Jesus of Nazareth, Sublimator

This is perhaps not gut-bustingly funny, but I saw another curious description of Jesus in an abstract today:

Arguably the New Testament Gospels – not least, the Gospel of John – are essentially narrative and theological documents which together envisage and seek to actualize a new humanity and created order of things. These distinctive yet mutually interpretative texts depict a protagonist, Jesus of Nazareth, whose misunderstood identity and mission disclose and enact a reign of God which subverts and sublimates the status quo. All merely self-serving human agendas – social, political, religious, and otherwise – are radically reconfigured around Jesus’ self-sacrificial death and resurrection, the pivotal point within an unfolding economy of God which entails the remaking of humanity and the world.

What does sublimate mean if you have a science background? To sublimate is to change a solid directly into a vapour, or vice versa, without passing through a liquid state. This is a strange operation for anyone, even Jesus, to perform on the status quo. Other likely unintended meanings of sublimate (from the OED) include raising to a high(er) place or state; transmuting into something nobler, more sublime or refined; and directing instinctual energy, especially sexual, so it is manifested in more socially acceptable ways. The best meaning I can find is “to refine away into something unreal or non-existent,” but I suspect this is a case where alliteration got out of hand.

Jesus’ Security Detail

On the one hand, I appreciate the need for church safety policies and practices; on the other hand, I’m really not sure how take the tone of this article that caught my eye on the journal rack yesterday. Some highlights from “Safety in the Sanctuary” in the July/August issue of Preaching, which starts by recalling the murder of Rev. Fred Winters in his church this past March, then some statistics and a warning:

Churches are increasingly falling victim to violent acts by individuals, usually male, 25 to 60 years old, who are angry with God and the church and see a church as an easy target. … A poll conducted by churchsolutionsmag.com in March showed 67 percent of its respondents said their churches were going to increase security, and 14 percent wished they could but lacked the necessary resources. The remaining 19 percent of those surveyed indicated they felt the shootings were isolated incidents and did not feel pressure to increase security.

The latter is a dangerous view to hold, though, say church security experts. Jeffrey Hawkins is the executive director of the Christian Security Network. His organization tracks church incidents on a daily basis that “cost lives and hundreds of thousands of dollars in monetary losses,” he says. “God tells us in the Bible to foresee danger and plan ahead and to be good stewards of what He gives us. As pastors have told us, it is the moral, ethical and biblical thing to do.”

An acknowledgment this may seem atypical for churches follows:

“Churches have been the last place to want to restrict access and appear unwelcoming,” says Strauch. “However, because of this they are now the most vulnerable and at the greatest risk for a person of violence to act.”

Three steps to get started thinking about security, including:

Does your state allow concealed weapons in a place of worship? Can a volunteer with a concealed weapons permit serve on your security team, or must he or she be licensed as a security professional by the state and on the church’s payroll for liability reasons.

A measured yet wary response is best:

Rodgers says churches need to have a plan in place to handle “simple disruptions” to the church program. These could include noisy cell phone users, a baby crying during the service or a person wandering through the sanctuary looking for friends he or she wants to sit with. “None of these require a SWAT team, but each could be better handled with a prepared plan of how the church wants these disruptions cared for,” says Rodgers. …

“Put some trust in the ‘Holy Hunch’ or DLR [Doesn’t Look Right],” advises Rodgers. “If a greeter or a staff member becomes wary of a visitor, a point needs to be made to speak to that person and gather more information. It may be someone to keep an eye on, or it may be someone just so uncomfortable in church that he doesn’t know what to do and needs some help.”

A strong, experienced security team is key:

“Churches need someone who is both sold out on the Lord and very experienced. They keep the correct balance of making sure ministry happens the way it needs to happen and still keep one eye open for trouble.”

At Houston’s First Baptist, Andy Rodgers says their team includes uniformed private security and law enforcement officers as well as plain-clothes security professionals. Other volunteers have important roles, such as helping plan and prepare security policies, serving as ushers and greeters, patrolling hallways and parking lots during service times and providing pastor assistance during services that does not include security intervention.

Rodgers believes it’s important for churches to first use existing law enforcement officers and security professionals if possible. “You’re asking someone to do a task that is very specialized and will likely require him to a make an instant decision on how to handle an issue that could involve someone’s life,” he says. “This can be a tough call under the best of conditions, which this will almost certainly not be. There isn’t time to call a meeting or ask a couple of others what they might do. It’s good to have a person in the hot seat who can quickly draw from his own knowledge and experiences on what actions may be needed.”

The article ends with stories about how Focus on the Family and New Life Church in Colorado Springs are handling security:

At the time, the entire security team was made up of volunteers (New Life has since created a staff position for a Director of Life Safety). It was decided that a small group of the team would be armed as part of their safety responsibilities, though that fact was never advertised or made public. “We knew that if a violent offender ever came into the church, we wanted to be able to respond appropriately,” explains Chinn.

What do you think? Is all this perfectly normal, ‘realistic’ behaviour for a church? Or are there reasons (say, Jesus’ arrest and twenty centuries of Christian martyrdom) to wonder about the theology at work here?

Update: The freelance author of the article, Sara Horn, has a military spouse blog.

How to Understand Hauerwas on The Enlightenment

The beginning of a sermon in Hauerwas’ new collection, A Cross Shattered Church: Reclaiming the Theological Heart of Preaching:

The story I learned in school, the story that is shaped the world in which you and I live, in broad outline goes like this: we are the climax; we have inherited the achievements of a succession of civilizations. From the Hebrews we learned to leave behind polytheism and most forms of religious superstition. From the Greeks we have been taught the power of reason through the development of philosophy and the beginnings of science. These achievements were given new power by Christians who, drawing on both Jewish and Greek sources, transformed the Roman empire to create what we now call Western civilization.

Unfortunately the story of progress was sidetracked for centuries by what is called the Middle Ages or, more pejoratively, the Dark Ages. During those dark times the human spirit was suppressed by an authoritarian religious regime that legitimated repressive forms of political rule. But with the Reformation the freedom essential to human development was rediscovered. That freedom found political expression through the American and French revolutions.

The pivotal moment in these developments is called the Enlightenment. This name marks the time, a time beginning with eighteenth century, we learned, in the words of Kant’s famous slogan, to “have the courage to use our own reason.” Through the use of reason, moreover, we have found the means to free ourselves from the limits of nature, disease, and death.

America is the name that sums up these developments. We are the society and politics, a democratic politics, which exemplifies this birth of human freedom, this movement from darkness to light. We are, as it says in the dollar, novus ordo seclorum, the New Order of Ages. As Americans we are aware that we have yet to be all we should like to be, but we are confident that if any people deserve the description “enlightened,” it is the American people.

Our enlightened status is only confirmed because we understand that the story I have told is far too simple. For example, we know that not everything about the Dark Ages was dark. We know the Greeks as well as many of those identified with the Enlightenment had slaves. Yet our ability to identify the wrongs of the past assumes the broad outline of the story I have told is true. We simply cannot imagine living in any other world. (33-4)

Hauerwas goes on to say how, as an academic theologian, he is a servant of the university and by extension the Enlightenment, and is therefore naturally unable to understand Jesus’ explanation to his disciples of why the man was born blind, much less see Jesus:

Learning to see Jesus entails a training that challenges our presumption that we are already in the light. The man born blind is able to see Jesus because he had the advantage of being born blind. We fail to see Jesus because we have the disadvantage of being enlightened. It turns out, moreover, that we cannot will our way out of our enlightened darkness. Rather, we must be confronted by a light so brilliant that we are able to see the darkness our pride mistakes as light. (35)

Hauerwas then preaches 1 Samuel 16:1-13, Ephesians 5:8-14, and John 9:1-41 quite forcefully while continuing to draw contrasts with the story of the Enlightenment he outlined:

I am not suggesting that everything about that story is evil, wrong, or false. Rather, I am suggesting that, as people shaped by that story, we are going to need all the help we can get if we are to discern, as Paul argues we must, what it means to live in the light of Jesus and to be that light for the world. The great challenge is not how we can fit Jesus into the story of the Enlightenment, but how the story the Enlightenment is to be judged by Jesus. For let us confess that our story, the self-congratulatory story of our enlightened status, can make it difficult for us to see and worship Jesus. We want Jesus to confirm what we have learned from a world that cannot believe that the Father would redeem the world through the gift of the Son. … If we are to be the light of Christ we must have our lives illuminated by those Christians who have other stories to tell than the story we tell of our enlightened status as Americans. (38-9)

In his introduction Hauerwas quotes John Marsh as arguing that a better question for understanding Karl Barth is not “How does this theology preach?” but “What sort of preaching lies behind this kind of theology?” Despite how late he seems to have come to value preaching and publishing his sermons, this is perhaps the greatest key to understanding Hauerwas’ oft-criticized rhetoric against the Enlightenment. Yes, the Enlightenment was good in many respects; yet it still must be written against today, insofar as its very name encapsulates our self-congratulation and pride. Of course, to those within the grasp of this story, any attack on our enlightened status will come across as hubris. But what Milbank, Hauerwas, and many other theologians seem to agree on is the necessity of doing so, to begin to expose our self-deception and subsequent complicity in the evils of the past few centuries. Indeed, our self-satisfied story of superiority over all previous epochs too easily translates into our continued domination, exploitation, and aggression towards those who do not share our story today, because they have not been enlightened as we have (Muslims, for example.) We are, truly, blinded by the light.

(This also seems to illustrate how buzzwords like “Emergent,” despite claims of novelty, actually help maintain the same self-congratulatory story of progress and Enlightenment.)