Sunday, July 13, 2008

Blue Like Jazz: Donald Miller

As a Jazz Musician, I found it disappointing to find Miller's book had little or nothing to do with Jazz. I've read too much Christian literature lately, and Miller's book is another in a long line of tired attempts to modernize American Christianity beyond its "conservative traditional" mystique. I have commented elsewhere in this blog on Emergent Christianity, and how impressive it is that given its assumptions each of us could in fact become our own Church, with our own sense of Church authority, whatever that might mean for any particular individual, I'm not sure.

I have often observed that both Right and Left winged American Evangelical Christianity are children of Emerson with different emphasis. The choruses they sing are Walt Whitman's Song of Myself where "Jesus" is a metaphor of "myself." The preaching is Emerson's monumental Self Reliance: the principle essay that still moves American politics both Right and Left, despite the fact that fewer and fewer of us have read it.

Miller is just another in a long line of American self invented Christians. One must admire his poetry, and good humor and his writing style. He has his own "particularism" reminiscent of Anne Lamott, or even Victor Hugo, but with a Christian twist. Miller is thoughtful, modern, and "real." I mean "real" in the sense of how any self invented twenty or thirty something wants to think of themselves as "real" these days. Which probably means half-digested truths applied to a bumper sticker that seeks to be more profound than that. I suppose one could call it "post-modern" as numerous reviews I read of it did. But post-modern is a much brandied about term in Christian circles, and I seriously doubt any of them have ever read Lyotard.

What would Emerson have made of Miller and his fellow emergents? I think perhaps he would approve of the contradictions inherent in Miller's framework as much as he would like the over-all freedom of it. If Christianity is "blue like Jazz," than it also necessarily is as individual, personal, and free to be whatever it happens to be. "Everybody sings their song the way they feel it. Everybody lifts up their hands."

In the end its not a question of intellect but one's own personal experience. It is always about the self, yet Miller in Anne Lamott fashion, with good humor, dismisses his self's ability to make a clear judgement. Only an American Christian can be so self driven while insisting the self is no longer relevant. Miller writes "The most difficult lie I ever contended with is this: life is a story about me." Yet Walt Whitman has his revenge after-all as Miller's profound journey is in the nether regions of his self awareness. The problems of the world are not out there, but inside Miller himself "The needy thing in his chest." What can set it free other than a new self alignment? That in the end is his prescription and I can only shake my head in awe of the audacity of it all.

American Christians like Miller are selfish selves, who humble themselves, give of themselves to God, who also lives in them and contends with themselves. God gets all the glory but he lives with-in them. Does the self reap the glory in the end? I suspect that it does.

Miller recounts humorous experiences of Individuals undergoing a "God thing." Can they ever separate the self from the God? Such a question is necessarily alien to them, as the nuances of their language allow a strange "knowing" distinction. Such a knowing is the "spark" or the "gnostic" urge so celebrated by Walt Whitman and Emerson, which can also be found in Kabbalah.

The God with-in apprehends the God with-out, or so Emerson thought. I love the poetry, though I fear the social/political consequences are something else. The nuances of doctrine are no longer necessary in Miller, only the particulars of situation. One of my favorite Emerson quotes is: "Our prayers are the disease of the will, and our creeds the disease of the intellect." Would Miller go that far? I suspect he would. Only an Emersonian Christian could somehow appropriate at least the last half of this formulation, the way Miller does. My hat is off to him and his audacious quest. Is it freedom he gains? I often wonder, is it freedom for the self? Or from other selves? I suspect the later, despite emergent Christian protestations to the contrary.

This book will last a short period in American consciousness as the Christian Church undergoes another metamorphosis, with an increasing hunger for the "fresh" perspectives. The sentiments of Miller, which belong to Emerson and Walt Whitman are timeless and have so infected Leftward Evangelical Christianity that I can scarcely distinguish them.

Saturday, March 15, 2008

The Quest of The Historical Jesus: Albert Schweitzer

I have been away from this blog for a while, due mostly to difficult life circumstances, but now I return to it. I have received some emails regarding previous posts; I try to respond as quickly as I can.

Of all the questers I've read, Schweitzer stands as the most poignant. This book in particular is probably essential reading for theologians, pastors, serious Christians, and skeptics. Since it was published in 1911, it has stood as a landmark book. In the study of Jesus, no scholar can completely ignore Schweitzer. He writes:

“The critical study of the life of Jesus has been for theology a school of honesty. The world had never seen before, and will never see again, a struggle for truth so full of pain and renunciation as that of which the lives of Jesus of the last hundred years contain the cryptic record…

Schweitzer begins his critique with an astounding survey of all of the German scholarship on Jesus, taking us through the Eschatology focus of Reimarus, the early rationalists, the fictitious lives, Paulus, Strauss, Bauer, Renan, and finally Wrede.

N.T. Wright, and other so-called “third questers” are often credited for comprehending Jesus in his Jewish context. Yet many of them owe their views to Schweitzer who was among the first to try to place Jesus in his Jewish surroundings.

Schweitzer, more than anyone else at the time, summed up the basic point of German scholarship, and concluded that the Jesus of history was quite alien to the Jesus of faith. Like almost all scholars, he wrestles with the enigma of Jesus as presented in the book of Mark, and concludes that Jesus—and thus Christianity was shaped more by the failure of the Parousia (the second coming) to take place. Jesus in his own lifetime expected a dramatic eschatological occurrence of redemption and salvation for Israel, which failed to come. His disciples chose to see the redemption in his death, and later his resurrection.

The whole history of “Christianity” down to the present day, that is to say, the real inner history of it, is based on the delay of the Parousia, the non-occurrence of the Parousia, the abandonment of eschatology, the progress and completion of the ‘de-eschatological’ of religion, which has been connected therewith. (p.358)

Schweitzer was among the first to recognize and historically trace a dramatic disappointment in Christianity, underneath its message of universal triumph.

There is nothing more negative than the result of the critical study of the life of Jesus….the historical Jesus will be to our time a stranger and an enigma. The study of the Life of Jesus…set out in quest of the historical Jesus, believing that when it had found Him, it could bring Him straight into our time as a Teacher and Saviour. It loosed the bands by which He had been riveted for centuries to the stony rocks of ecclesiastical doctrine, and rejoiced to see life and movement coming into the figure once more, and the historical Jesus advancing, as it seemed, to meet it. But He does not stay; He passes by our time and returns to His own. What surprised and dismayed the theology of the last forty years was that despite, all forced and arbitrary interpretations, it could not keep Him in our time, but had to let him go.

Schweitzer the historian realizes that it is not the study of History that can discover Jesus, he writes:

“History can destroy the present; it can reconcile the present with the past; can even to a certain extent transport the present into the past; but to contribute to the making of the present is not given unto it.”

Schweitzer at spiritual odds with his historical conclusions recognizes a kind of sincerity, which feels to him like truth.

Jesus means something to our world because a mighty spiritual force streams forth from Him and flows through our time also. This fact can neither be shaken nor confirmed by any historical discovery. It is the solid foundation of Christianity.

With a kind of anguish, Schweitzer recognizes the temptation for the reader to read himself into Jesus’ life.

It is nothing less than a misfortune for modern theology that it mixes history with everything and ends by being proud of the skill with which it finds its own thoughts.

Many of Schweitzer’s views have been disproved, by modern scholarship. He did not have access to the Dead Sea Scrolls, and one wonders what he would make of their cryptic resemblances to the New Testament. Yet, he stands as the most important Jesus scholar of the 20th century. Schweitzer was a great man, a wonderful musician, a missionary, and a winner of the Nobel Prize. It was as if he thought of St. Paul in First Corinthians 13, and the moving poem he quotes of love, hope, and faith, but the greatest of these is love. After an incredibly vigorous and poignant historical survey, Schweitzer had no faith, no hope. But he retained love.