind; it’s a wonderful instrument. When the mind and heart work together, they’re brilliant. But anything which makes the mind rigid, fearful, simplistic creates a human being who uses neither the mind nor the heart.

To be continued…to see where Cynthia’s going with this, I recommend checking out her books The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening,  The Meaning of Mary Magdalene, and The Wisdom Way of Knowing.

If you’re interested in exploring the myriad of ways in which apprentices to Jesus can navigate change in the 21st century – in our worship, our spiritual formation, our way of engaging the crises and opportunities we face today – I hope you join me at Co-Creation 2012, happening this April 12-15 in the same space where I saw Cynthia. Brian McLaren, Diana Butler-Bass, and Integral Christianity author Paul Smith will be joining with the Servant Leadership School of Greensboro, North Carolina and a half-dozen artists and musicians to bring a truly unforgettable, interactive experience. To register, click here; to read more about this in an in-depth blog post, go here.

In This Series:

The Way of the Heart – Cynthia Bourgeault Part 1: What IS the Path of Jesus?
The Way of the Heart – Cynthia Bourgeault Part 2: See What Jesus Sees; Do What Jesus Does
The Way of the Heart Part 3: Cynthia Bourgealt’s Four Proposals – Beyond ‘The Imitation of Christ’
The Way of the Heart Part 4: Heartfulness Practice Transcends & Includes Orthodoxy
The Way of the Heart Part 5: Upgrading Our Operating System
The Way of the Heart Part 6: A Rorschach Blot for the Mind
The Way of the Heart Part 7: When 20/20 Hindsight Becomes Blindsight
The Way of the Heart Interlude: Kenosis Hymn
The Way of the Heart Part 8: Heart Surgery 

Note: This post will make a lot more sense if you read The Nine ‘O Clock Service: The Vibrant, Troubling Birth of the Emerging Church first.

Today’s Sunday Devotional is sure to raise some ambivalence – but no one processing religion, faith, and spirituality in a post*(everything) world can afford to ignore Matthew Fox - tempestuous, flamboyant, inventive; priest, artist, liturgist and theologian. The defrocked Catholic-turned-Episcopal priest was (with the unlikely influence-pairing of Vineyard revitalizer John Wimber) responsible for inspiring what was arguably the first ever emerging/postmodern congregation in the mid-1980s – the brilliant, controversial, combustible Nine O’ Clock Service. Inspired by a Wimber prophecy at St. Thom‘s in Sheffield and nurtured by Fox’s Creation Spirituality amongst working-class rave culture, the NOS was a potpourri of influences and expression.

The message is as straightforward as it is apparently elusive to many “spiritual leaders” today: The person and message of Christ and the Christian mystery must be not only applied to, but interpreted by, the Janus-faced Crises/Opportunities we face today: political, economic, cultural, and ecological. When we mine our Scripture, tradition, poetry, and luminaries on the one hand, and nature, art, science, and global cosmologies on the other hand, real magic can happen.

Even after it’s untimely demise, the NOS’s ‘Planetary Mass’ idea – shades of Teilhard de Chardin‘s Mass on the World – re-caught the attention of Fox himself, who brought it back to the US as a ‘Techno-Cosmic Mass.’ To this day, there are many interested in applying the ideas of Original Blessing and Creation Spirituality to communal expressions, as well as many of wide variety of theological persuasions interested in alternative worship expressions.

“Eyes on a page are not really a way to open the heart up,” says Fox. To see footage from his Cosmic Mass in Oakland, see this video here. If you’re part of a worshiping community, join me in considering: How can we bring more beauty and awe into our worship, drawing from the deep wells of our tradition, from ecology, and from postmodern culture? 

For a compendium alt.worship resources, go here. Also see Fox’s YouTube channel.

If you’re interested in exploring the myriad of ways in which apprentices to Jesus can navigate change in the 21st century – in our worship, our spiritual formation, our way of engaging the crises and opportunities we face today – I hope you join me at Co-Creation 2012, happening this April 12-15. Brian McLaren, Diana Butler-Bass, and Integral Christianity author Paul Smith will be joining with the Servant Leadership School of Greensboro, North Carolina and a half-dozen artists and musicians to bring a truly unforgettable, interactive experience. To register, click here; to read more about this in an in-depth blog post, go here.

Portions of this were originally posted on February 7, 2010. 

Update: Wondering what a NOS-styled ‘Planetary Mass’ would look like in the US, minus the scandal? Check out Sunday Devotional: Matthew Fox, Cosmic Mass

Historians tracing the birth of self-consciously ‘emerging’ forms of church – if they seek to trace such things – will quibble about where and when, as historians do. But my best case is that a modest Anglican church in a small northern England city visited by Vineyard leader John Wimber in 1985 is the genesis of all that emerges today: An eclectic band of cultural creatives serious about radical discipleship began to craft one of the most creative, aesthetically appealing, and theologically forward-looking congregations ever – for the 1980s/90s or today. The congregation called itself the Nine O’ Clock Service, and its leader was Chris Brain. Under Chris’s leadership, NOS (as it was known) became a model in the Church of England and beyond – a template for what later became Fresh Expressions, as well as the alternative worship movement, which eventually spread (in at least some respects) to American innovators in the Young Leaders Network, which eventually became Terra Nova and then Emergent Village.

With that said, NOS could never fully emerge out from under the ‘radical discipleship’ and ‘shepherding‘ movements that marked the charismatic church – UK and American – in the 1970s and 80s. From the beginning, something was quite…off.

What was it?

I got to visit the NOS incubating church, St Thom’s of Sheffield, in 2003 – less than a decade after NOS’s demise, and ask St Thom’s members what went down. It’s legacy – both helpful and hurtful – was still palpable in this church and this town. I received further, in-depth clues after reading (at Phyllis Tickle’s recommendation) The Rise and Fall of the Nine ‘O Clock Service. As she said,

This is everybody’s idea of the perfect cautionary tale. As such, it is also one of the saddest reads in the growing literature about Emergence Christianity; for the Nine O’Clock devolved into scandal instead of evolving into a fresh expression of church. Its story needs to be known, however, by anyone seriously interested in being part of shaping an Emergence community.

It was hastily-written and could have used a better editor, but it’s a treasure trove of relatively-even-handed information and reflection. But more recently, I discovered a documentary that aired in the UK just as the national scandal – yes, national scandal – involving the NOS broke. As much as I’d read, as much as I’d talked to St. Thom’s members, I was unprepared for actual video feed of both NOS’s stunning services and face-to-face interviews with the brilliant/delusional Chris Brain and his co-creators/victims.

If you consider yourself an ally of emergence or a nemesis – or a charismatic movement enthusiast, or antagonist, for that matter – you owe it to yourself to watch this documentary. Here it is:

My reflections? I feel ambivalent. I think it would be all-too-easy to dismiss Chris Brain, when in fact trying great, bold things often seizes hold of our darkest shadows, and leaves open the possibility to great, bold failure. But is it better to have tried nothing? If Brain erred on the side of authoritarianism and prompting anxiety in his co-congregants that was very against the grain of the grace, freedom, and exploration he proposed, well – I’ll just come out and say it: I think that many of today’s emergent leaders (and I count myself in this, sometimes) suffer from a failure of nerve. Because we don’t want to be a “sage on the stage” we become “a guide on the side,” muting our deepest wisdom and most provocative gifts. Because we don’t want to be a Falwell or a Hinn or a Piper or a Mohler, we’re often diminutive in our impact.

I’ll say this: If we had more leaders like Chris Brain today – hopefully who have done substantial shadow work, a la ManKind Project or Women Within, which do fantastic work helping people transform their personal banes into blessings – the Great Emergence that many of us feel is in fact arising right now during our time of cultural transition would be more self-evident to every follower of Jesus today, not to mention the culture at large – whether they ‘agree’ with it or not.

None of this excuses Brain’s excesses, of course, or our all-too-common desire to latch onto a cult of personality.

But who else has stepped up to take eco-spirituality seriously in the past 20 years in a high-impact, visible way?

Who else has stepped up to bring truly beautiful worship into our midst that incorporates the ancient with the postmodern?

The answer, of course, is “lots of us.” From Matthew Fox and Brian McLaren to Karen Ward to Jonny Baker, Kester Brewin to Lilly Lewin, there has been a much more distributed effort. But for those who call out for a “Steve Jobs of religion,” well, for one thing be careful what you wish for. But for another thing – we may have had it, in the 1980s and 1990s, in Chris Brain and his dedicated team of worship-crafters and experience-curators.

If anyone is reading this who used to be part of the Nine O’ Clock service at any level and would like to respond with a comment or even a proposed guest post, please let me know.

Bonus: Download a rare MP3 of a 1992 NOS Planetary Mass here.

It’s only a theory!   and,

Were you there? 

 This video series (and the accompanying subculture) were all we needed to realize that the universe was created in six literal days 6,000 years ago, with carbon dating a sham and evolution a Satanic plot to discredit the bible and promote abortion, homosexuality, and one world government by the same godless people who took prayer out of public schools and watch Susan Sarandon movies.

Fast forward to college around the turn of the century. A philosophical young lad and fellow student turned me on to Hugh Ross and Reasons to Believe, with his argument that the Big Bang and an old earth/universe was indeed compatible with the biblical narrative of Genesis. I took to Intelligent Design like a duck to water – it was refreshing to not have to believe that God made rocks and stars appear old as a test of faith (as SBTS president Al Mohler apparently believes). It turns out some friends in my Atlanta-area house church were Hugh Ross fans, and indeed he was invited to speak at the school where one of them teaches – so I joined them there one night for a lecture from the man himself. While I was more convinced than ever of the scientific arguments for an old earth and cosmos, I learned that night Ross did not extend the same courtesy to biology that he did to physics – he rejected ‘macro’ evolution outright, seemingly on theological grounds.

It wasn’t until 2007, when I with TheOOZE helped put on Soularize in the Bahamas, that I heard a clear, passionate, positive articulation of the relationship between science and faith – in one Michael Dowd, pastor and author of Thank God for Evolution, curator (with his wife, scientist Connie Barlow) of the Evolutionary Christianity interview series. From Dowd I discovered Bruce Sanguin, author of Darwin, Divinity, and the Dance of the Cosmos: An Ecological Christianity, The Emerging Church: A Model for Change and a Map for Renewal,  and the beautiful, poetic, prayer/worship book If Darwin Prayed: Prayers for Evolutionary Mystics. Finally, thanks to my buddy Tripp Fuller, I discovered the dizzyingly brilliant heart and mind of Philip Clayton, whose insights on evolution and Christianity are many and substantial. I really want to read his The Predicament of Belief : Science, Philosophy, and Faith, coming out in a few days!

Coevolution from The Work Of The People on Vimeo.

Do yourself a favor and watch the video above, and the rest of this series by my friend Travis Reed at The Work of the People/Alter Video Magazine. Even if you have to stop reading this blog post – they’re that good, and might change your life. Seriously.

From their insights (and the many antecedents they point to), I began to see the evolutionary impulse as emergent nested creativity, a divine spark that is ever-expanding in complexity and empathy, bringing us, quite possibly, to an approximation of Jesuit priest and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin‘s idea of an Omega Point, where the universe is becoming conscious of itself (vis-a-vis us) and all of reality is forming the cosmic Body of Christ. Celebrating the gifts of the scientific community, these thinkers and idea-leaders embrace science with zest as (to put in Augustine’s terms) God’s other Sacred Book – nature.

More recently still, I’ve been reading some more cautious, but equally vital, works of scholarship: Peter Enns‘ magisterial Evolution of Adam, The: What the Bible Does and Doesn’t Say about Human Origins and Christopher Southgate‘s The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution, and the Problem of Evil.

With all this as preamble, I’ve been thinking a lot over the past year about the second creation narrative in Genesis 2-3 – with Adam, Eve, the Serpent, two Trees, God and the garden. I’ve been pondering its significance, and how certain epiphanies in this narrative have led me to substantially re-imagine an eleven-year personal writing project. I’m currently staying in a lovely rural house with friends about 40 miles outside of Raleigh, on a writing ‘semi’ sabbatical. In addition to serving my many clients (don’t worry folks – I am still working!), I’m looking to at long last complete at least the ‘First Act’ of my Four-Act book. The book – and this is the first time I’ve said this publicly in 11 years – is titled Eat God, provisionally subtitled Taste Heaven, Party like a god, and Save the World.

Yesterday, my e-friend Shane Crash asked a pitch-perfect setup question via Twitter and Facebook – the kind of thing that primed the pump for me to road-test some ideas for the book. Here it is:

“People who believe God is punishing humanity because a chick ate an apple. Why?” 

There were some fun answers, which you can read if Shane’s privacy settings are sufficiently low (I’m not sure). Here’s what I said, edited slightly for better coherence:

I’m not always fan of Augustine, and I’d like to get away from the idea of “The Fall,” believe me. I enjoy Matthew Fox’s Original Blessing, and I think he makes some compelling arguments for the original and sustaining goodness of creation, affirmed in Scripture and our experience. And yet, I can’t believe that humanity was just blissfully enjoying life when one day some grumpy religious people made up the myth of Eden and the rotten fruit. No…we must have felt something happen, some kind of existential shift, and then told this story of a primal human pair, two trees, and a tragic dietary choice.

Do I believe that God is ‘punishing’ us? No way! Do I believe a literal piece of fruit was ‘eaten’ by some first woman? That is highly debatable. But here’s what I think happened:

For some 200,000 years, homo sapiens enjoyed a pretty good life. Far from being ‘poor, nasty, brutish and short,’ a growing number of today’s anthropologists and archaeologists are pointing to a quite new vision of our deep pre-history. During the paleolithic era, we seemed to enjoy a deep sense of connection to our own bodies, one another, our natural environment, and our sense of the sacred (the last one of which seemed to include a High God/Creator, an immanent sense of the ‘spirit-ness’ of everyday objects and things, plus an ongoing communion with ancestors who have gone before us). We can see this way of living mostly neatly glimpsed in the rare, surviving aboriginal cultures on our planet today.

During most of our history, we shared everything. And there was abudnance – enough. We lived on a relatively ‘virgin’ planet, and population was much lower, for instance. Women were equal to men, and organized warfare was unheard of. I know this sounds like pie-in-the-sky, but read some Jared Diamond or Jetha and Ryan’s Sex at Dawn. It’s astonishing, the new consensus emerging about our original culture.

But then…something happened around 6,000 to 10,000 years ago. A magnetic pole shift, climate change, or the dawn of complex agriculture – there’s debate about which factor(s), but there’s a clear demarcation in our collective psyche, beginning in the Fertile Crescent and radiating outward along trade paths and weather patterns. Suddenly (over a period of 2,000-4,000 years – but ‘suddenly’ in geologic time), something changed in our fundamental psychological functioning. Whereas before consciousness was distributed through our entire bodies, now it all rushed up into our heads. Where we used to be instinctual, feeling, tribal creatures, every condition was now in place for us to be discursive reasoning, thinking, individual decision-makers. Psychologists call this until-now-unheard-of process self-reflexive consciousness.

Self-reflexive consciousness, the ability to reflect on ourselves “as though” from the outside, turned out to be a burden as well as a blessing. Over the milennia it’s given us planes, trains, and automobiles, but also war, pestilence, and famine. It’s given us art and ache, innovation and envy. This development of the ego is fundamental to all that is recognizably human. And yet, it is what gives us this undeniable feeling of four-fold alienation: from God, self, others, and our environment.

I think that the Hebrew bible and it’s narrative arc is wise beyond it’s years, but of course we (whether fundamentalist or modernist) over-literalize and argue about details. In its broadest strokes, though, I think that the break with ‘oceanic,’ interconnected ways of knowing to this four-fold alienation is “the fall.” I think that the Tree of Knowledge represents self-reflexive consciousness, dualistic thinking, and discursive reasoning, whereas the Tree of Life represents a kind of non-dual seeing, a holistic living in the present moment that embraces all of life as it arises.

This ‘Tree of Life’ consciousness, which is more a practice than anything (a practice I call eating God), is both backward-reflecting on our deep-time roots as humanity and forward-looking to our aspiration of integration: Taking the best attributes of our recent 10,000-year adolescence in division, judgement, and Fruit of Knowledge indigestion, putting us on a Tree of Life de-tox regimen so that unripe knowledge is purged from our systems, making way for the ripened fruit of the Wisdom we need before it’s too late for us as a species or an ecosystem.

[As a parenthesis, the story of Cain vs. Abel is the story of ascendant complex agrarianism (on its way to nascent urbanism) clashing with hunter-gatherers and simple pastoralism. God prefers the worship-connection of the hunter-gatherers over those of the upstart agrarians - the violent farmer knows this, and murder is born. For more on this perspective, see Brian McLaren's novel The Story We Find Ourselves In, and Daniel Quinn's fascinating Ishmael trilogy]

I think that Christ can point the way, or even BE the Way, if we ‘eat Christ‘ and take him as both Life and the Wisdom of God. Seeing what Jesus sees, and knowing what Jesus knows, is the route out from the dead-end of small-egoic consciousness and the on-ramp to four-fold re-connection with God, self, neighbor, and ecosystem.

Moby is a fan of 'Eat God'...don't you want to read?

Eat God: Act 1 (‘taste heaven’) transfigures the classical Christian mystical stages of ascent – illumination, purgation and union – into tasting, de-toxing, and digestion – and looks at how to make this practicable every day. It should be juicy. But in the meantime, if you’re interested in these concepts, I’d recommend you check out The Fall: The Insanity of the Ego in Human History. It’s not from a ‘Christian’ perspective (which is fine by me though the author missed some obvious, rich literary material) and the guy could’ve used an editor, but the research he pulls together is pure gold.

Eat God: Acts II – IV weaves all of this together with spiritual practice, Jesus’ subversive meal-sharing habits, and our contemporary food and water crises as a clarion call to a new way of being spiritual and human in the 21st century. It’s rooted in the deep tributaries of the Christian tradition, but incorporates science, poetry, and a good deal of strategic foresight and systems thinking as it applies to our food and water systems.

As I mentioned, I’m at a farm-house outside of Raleigh making a dent in writing part one, as I’ve been working on this puppy since a few months before the twin towers fell.  I’m realizing now how much more editorial work is needed to keep it fresh, concise, and accessible. I hope this isn’t my own ego talking, but I see this as an important work – spiritually, culturally, and ecologically – as we need a contemplative, mystical, “deeper life” literature for today that inspires us, from our deepest convictions and highest apsirations, to live – sacrifically if needed – for the good of our children and our planet. Because I want to take advantage of the freedom and innovation that is contemporary self-publishing, I’m considering a Kickstarter or IndieGoGo campaign to raise funds for the completion of the manuscript(s) and their innovative word-of-mouth marketing. So – a poll for you dear readers: Would you consider supporting a Kickstarter or IndieGoGo campaign if it meant that a.) This work could get out there in the world, and b.) You would get the first copies of it? There’s no wrong answer here – I’m just curious what interest is out there.

(If you answer ‘yes,’ please leave a comment below! I’ll want to let you know if I actually do this. )

I’ll close with a gem from Joesph Campbell‘s Thou Art That which has deeply informed my thinking and intuition:

When Man ate of the fruit of the Tree, he discovered himself in the field of duality instead of the field of unity. As a result, he finds himself out, in exile. The two cherubim placed at the gate are there representative of the world of the pairs of opposites in which, having been cast out of the world of unity, he is now located. You are kept in exile by your commitment to that world.

Christ goes past that – “I and the Father are one” – back into the realm of unity from which we have been expelled. These are the mysteries. Here is an echo and a translation into another set of images of what we ourselves are experiencing. What comes forth now with the grain, as particles of that one life that informs all things, is the revelation of the spiritual unity in all its aspects.

Adam and Eve are separated from God and they are aware of this break in their sense of oneness. They seek to cover their nakedness. The question becomes, how do they get back to the Garden? To understand this mystery, we must forget all about judging and ethics and forget good and evil as well.

Jesus says, “Judge not, that you may not be judged.” That is the way back into the Garden. You must live on two levels: One, out of the recognition of all life as it is without judging it, and the other, by living in terms of the ethical values of one’s culture, or one’s particular personal religion. These are not easy tasks.

I don’t mean that I’m going to Atheist Meetup Groups to make new friends (though that would be fun, I’m sure); I mean that alot of my Christian friends are beginning to conclude that seeing God as an anthropocentric being ‘out there’ is no longer cutting it for them. They’re not (primarily) getting there via Dawkins or Dennett or Harris or Hitchens, though that might be side-reading. They’re getting there more via Dietrich Boenhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison, or Pete Rollins’ The Fidelity of Betrayal or Insurrection - or Zizek or Badiou or Caputo or…you get the idea.

They’re also getting it from life - a lifetime spent doing the things that good (typically evangelical and charismatic, but also mainline and Catholic) Christians are taught to do. The virtue/prayer formulas taught in Deuteronomy or Proverbs (or even by Jesus) don’t seem to be working. The next thing you know, they start reading Mark’s gospel kinda like this, and Ecclesiastes, and voila! Atheist Christian.

What is an atheist Christian, you ask? Well, perhaps I’ll ask Ted Troxell to write me a guest post, but for now I’ll say this: An atheist Christian is a materialist who sees Jesus‘ (and, in many cases, Paul’s) ideals and programme under some soft of social-utopian lens, languaging a relational order in which all are given dignity. The theistic language that accompanied such visions is a necessary fact of the times in which they lived, but need not signify a core part of their ideology, as many of their other ideas (such as the smashing of idols, or the death of an incarnate God on a cross) are actually critical of and subversive toward overt religious claims.

I think I’d go so far as to say that I have more ‘atheist Christian’ friends these days than I do ‘uncomplicated’ Christian friends. How about you? Apparently this is not just a trend among emergent types, as even evangelical publishing house Tyndale has published The Christian Atheist: Believing in God but Living As If He Doesn’t Exist addressing this trend, though I’m not sure if  Craig Groeschel‘s prognosis (which seems to be double-down and try more of the same) is really going to cut it with growing numbers of my friends. Atheist Christianity seems here to stay.

In many ways this trend disturbs me – too many of my atheist Christian friends have a nihilistic streak in them a mile wide. If “you shall know them by their fruits” is applied to their deconstruction of faith, well, in many cases their depression, anger, cynicism and disintegrating family life speaks for itself.

On the other hand, you have happy, well-adjusted atheists like Alain de Botton and Carl Sagan. To hear them talk they sound more like mystics, in awe at an interconnected universe. They don’t particularly believe that there’s an underlying, transcendent, conscious intelligence behind said universe, but they’re definitely reverent when it comes to What Is.

Compare this to the pietisms of the world – in Christianity, Pietism has Lutheran, Weslyan/Holiness, Pentecostal, charismatic and evangelical flavors. Puritanism is a close cousin of pietism too. Pietism says that God is a God “out there,” but if you please Him enough (through faith, devotion, good works, discipline, or any number of other requirements), you can feel God in you, transforming you.

Pietism is powerful – a lot of people report feeling God. In the same twentieth century that brought on the Death of God movement, birthed in an Atlanta pub that I’m sure hosts theological conversation to this day, there’s also been an explosion in Pietism as manifested in Pentecostal, charismatic, and indigenous ‘Spirit-filled’ churches throughout the global south and two-third world. Marked by passionate worship, fervent evangelistic preaching, ardent expectations of signs & wonders, (often) prosperity teaching and (usually) the Second Coming of Jesus, these churches are growing by leaps and bounds. It’s estimated that one out of two congregations on earth are one of these types.

I can see why. I grew up in them. There is much to commend about their palpable sense of the reality and goodness and availability of God.

And yet…there is trouble in Pietism.

I began to see this trouble when I started reading mystics when I took off for college, in the late 1990s, and started trying to do what they recommended doing – ie, savoring Scripture slowly in lectio divina, chanting Psalms, or sitting in openness before a God who’s rendered unknown at the very site of revelation. I’ve tried and fumbled at these practices as an individual, as well as in groups, ranging from Quakers to house churchers. 

Now, at first blush, Christian mysticism is like Pietism on crack. If pop pietism can effuse ‘Jesus is My Boyfriend‘ Top 40-style worship songs, mystics can pen toe-curling erotic poetry to each member of the Trinity. If Pentecostals go to get their Jumpin’ Jehovah & Jesus fix twice a week (Sundays and Wednesday nights!), mystics expect some kind of daily encounter of the availability of God (though many are quick to caution against excessively showy manifestations, which they call ‘consolations’). But there’s a difference: In general, Christian mysticism or the contemplative path is far more subtle than Pietism, with its entire sanctifications, second blessings, and fast-tracks to an explosion of God’s palpable presence. The contemplative programme typically involves a lot of sitting, a lot of awareness, much letting go and a lot of quietly-cultivated love.

The end result of a life lived from this transfigured point of reference: A sense that God is everywhere even if God isn’t terribly overt; a weak God who looks like Jesus (strength made perfect in weakness) who is, nonetheless, All in all. A God in whom we live, move, and have our being – a ubiquitous God who defies description, even descriptors like ‘presence’ or ‘existence.’ It’s a deep ‘down and in’ consciousness of divinity, in which Spirit shows up disguised as your life.

Here’s where an extended quote from Jewish lawyer, activist, and spiritual teacher Jay Michaelson - author of Everything is God: The Radical Path of Nondual Judaism - is going to be awesome: Because I’m thinking is that deep-rooted nondual mysticism and awe-filled atheism are practically the same – at the end of the day, a God who is nowhere and a God who is everywhere might be merely a difference in semantics – a joy-filled word-play that we can each have fun with, riding the dialectic to a happier and more connected life. So here’s Jay:

To many people, spirituality is about having certain feelings, and spiritual practices are those actions which bring the feelings about. Light the candles, and feel “connected.” Pray, and become inspired. One does these practices in order to have certain feelings, or mindstates, to which one may attribute a range of mythic or psychological meaning. Conversely, if a practice isn’t working for you – that is, if you don’t get the desired feeling – drop it.

Secular critics of this type of spirituality (which often is derided as “New Age”) complain that it is narcissistic. Essentially, it’s just another thrill - and one which is then overlaid with delusion. At best, these pleasant delusions are rather pathetic balms. But they may also be deeply counterproductive, as the happy spiritual practitioner blissfully ignores her own problems, and those of the world. At worst, if the spiritual practitioner actually believes Allah, or Jesus, or whoever, is speaking to him, the delusions of the New Age are little different from the fundamentalisms of our era.

Within religious circles, surprisingly similar criticisms are leveled against ‘New Age’ spirituality. First, religious critics argue that New Age spirituality puts the individual before God. Some argue that it improperly values experience over authority, or over ethics – it is immodest, indulgent, and perhapsjust too much fun.

A less common critique comes from within the world of spiritual practitioners itself. Here, the complaint is neither impudence nor egotism but theological error. From a nondual perspective, spiritual practice is not about having a particular feeling, but about waking up to the shocking reality that your conventional self only exists as an appearance, a mirage. Like the Big Dipper, it is “there” in some sense, but not in the deepest sense; it’s not a structure of reality, but merely a way reality appears when looked at from a certain way. Spiritual and contemplative practice, in the nondual view, exist to wake us up from that “certain way,” which also happens to bring about all kinds of suffering, selfishness, and violence.

To do so, nondual spiritual practice must be all-pervasive. If you suppose that God is only present in the pleasant stuff – on a summer’s day but not in a cancer ward, when you’re feeling relaxed but not when you’re tense - then you’ve still making the same dualist error: God is here, but not there. In fact, the best spiritual practice might be one that neither provides the allure of the present nor the expiation of the difficult – but one which is utterly transparent, colorless, and thus always available. (Much more here!)

Michaelson is one of the most fascinating spiritual/religious thinkers, practitioners, and teachers today, precisely because he’s asking how the Western monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam might be potentially just as nondual as eastern traditions of Taoism or Advaita Vedanta. Now, for my more traditionally-minded Jesus-following readers who might feel like I’ve completely jumped the shark, don’t worry – I’ll get to my lens and my caveats in a moment. But first, let’s come back to Michaelson, in another article, this one on Prayer and Nonduality:

Nonduality may be understood in at least two ways. First, and traditionally, it proceeds from the theological tenet that God is infinite (Ein Sof in the Kabbalistic locution). Logically, if God is infinite, then every thing is God. “Do not look at a stone and say, ‘that is a stone and not God,’” wrote the sixteenth-century rabbi Moses Cordovero, one of the greatest Kabbalists of all time, “for you have dualized — God forbid. Instead, know that the stone is a thing pervaded by Divinity.”

Nonduality may also be understood from the bottom up (from our own experience), as well as from the top down (from the perspective of theology). The bottom-up inquiry proceeds not from a theological tenet but from a very close observation of our perceptions. Where, for example, is the “essence” (Platonic or otherwise) of the chair on which you are sitting? Take it apart mentally: is it in the wood? The legs? Its property of holding you up — which, if you inquire more closely, has nothing to do with the “chair” and everything to do with molecular properties, strong and weak nuclear forces, and all sorts of other things you and I do not understand? Really, “chair,” and everything else, is an emergent property that usefully describes reality as we experience it, but doesn’t really describe its actual truth. As Joseph Goldstein likes to say, it’s like the Big Dipper — it describes something about how things look from a particular perspective, but we all know there is no Big Dipper really, right?

It’s possible, if the mind is quieted and slowed by meditation, to notice how thoughts pop in and out, how they are all conditioned by other things, and how the idea of the “self” in which all of us are so invested is, like the Big Dipper, just a useful label that describes how things seem from a particular perspective — not how they are. In actuality, to speak of chairs, selves, and other things as existing in their own right is useful but not entirely accurate.

But if there’s no self, what is there?

That question is where pantheism and atheism shake hands, where nonduality in its specifically religious forms becomes quite interesting. God, we might say, is what is left when the self is subtracted from everything else. A Buddhist would say everything is an empty play of conditions: your decision whether or not to keep reading is due not to some homunculus inside your brain but to a myriad of causes, including genetics, what else you have to do today, how well I’m writing, learned behaviors, and so on. A nondual Jew or Christian uses the word “God” to refer to those conditions. (emphasis mine)

If God is All there Is, we can stop looking for the miracle – life is the miracle. We can also stop trying to explain away truly extraordinary, unusual happenings like the spontaneous healings and spot-on ‘words of knowledge’ and bizarre manifestations I’ve witnessed – because everything is God. This does not mean that there is no room for improvement, or that genuine evil and atrocity do not ‘exist’. Indeed, as Ram Dass said, “The world is perfect as it is – including my desire to change it.”

Or as Ken Wilber said (and as we recounted right here on the blog last month),

If you are the One, and—out of sheer exuberance, plenitude, superabundance—you want to play, to rejoice, to have fun, then you must first, manifest the Many, and then second, forget it is you who are the Many. Otherwise, no game. Manifestation, incarnation, is the great Game of the One playing at being the Many, for the sheer sport and fun of it.

But it’s not always fun.

Well, yes and no. The manifest world is a world of opposites—of pleasure versus pain, up versus down, good versus evil, subject versus object, light versus shadow. But if you are going to play the great cosmic Game, that is what you yourself set into motion. How else can you do it? If there are no parts and no players and no suffering and no Many, then you simply remain as the One and Only, Alone and Aloof. But it’s no fun having dinner alone. (The whole piece is well-worth reading if you haven’t already)

Now – there’s only one piece of this that doesn’t work for me as a relatively ‘orthodox’ Christian. It’s not God being all-pervasive, which I think is compelling, nor is it the difficulty this entails with ‘the problem of evil,’ which I think all cosmologies share – no, it actually shows up in the subtle-but-huge difference between Wilber and Michaelson’s depictions of nonduality: For Michaelson, ‘God’ often seems like a descriptor we give to the All – ‘God’ is a figure of speech. Eastern paths – and Western paths that tend to be over-accommodating to them – tend to elevate the impersonal over the personal as the highest insight possible. But for Wilber – in this piece at least – God has agency, and personality.

For me – and perhaps this is a weakness of mine, or perhaps this renders my nonduality and atheist-friendliness to be the thinnest of artifices – God must be personal. And God must be ultimately good - or, love - in the ways in which our deepest intuitions imagine goodness and love to be. Which is why I’m so taken by Jesus, and the imaging of God he depicts – ‘the exact representation of the Father’s being.’ Owning that yes, of course ‘Father’ and even ‘Person’ are projections and anthromorphisms, I can affirm that whatever ‘God’ is,

God must be more than personal – but I can’t agree that God is less than personal.

How can I get all of this to hang, cosmologically? Well I’m not sure, but let me throw a sketch out there, that my most theologically-astute friends can hopefully help me or rebut me on: You know how in Walter Wink’s theology, there’s a ‘spirituality of institutions’? How he posits (in The Powers that Be and everywhere) that “the Angel at the Church of Sardis,” et al, is referring to the collective identity of a particular congregation, which has a kind of supra-personality that includes but transcends the sum of its parts? And you know how Wink proposes that ‘the demonic’ is similarly institutionally personal – an ‘Angel’ who has turned against its reason for being? So that everything from the U.S. Military-Industrial Complex to Coca-Cola to the Church of Peter, Paul, and Mary and #Occupy is a principality and a power – either angelic or demonic, for good or for ill? (If you aren’t familiar with this way of thinking about the biblical witness concerning ‘the powers,’ read Wink‘s books! They’re borne out of both personal experience with the demonic in helping end South African apartheid, as well as careful scholarship. They’re life-changers.) A corporation or a congregation or a popular mass movement seems to exert actions or behaviors that sometimes override the wills of individual members within it – even those who supposedly occupy influential or top-ranking positions within them. It’s as though the sum total of these groups have a will of their own, in a way that projects an aura of personality that transcends the organizational life of the collective.

Well, what if God is like that, relative to the Universe? If the universe is greater than the sum of its parts, the Personality thus generated is God. This could be a very specific God, revealed in one of the great world religions or philosophies, or perhaps fragments revealed in all of them – including atheism. (Sociologist Rodney Stark explores this possibility in Discovering God). This God could exhibit traits intelligible to humans, and could decide to manifest in one or more of any number of ways.

There are, as I see it, epistemological difficulties with this A-Personal-God-is-a-Projection-of-the-Universe idea. Namely the charge that this is simply pantheism writ large – God IS Reality, albeit personal (whereas most pantheists, like most deists, conceive God as most philosophers to – non-personal). Therefore, the pre-existence and transcendence of God is toast in this view. This need not be the inevitable conclusion, however. Because if time, as I understand Einstein, is a byproduct or  co-extensive effect of space, then a God who transcends and includes the sum of the Universe’s parts need not be constrained by all of its strictures. Put another way, words like ‘eternity’ are themselves human creations, and we tend to associate ‘time’ with them when ‘depth’ is closer to their original meaning. Given all that we don’t really understand about quarks, super-strings, and holographic physics, we live in a strange and wonderful Universe that could bear or be borne by a strange and wonderful God.

This is not a ‘God of the gaps’ theory, relying on some sloppy appeal to ‘mystery’ and ‘what we don’t yet know’ to substantiate it. Ultimately, I’m deeply okay if God = The Universe (pantheism), or if God, even while being the personality generated by the Universe, turns out to be in some way outside its strictures and thus ‘transcendent’ over/beyond it (panentheism). Either way, God is All in All, as my Christian Scripture attests in its brightest moments. And either way, a God who emptied Godself in kenosis, and who died rather than seek revenge, who is resurrected nonviolently – this is a God whose ‘weak force’ is strength in a way where ubiquity might as well be non-existence, as ‘existence’ is a category too paltry to contain the Beloved. Instead, we have a Way who empties himself of easy certainty, a pathless path that is co-extensive with life itself. The realization of union with God (which need not come with bells and whistles – only the simple, trusting/experimental acknowledgment) yields a way of seeing in which God is everywhere, and manifest in everything – which might be the true meaning of Bonhoeffer’s ’religionless Christianity,’ a path that is “utterly transparent, colorless, and thus always available.”

Pietism, then, is a frustrating half-measure – a God who is neither everything nor nothing, and is thus a bridge to nowhere – a dead-end of unmet religious longing leading to dangerous fundamentalism on the one hand and impotent liberalism on the other hand. Could it be that the God revealed in Jesus is a God willing to be broken and poured out , and in Pyrrhic resurrection negate into ubiquity, becoming tastable and handle-able by each of us, power distributed to the whole of us rather than a Power-Narrative all too easily abused by the strongest of us?

I can hope. Or at least, wonder.

Recommended Reading:

Naked Spirituality: A Life with God in 12 Simple Words by Brian McLaren
Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening by Diana Butler-Bass
Integral Christianity:  The Spirit’s Call to Evolve by Paul Smith

Not conincidentally, all three of these authors will be sharing at a most unique gathering: Co-Creation 2012: The Great Emergence & The Spirit’s Call to Evolve, hosted by the Servant Leadership School of Greensboro, North Carolina! They’ll be joined by world-class artists and musicians, as well as participants from across the country; come on out and see us this April 12-15th! Register here.

Other good reading on this includes The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See by Richard Rohr, The Wisdom Way of Knowing by Cynthia Bourgeault, If Darwin Prayed: Prayers for Evolutionary Mystics by Bruce Sanguin, and Thank God for Evolution by Michael Dowd.

Other Posts of Potential Interest:

Radical Incarnation: Thoughts on Nondual Spirituality by Matthew Wright
Nondual Week: Ken Wilber on ‘One Taste’
Nondual Week: Panentheism & Interspirituality – What’s Jesus Got to do With It?
Nondual Week: Panentheism – Perichoresis – Christology: Participatory Divinity
Nondual Week: David Henson on ‘How Hinduism Saved My Christian Faith’

and

The Way of the Heart – Cynthia Bourgeault Part 1: What IS the Path of Jesus?
The Way of the Heart – Cynthia Bourgeault Part 2: See What Jesus Sees; Do What Jesus Does
The Way of the Heart Part 3: Cynthia Bourgealt’s Four Proposals – Beyond ‘The Imitation of Christ’
The Way of the Heart Part 4: Heartfulness Practice Transcends & Includes Orthodoxy
The Way of the Heart Part 5: Upgrading Our Operating System
The Way of the Heart Part 6: A Rorschach Blot for the Mind
The Way of the Heart Part 7: When 20/20 Hindsight Becomes Blindsight
The Way of the Heart Interlude: Kenosis Hymn
The Way of the Heart Part 8: Heart Surgery 

Of course, not everyone likes change, or deep wisdom that defies convention, as we’ve been exploring on the blog this week. What follows is a reflection on this from 2008:

You know you’re doing something worthwhile when all the right people are denouncing you.

A couple of weeks ago Herescope denounced Jay Gary, Diana Butler-Bass, Brian McLaren and myself, who will be hanging out at the World Future Society‘s annual conference in D.C. We’ll be talking about “The Future of the Religious Right” and of global Christian faith in general, but the Heroscope team sees our work as promoting “new theologies and practices,” and “disparaging…of biblical prophecy.” Somehow, they suspect that all this winds up “creating an evolutionary convergence” where we all sing Kumbaya and venerate Gaia and Easter bunnies. As if that’s a bad thing!

Moving along: I’ve already told you the kind of flack The Shack has been getting recently with the heresy-hunter websites. Well, as Steve Knight reports at Emergent Village, now our ‘ol pal Mark Driscoll is in on the action too (you can watch his eight-minute YouTube rant on the E.V. link). Apparently he’s mighty uncomfortable with the sacred feminine, relational depictions of God, and the idea of the Trinity (and thus, human relatedness) as mutually submissive rather than chain-of-command hierarchical. Sigh. Co-publisher Wayne Jacobsen blogs his response to the question “Is The Shack Heresy?”

Of course Frank Viola has had his share of critique concerning Pagan Christianity–not all from shrill heresy hunters, but certainly enough of it. Tim Dale over at Karis Productions produced this pretty funny spoof response:

I have two observations about all the shelling and attack from this past month: Most of the people above are friends of mine, and for the most part, we can all laugh this off (in the cases of Frank and Team Shack, they can laugh all the way to the bank, as these books have really struck a chord with most readers and have become best-sellers)–even if we don’t know whether to laugh or cry sometimes. Others, though, are not so fortunate–heresy-hunters can cost people their livelihoods.

I don’t have the privilege of knowing Peter Enns, but his story has been all over the blogosphere recently. As Christianity Today reports, Enns has been suspended from his teaching post at Westminster Theological Seminary for writing his 2005 book Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament, which takes a hard look at the messy, complex, and human aspects of Scripture from an evangelically-informed text criticism point of view. The Board of Trustees said:

“That for the good of the Seminary (Faculty Manual II.4.C.4) Professor Peter Enns be suspended at the close of this school year, that is May 23, 2008 (Constitution Article III, Section 15), and that the Institutional Personnel Committee (IPC) recommend the appropriate process for the Board to consider whether Professor Enns should be terminated from his employment at the Seminary. Further that the IPC present their recommendations to the Board at its meeting in May 2008.”

I understand that confessionally Christian schools are not as enamored with “freedom of thought at any cost” like their liberal arts counterparts; I get that evangelical higher learning institutions are trying to maintain a precarious balance between intellectual integrity and nurturing creedal faith commitments. All the same, Enns is not Bishop Spong or something–he’s asking questions about Holy Writ that the rest of the Church (and world at large) have been asking since the 19th century. Like it or not, those who read and love the Bible are going to begin pondering its more troubling aspects with greater honesty and ideological flexibility.

Heresy-hunting is far from the world’s worst problem. (Next time, I’m going to blog about sex trafficking. Please try to refrain from throwing yourself off a building.) Nonetheless, it is a downer. As I mused last year, sometimes I wonder why I even bother participating in this kind of ‘dialogue’–it all seems so insular. Sometimes I just want to throw my blog into the ocean (so to speak) and becoming a wandering hermit…with my wife and child, of course. But for now, I suppose I’ll leave everyone with an easily-rebuttable maxim: If you don’t have something kind to blog, don’t blog anything at all.

Related:

Mike Todd’s The Shack Film casting call

John MacArthur launches Nothing Must Change tour

Portions of this post were originally published on April 8, 2008

Also in this series:
Resisting the Logic of Heresy-Hunting: A Cautionary Tale
Gutless-Grace Girlieman Inspires Po-Motivators…Story At 11
I’ve Been ‘Sliced! (or, when heresy-hunters attack)

Heresy-hunting is everywhere these days – even in presidential politics. Think what you want of the various candidates (I’ll not go into any stump speeches here), but when a presidential candidate criticizes the current president, not over disagreements in policy, but for “phony theology” as Santorum did Obama, well, you have presidential-level heresy-hunting. Here’s the scoop on that:

Targeting people with different spiritual and religious perspectives with appellations like “phony” and “heretic” has, of course, been going for a long time – arguably since the very existence of religion, but in contemporary times at least since the publication of John MacArthur’s Charismatic Chaos in 1993. A few years ago, it was finally my turn…

Glory be, my day of infamy has arrived–the biggest heresy-hunting ‘blog this side of Ken Silva has targeted little ‘ol me for witchery! Ingrid Schlueter of Slice O’ Laodecia sez (in a piece titled Christian Witchcraft is Here) that my main website, zoecarnate.com, advocates “cool new “Christianity”, including an ad for an emerging conference, and links to all the emerging sites of Dan Kimball, Doug Pagitt, and a host of others listed under the category, “Dispatches from the Great Emergence”.

Guilty! Of everything except being cool. (My wife will tell you that I’m a big nerd, and I still dress funny if she doesn’t have any input.)

Apparently I made the ‘mistake’ of being linked to by a website called RavenWing, whose authors, Charlie and Melody Jenkins, are exploring the tensions and commonalities between neopagan practice and Christian faith. I’ve gotta admit, Ingrid, they have some pretty interesting beliefs. The thing to keep in mind of course is a.) They found me, not vice-versa, and b.) I’d love to hang out with the Jenkins over tea or something, and talk with them about their lives and faith journeys, rather than make some appraisal of their beliefs with the degree of easy finality that you do. I guess that’s just ’cause I’m just soooooooooo emergent. Either that or because I think there’s something to that whole ‘ministers of reconciliation’ thing.

But this isn’t all I’m being Sliced over. Ingrid continues,

“The ZoeCarnate [sic] site is also promoting The Shack as must reading for emerging Christians.”

Interestingly, she draws this connection because of the banners I have up on this blog and my site for the book, not because I’m one of the endorsers easily visible on the back cover. Why, oh why, does Eugene get all the attention? I feel slighted. To apply “eye salve” to this clear oversight (If you’re gonna play guilt-by-association, the heresy-hunters’ favorite game, you can’t miss key links like this), let me clarify just how much I love The Shack. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:

“Finally! A guy-meets-God novel that has literary integrity and spiritual daring. The Shack cuts through the cliches of both religion and bad writing to reveal something compelling and beautiful about life’s integral dance with the divine. This story reads like a prayer–like the best kinds of prayer, filled with sweat and wonder and transparency and surprise. When I read it, I felt like I was fellowshipping with God. If you read one work of fiction this year, let this be it.”

I said it. I believe it. That settles it. : )

Siiiiiiiiiiiiiggh. This isn’t the first time self-proclaimed Christian Watch Doggies have targeted me, and I doubt it’ll be the last. If they only knew the company I keep, the friends I have, and the ideas that run through my mind while invoking Baphomet in my blood-drawn pentagram!

In all seriousness (and c’mon guys, that previous sentence wasn’t, so no fair quoting it as though it was), these folks might be surprised to know that I (and every alt.Christian I know) believe that there is such a thing as harmful or destructive teaching, we do think about our beliefs, and we don’t rip Jude or 2 Peter out of our Bibles. But the warning passages there (and in Timothy and the Gospels) aren’t biblical wax noses that we can bend at whim; there were specific heresies (dualism and legalism) being addressed in the pages of the New Testament. We’d do wise to treat these ‘attack passages’ (as they’ve become) while wearing asbestos gloves, with fear and trembling. We should pray and fast before ever leveling them at a sister or brother in Christ. Our reverence for Holy Writ (and the Holy One whom we confess has inspired it) demands no less.

In other news, the fundies seem to be devouring their own…

The intro to this post is new. The bulk of this was originally posted on Feb 29, 2008

See also Resisting the Logic of Heresy-Hunting: A Cautionary Tale
Gutless-Grace Girlieman Inspires Po-Motivators…Story At 11

It is the latter that has me blogging about ‘em today. This weekend a couple of Phil’s accomplices on the ‘blog posted a particularly incendiary post, indicting (in the courtroom of their enlightened opinions) Jesus-followers participating in the emerging conversation for favoring style over substance, running roughshod over Scripture and the good news of God found in Christ–accusing of us of virtually everything except for eating small puppy dogs. They baited emerging church conversants/practitioners to come in and make our case, with the stated goal of the whole shebang being to reach 1000 comments through the sheer controversy of it all. And I decided to waste my time participate in the thread.

What does this have to do with design? Well, these Pyromaniacs have created a medium of expression all their own, inspired by the Demotivators, called Po-Motivators (see Andrew Jones recap much about Po-Motivators here and here. UPDATE: Andrew has his own response to this Pyro post here.) Well, no fewer than four Po-Motivators were generated by Johnson in response to the comments thread in this post, influenced in part or in toto by yours truly. In Phil’s own words, “Mike Morrell inspires me.”

This is not meant as a compliment.

Without further ado, here are the brand-spanking new images “inspired” by me:

This is a strange tribute indeed from Mr. Johnson. I have “known” him, in a virtual sense, since the early days of the popular-use Web in the late 1990s, when he maintained his Hall of Church History and Theology Bookmarks. Our relationship has really blossomed since then from one vantage point. I mean, back nearly a decade ago he ignored my emails taking him to task for calling Anabaptists violent extremists (he seems to have cleaned up this rhetoric since then) and saying that those of us engaged in house churches “want to play ‘church’ but despise authority.”And now, look how far we’ve come! He’s creating original artistic renderings in my “honor”! I’m speechless.

While I am unable (and unwilling…see below) to respond in kind, bloggers far more design-gifted than I have crafted their own comebacks to these pithy little postcards. Here are a couple:

And so, the question is begged: Is such debate even helpful? Jesus often refused to answer his critics, even refused to defend himself when he was on trial. He could “read” people’s souls, and know when not to bother. (This is buttressed by the whole not casting your pearls before swine thing.) Fools, it seems, rush into ill-advised conversation where angels fear to tread. There is plenty of sound spiritual precedent to hold one’s tongue and not enter the fray.

At the same time, I’m deeply uncomfortable putting myself in the position of “Jesus” by default and fellow Christians–obnoxious though they can be–as “Jesus’ accusers.” This is rather unreflective and un-challenging hermeneutics. Surely, iron sharpens iron and a three-stranded cord isn’t easily broken. Certainly, it is blessed and good when sisters and brothers dwell together in unity–and sometimes, this cannot happen without soul-searching conversation and–indeed–hard confrontation when the occasion calls for it. Vineyard founder John Wimber wrote a helpful paper 15 years ago, Why I Respond to Criticism, that addresses many of the salient issues at stake.

Criticism of the emerging church conversation is nothing new, though it’s actually a bit newer than some of us may realize, as it’s “felt like forever” since we were free from constant cross-examination. But Stephen Shields was able to write accurately at the very end of 2004 that we “have so far been impressed by how generous and restrained critique has been.” The reason was this: from the 1990s onward, different groups of us began quietly rethinking and reimagining what it means to be faithful to God and God’s work on earth in our postmodern context. Because the early thinkers were church planters, ministers who worked with kids, and other “off-the-radar” folks in praxis, at the grass-roots, we weren’t on the map of heresy-hunting “discernment ministries,” who spent the 90s warning conservative Christians about alleged goddess worship in Mainline churches, laughing revival in charismatic churches, and that crazy liberal innovator Chuck Colson and his Evangelicals and Catholics Together initiatives.

But in 2004 all this began to change–Christianity Today did a cover story on us and Brian McLaren was selected as one of the Top 25 Most Influential Evangelical voices in America. While our numbers may not have spiked considerably between ’03 and ’05, suddenly we were news. And that made us open season for all sorts of people. Not even drummers are safe.

I don’t wish to denigrate the sincere concerns of others who weren’t in our prayer meetings, conferences, email discussion lists, and message boards for all these years prior when we were “subterranean.” But in some ways, it’s been difficult to catch them up to the conversation thus far, particularly when they don’t seem to want to listen. (Lord knows I’ve tried!) And really, I don’t want to give my best and most ardent energy trying to define and defend a paradigm of spirituality. As I said in one of my too-many comments in the Team Pyro post, “I just hate [this mode of discourse], for all of us, because our theologies, spiritualities, and praxes become more like a bad rap song, all self-referential instead of singin’ about what we want to sing. Instead of conversing about what we’ve conversing about (or, if you prefer, theologizing), we start conversing about the conversation itself…which is kinda nerdy and boring…this internet thing sucks for handling disputes.”

And that, my friends, is where I’ve come down. It’s not that the Team Pyro folks aren’t my kin in Jesus. It’s not that, were we part of a single, local church, I wouldn’t spend hundreds of hours hearing their concerns and sharing mine, pleading for common heart and direction. (I happen to expend a ton of such energy in my local church, with great reward. I’d take a bullet for these people, and they know that.) But they’re not local, and none of us are particularly invested in one another’s lives and well-being. Either side of this ramped-up debate could easily find thousands of forums online attacking our lives and theologies, and we could expend a lifetime waging verbal warfare with our critics.

But it isn’t worth it, for me, any longer. After this weekend, I feel drained. Like I’ve undergone a serious spiritual attack with nothing to show for it. I don’t say this to demonize the the particular post-ers/commentors on TP. But I think we can all get sucked into a system, a transpersonal grid that has a collective spirit all its own, manipulating the whole in ways its individual parts would never consent to. I believe this is part of what the sent-one Paul meant when he described the church’s opposition to and transformation of the principalities and powers. Mutual love and respect has to precede any truly transformative conversation, and form the basis for any relationship that might later require painful words of exhortation or correction. The connection just ain’ t there, brothers.

As someone once said, Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. Philippians 4:8

There are literally thousands of blogs updated daily that stimulate, challenge, and edify with spiritual explorations into the heights, depth and breadth of knowing Jesus Christ, loving God and neighbor. Why should I have submit to such spiritual sadomasochism, treading in areas where I know wounded people hang out to inflict further pain on one another? As our apparently-patron saint Bono sings in “One,”

You ask me to enter
But then you make me crawl
And I can’t be holding on
To what you got
When all you got is hurt

I can’t keep holding on, brothers. And–with God’s grace–I won’t, any longer. I will stick around, if needed, to respond to any comments on that particular Team Pyro post, but–for my integrity and theirs–I can no longer be a party to this level of discourse.

If you find yourself to be a misfit, ragamuffin friend of Jesus, worn-out by religious rhetoric and in need of some kindness and renewing mercy, I leave you the following benediction: An encouragement from one of the more gracious of the postcard replies, appropriately, from Emerging Grace:

This was originally posted on September 3, 2007

See also Resisting the Logic of Heresy-Hunting: A Cautionary Tale