Recent reading from Peter Rollins

I read this yesterday in his book, How (Not) to Speak of God:

In a world where following Christ is decreed to be a subversive and illegal activity you have been accused of being a believer, arrested, and dragged before a court.

You have been under clandestine surveillance for some time now, and so the prosecution has been able to build up quite a case against you. They begin the trial by offering the judge dozens of photographs that show you attending church meetings, speaking at religious events, and participating in various prayer and worship services. After this, they present a selection of items that have been confiscated from your home: religious books that you own, worship CDs, and other Christian artifacts. Then they step up the pace by displaying your many poems, pieces of prose, and journal entries that you had lovingly written concerning your faith. Finally, in closing, the prosecution offers your Bible to the judge. This is a well-worn book with scribbles, notes, drawings, and underlings throughout, evidence, if it were needed, that you had read and re-read this sacred text many times.

Throughout the case you have been sitting silently in fear and trembling. You know deep in your heart that with the large body of evidence that has been amassed by the prosecution you face the possibility of long imprisonment or even execution. At various times throughout the proceedings you have lost all confidence and been on the verge of standing up and denying Christ. But while this thought has plagued your mind throughout the trial, you resist the temptation and remain focused.

Once the prosecution is finished presenting their case the judge proceeds to ask if you have anything to add, but you remain silent, resolute, terrified that if you open your mouth, even for a moment, you might deny the charges made against you. Like Christ, you remain silent before your accusers. In response you are led outside to wait as the judge ponders your case.

The hours pass slowly as you sit under guard in the foyer waiting to be summoned back. Eventually a young man in uniform appears and leads you into the courtroom so that you may hear the verdict and receive word of your punishment. Once you have been seated in the dock the judge, a harsh and unyielding man, enters the room, stands before you, looks deep into your eyes and begins to speak,

“Of the charges that have been brought forward I find the accused not guilty.”

“Not guilty?” your heart freezes. Then, in a split second, the fear and terror that had moments before threatened to strip your resolve are swallowed up by confusion and rage.

Despite the surroundings, you stand defiantly before the judge and demand that he give an account concerning why you are innocent of the charges in light of the evidence.

“What evidence?” he replies in shock.

“What about the poems and prose that I wrote?” you reply.

“They simply show that you think of yourself as a poet, nothing more.”

“But what about the services I spoke at, the times I wept in church and the long, sleepless nights of prayer?”

“Evidence that you are a good speaker and actor, nothing more.” Replied the judge, “It is obvious that you deluded those around you, and perhaps at times you even deluded yourself, but this foolishness is not enough to convict you in a court of law.”

“But this is madness!” you shout. “It would seem that no evidence would convince you!”

“Not so,” replies the judge as if informing you of a great, long-forgotten secret.

“The court is indifferent towards your Bible reading and church attendance; it has no concern for worship with words and a pen. Continue to develop your theology, and use it to paint pictures of love. We have no interest in such armchair artists who spend their time creating images of a better world. We exist only for those who would lay down their brush, and their life, in a Christlike endeavor to create a better world. So, until you challenge this system and become a thorn in our side, until you die to yourself and offer your body to the flames, until then, my friend, you are no enemy of ours.”

Jesus and The Conceptualized Self

There is an idea in psychology known as the conceptualized self. This has also been described as the ego, but because of some of the confusion around ego structure and how it works we will stick with the conceptualized self for now (perhaps there will be a future blog about ego structure). This conceptualized self is who you think you are, your defenses of those thoughts, and all the narcissism tied in. Your mind adapts to thinking that it is the entirety of your being and its survival is paramount. To quote Brad Blanton: "Once the mind has decided that itself is what must survive, its survival comes from being right at any cost...by getting agreement and not disagreement from other minds...[from] being right and avoiding being wrong. This narcissistic preoccupation with itself, its own survival, necessitates defense of its assessments, judgements, decisions, stories, products and creations."- Radical Parenting, pp141-142. We trick ourselves that our value is based on our performance, our acheivement and our ambition. THAT is the conceptualized self, and it is not who you are. Eastern philosophy and religions have tapped into these ideas and have come up with a inadequate solution to the conceptualized self--ridding oneself of desire and ambition, and becoming one with the cosmos (yes this is a simplified picture for time's sake). The idea is ridding yourself of a conceptualization of who you are for a lack of identity, or identifying with everything else (which, to me, eliminates distinction, therefore lack of identity). I agree with Eastern philosophy that we must destroy our conception of self, but we cannot move on without identity.

This is where Jesus comes in. I think Jesus takes this idea and epitomizes both the destruction of "conceptualized self" and adoption of a real self. The reason I put conceptualized self in quotation marks in the previous sentence, is that I am not sure Jesus ever conceptualized himself as other than he truly was. I think Jesus understood himself fully. I think, though, that he demonstrated the hallmarks of conceptualized self destruction. He rid himself of selfish ambition--his only ambition was to obey the father. His temptation by Satan in the desert was tempting his ambition. His miracles were never out of self-service, only service to others. In a time when everyone seemed to want him to be an earthly king (a position of achievement), he destroys that, by not only allowing his body to be killed, but taking on the sins of mankind. He effectively makes it possible for us to destroy our conceptualized selves. See, without atonement for our sin our identity is fixed--sinners condemned to death. He makes the necessary sacrifice to allow us to adopt a new identity--the one we were created to be. The Father conceptualizes us is what we really are--his beloved children. Children should be loved without regard to their performance, their acheivement--they are loved for being. This is how God loves us.

Finally, my friend says the purpose of life is knowing oneself. I believe he is more right than he knows. However, one cannot know oneself outside of relationships, otherwise that person would have no objectivity, and therefore accuracy, in knowing self. If relationship is necessary to know oneself, what better relationship to establish than with someone who knows you better than anyone, the one who created and loves you for who you are, not what you do.

A few years later...

the needle bw
Originally uploaded by phil32581

I returned to the Sangre de Christo Range last weekend to complete some unfinished business. This peak (Crestone Needle) has been the bane of my existence for three years. I have tried it once a year for the last three years without victory. This weekend was different. I finally stood atop my 45th fourteener.

At times in my life it is hard for me to feel God's delight in me as His son. I understand that His love for me does not change, but my ability to be in touch with that fluctuates. Particularly when things don't go to the plan I imagined or hoped for, I wonder about His love. It is in these mountains that I regain the knowledge and feeling of His delight in me. Sometimes I picture Him creating these peaks thinking specifically of me and the day that I will climb one and praise His name with those with me. I return down to earth and hold on to that feeling and knowledge in the hopes that I can feel and know in the mundane, everyday experience that I take for granted.

tent life continues... with a new addition.

Okay, I know that I haven't exactly been keeping this up. Sorry about that. I am still tenting it up. It has been a cold winter and I have taken a couple weeks off to house break my new puppy before bringing him into my expensive tent where I sleep. He is a pure-bred Golden Retriever male named Tenzing. He is named after the Sherpa mountaineer who assisted Edmund Hillary to the top of Mount Everest in 1953. My hope is that he will be a great trail partner and friend.
Tent life, in response to one of my readers, is my choice for a year to live more simply. I have saved some money, but that is not the point of this experiment. It has been difficult, and at times, inconvenient. I have learned a lot about myself in the process, especially what I truly need and what I don't.

MTV and me

So I spent my birthday yesterday wrting a 15 page paper on Hebrews 10:26-31. It is a frequently cited passage to say that one could lose their salvation. Salvation is not a set of keys!

I won't get into that, but I stopped in the middle of writing this to watch some television and happened upon MTV. There was a show called "My super sweet 16". The basic premise is this: a rich girl is turning 16 and the cameras follow her and her idiot parents around to watch them spend literally hundreds of thousands of dollars for a one night party celebrating this spoiled girl's birthday. I watched some schmuck of a dad spend 200,000 on a one of a kind H2 for his little girl, who wanted a vending machine installed in the back of it.

Besides making me want to scream, this show did make me think. I began to wonder if MTV is much more subversive than I am giving them credit for. Maybe their intention in a show like this is to actually decrease materialism in American culture. The reason I can tentatively conclude this is because there is no way any sane person could watch this show and walk away in any other state of mind than being pissed off at our culture's materialism. I know that I am not necessarily representative of all the people in this country, but I still think I am somewhat normal. However, I have recently decided to make some changes that others might see as abnormal.

By the end of June I will be moved into a tent. I have decided to sell or give away most of my clothes, and extraneous possessions. That's right, the iPod must go. So must everything else with the exception of 2 suits, normal clothes (enough to last me a week's time) and my technical gear. I will keep my car (at least for now) and my cell phone (although I would like to rid myself of it). This decision has very little to do with watching spoiled little girls celebrate. It actually comes at the end of reading a book called The Last American Man. In this book, a man named Eustace Conway leaves civilization in 1977 to live in the woods for the rest of his life. It got me thinking, why am I paying someone to provide a service (housing) to me that I am fully capable of providing myself with? There is no good reason. And so I am going to remedy myself of this situation. I will live out of my pack and tent until I can afford to buy land. I will document this with my camera--one of few possessions I intend to keep.

Theology:Christology

I am taking another section of intensive theology this January term. Here is an interesting concept. There is a gap that exists between God and man. It is a two part gap: part moral, part metaphysical. The moral part is that because God is holy, He cannot tolerate sin. He therefore is seperated from us, hence the gap. The metaphysical part of the gap has always been there, even without sin present. God is an infinite eternal being, whereas humans are finite and temporal.
Here is the genius of the incarnation of God in Christ. Jesus bridged the gap completely. He became a finite temporal being, suffered the life of a finite being and became the substitutionary sacrifice to pay for the moral part of the gap, our sin.

On Psychology and Christianity

Psychology and Christianity. All you have to do is google these terms together and find that there is an ongoing debate on "Psychoheresy" and Christianity. I am sure most people who know me will probably know where I stand in this debate. I believe that over the history of the church we have gained alot from allowing science to inform our beliefs: the earth's roundness, its revolution around the sun to name a couple. But there are people who oppose science as having any kind of say in shaping our understanding of humans or (heaven forbid) God. People have been threatened and killed (by the church) for claiming the above statements about our earth. I believe that Psychology is a valid science that has something legitimate to say about humans, what they were created to be, and who their creator is. Is there anyone out there who disagrees? If so, please comment. What takes precendence in integrating psychology and Christianity? How do you determine that?