Why the Parade?

So, why did I think this was so important now? This is what drove me. And I may be just as deceived as anyone I would disagree with but hear me out.

In the North American political milieu, we Christians are a Fifth Column against the "responsible government" (Canadian term) and "republican government" (US constitutional, not the partisan term) that, until recently, has done so much to make it so much more possible for so many of our neighbours to survive and thrive. This traitorous orientation must end. Now.

I have described myself, in part, as a Vineyardized Anabaptist, and in that Vineyardized context, I have seen too much willingness to adopt the leaders from the "right wing" in the US (increasingly with an autocratic bent) because they have been touted by leadership of one kind or another as God's man for the hour, whatever that hour currently is, and then approved of no matter what they do. This habit extends before that time to the ascendancy of Guatemala's Ríos Montt who was praised then as God's man for that place at that hour. He has since been contestedly convicted of being the cause of genocide of indigenous folks there. At the very least his leadership style allowed the military to commit the crimes, that much seems incontrovertible and something he admitted to.

Again, in my memory, this happened with Bush 43 being called a "Burning Bush" a symbol of God's blessing, and many American friends voted for him. In the present times, too many of the people I loved and trusted in non-political-matters have similarly been univocal in support of the criminal kleptocracy to the south. And they have come out against effective civic response to a pandemic (in the name of FREEDOM! and becoming super-spreaders and adherents of various quack-cures -- to the detriment of others that I also love). They continue to dismiss the unfolding global catastrophe of anthropogenic climate change both there and here in my own country -- earlier that it was even happening, now often just as vociferously that people aren't causing it.

Folks, we're being stupid. We're being consistently stupid. We're being invincibly ignorant (even if we're of the party that accuses everybody but themselves of that folly). Since the first days of the New Deal, the rich and powerful, who resented that imperfect implementation of a people's policy agenda (it reinforced certain sexist and racist harms), they have done everything they could to scuttle it and they turned us into a fifth column from the beginning in order to accomplish that.

They started by injecting anti-New Deal ideas into Christian preaching (I heard my own father expound their injected themes in a call to a serious and holy life).

In the days of Nixon, they turned the whole Christian world against abortion (before that time, the Baptists came out in support of abortion, and groups of nuns performed abortions so that the poor women around them would not die in the rooms of incompetent back-lane "clinics").

They called themselves pro-life while accelerating the nuclear arms race and fluffing capital punishment. (Recognizing this structural contradiction in High School was the first nudge away from the conservatism I was raised up in. As more and more such structural lies were exposed, it was only a matter of time before I rejected the whole agenda)

And they've kept pushing ever since: for instance promoting toxic masculinity in the name of God-ordained authority structures. Because it suited them. Because the ascendancy of these doctrines made us easier to hold in their sway.

These things are not a matter for debate. They are well documented in

• Kevin Kruse's "One Nation Under God?"
• in Kristen Kobes du Mez's "Jesus and John Wayne"
• in Robert Jones' "White Too Long".

And we leavened this toxic mess further with the three preceding follies that built up an expectation of a hero-deliverer. I'm not saying Jesus isn't our deliverer (as Christians, individually, or as his people, or for the whole of humanity) or that he isn't our hero. He's just not a nationalist hero, nor a temporally violent deliverer.

I'm asserting that he is the same today as he was when he walked the earth the first time. When he said, "don't you know I could call down 12 legions of angels" but he did not; when he made sure the disciples had swords in the garden but barred them from using them further, how can we find a "no more Mr. Nice Guy" future iteration remotely credible?

Here's how: Because lifelong, centuries long, history and pre-history long, in culture before it could be called culture we've had hierarchy and domination and we don't know how to accommodate or expect something different. And this must change.

Peter Thiel likes to quote/invoke René Girard and Tolkien in his philosophy but he misapplies them both. Jesus, in embracing being the victim and not exacting revenge on us opened the way for humanity to escape from the pattern of redemptive violence that Girard documented and described. It continues, to this day, and indeed, the church uses it as well -- but it ought not to; when it does, it resembles the beast from the earth in Revelation 13.11. And where it does, there it grows least quickly, it is in danger of dying on the vine in the long haul.

Where it does not embrace this madness, it grows even if it must do so from seeds that have been slain and buried (John 12.24).

Either way, the fruit, whether bitter or nourishing endures.

Where the price is not death itself, but rather the laying down privilege and position, we fail to do that at risk of losing the plot of the story we claim allegiance to. And in North America, many whom I love dearly, 'neath whose roof I have sheltered, at whose tables I have been refreshed are doing just that.

Insisting on the right to hurl insults and calling the resulting recrimination, or exclusion, or fines or penal sentence "persecution" and it is not: we have lost the plot.

Espousing the least merciful, most vengeful, least generous, most exacting legal, fiscal policies (why the Ten Commandments, when they have been superseded by exactly Two?), we have lost the plot.

Bolstering the chorus of jingo and nationalism mixed with the most vile racist, sexist, classist, ableist, otherizing filters of Who Belongs In, we have lost the plot.

The rich and powerful have had their way with our headspace for too long and we need to turn away from their voices -- never mind the voices of those who want only to sow chaos so as to make us still easier for autocrats to take over entirely -- for their own purpose and not just for those of our rich neighbours.

This self-deception, this choosing to be gaslit must end now. It's hurting our neigbours, it's hurting our world, and in the end it will hurt, even kill, us and our children as well. And turning away from these voices must include returning to caring about character so that whatever political party seems to reflect your values best overall, miscreants like Donald J. Trump and his whole grifting clan, like Jair Bolsonaro, like Viktor Orbán must not be permitted to gain or hold power, and instead of allowing ourselves to be inflamed by Rumsonist<1> diatribes to voting to "get it all back the way it was", we need to vote and advocate for policies and positions that will do the most good to the most of our neighbours (listening to how they see that good with as much mercy and compassion as can justly be granted -- and "unsanctified mercy" isn't as much of a problem as some may make of it), human or otherwise, turning away, as we have been commanded to do, from fear, from greed, from grasping, from trying to hold on to what we view as our own. Everything temporal like that, we only ever hold in trust, anyway. Let's fulfill our trust responsibly and for the benefit of all, not exclusively for our own selfish benefit (James 4:1-4).

This bent toward autocracy Must. End. Now. Before it ends us. That is why I wanted to publish these pieces now,

This enduring mass of madness is the thing that weighs on my mind the most. It has done so my whole life in one form or another, though when I was young I did not understand what it was.

It has done so consciously and increasingly, as I could name it and understand it, and see its tentacles wrapping around so much that I love and tainting all of it to some extent. There is precious little I can do more than watch and pray that we would escape this madness. So asking that it end is, in one way self-serving. Only, I am convinced that ending it will do all of us, and all those around us great good. So I will persist.

When I first conceived of my three answering follies to Wright's widely encompassing set, I did not see that as a potential blow against this scourge, nor when I wrote the initial drafts of the summaries describing what he meant with his two word summaries -- that might not be comprehensible to most of the Jesus Followers of my acquaintance -- as an intro to my three, even more opaque because I am not the scholar that Tom is, I did not see that as a potential blow either.

But that it might be such a blow occurred to me this spring, so I resolved to present them all, although until now, I have kept these thoughts to myself, my family, my closest companions alone.

Against this scourge, all I can do may have no more weight than shouting from a cliff-top could be seen as an assault on the canyon from which the shout echoes. But it is what I can do here. Now. If it encourages others to take up that shout, great. If it fires up others to notice and take a similar stand, then these little motes will have begun to do what I could hope for. That this would be the beginning of the end of the madness, I won't even dare to dream. But I will hope.

Against, this madness, "I will not cease from mental fight, nor shall my [pen] sleep in my hand..." until mind moulder with age or moral fatigue claim me completely. God grant that this shall not be, or at least that it shall not be soon.
---
<1> I couldn't avoid one footnote at least could I? This is a reference to "Bob Rumson" the character decried in the final speech of Sorikin's film, "The American President", who doesn't want to fix things, but to make you scared of them and tell you whom to blame for them.

Parade of Follies -- Imperializing the Parousia

And here comes the last "float" in the parade. Maybe by the end of this you'll see where this is going? I'm still working on composing the "trailer" piece for this. I had it in two pages but once there was a satisfying draft I looked back at this one and realized how much I was repeating myself. "If I'd had more time I would have written a shorter letter" comes to mind. Oh well. I see some serious pondering ahead of next Thursday/Friday. But here goes... or rather after one more note, repeated to some extent but my choices of terse obscure words requires it. "Parousia" (παρουσια) in New Testament Greek refers to "appearing" either as one arriving, or as one who has been present but you only notice them now, and it's used as a blanket term for that portion of "Last Things" (eschatology) around Jesus' return, promised in Acts 1.11 -- so a somewhat specific (but not narrow) slice of a significant slab (but nowhere near all) of Christian theology. So yeah, here goes...

“The first time he came as a sacrificial lamb, the second time he’ll come as a conquering king” (i.e. “No more ‘Mr. Nice Guy’!”)

You won’t find that in Scripture but I don’t know how often I heard sentiments like that expressed about Jesus’ 2nd coming. And it took me a long time to get to this point, to where I became absolutely, adamantly convinced that it’s wrong.

Jesus chides his disciples (in one account) as he is being arrested, that if he’d wanted to, he could have had twelve legions of angels at his disposal – and that hasn’t changed: they’re still there at his beck and call. But where once I might have thought that he would come riding back with those twelve legions behind him, to smite and destroy however many people were still opposing him, now that picture is repugnant and unimaginable, utterly incompatible with that of one who prayed for forgiveness of those who had nailed him to that cross.

Hebrews 13.8 says that Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever. In other words, he is and always has been our shepherd (as his Father is and always has been our Father, too), and one who will go to whatever lengths are required to rescue any sheep no matter how lost. Is it credible that at the end he would initiate a battle to end all battles to bring the whole thing to an end? Is it credible, even, that he would join such a battle if it had been started by human armies on its own terms?

Having this expectation that he would do so at the back of (or shot all through) our minds leads to a kind of prayer that can take escapist overtones: “Christ, come quickly! There’s danger at the door...”<1> as though the parousia will be some kind of Deus ex Machina. When we lean in this direction, I am convinced we are mistaken. Deeply. We have not taken into account what our original commission in creation was: to stand at the junction of the natural and the supernatural realms: reflecting God’s wise rule and care into creation, reflecting nature’s glory back to God. Anything short of this, I believe, doesn’t take account of his ancient intentions: to his image bearers, in his temple, fully restored.<2>

Expecting Jesus to return and fix everything has made us careless about creation. Expecting Jesus to destroy this world and re-create it fails to understand a creator’s heart towards his own works. Expecting Jesus to do all this at the end narrows our focus in “preaching the gospel” to words directed to our fellow humans: his command says our proclamation ought to be broader: to disciple others, we need, ourselves, to be fully discipled, including in how to care for his masterpiece. Expecting him to be the final “fix” lets us off from doing the hard work of being his hands, his feet, his voice, conveyors of his heart, reconcilers by default, toward the world whenever it gets “too hard” to bother with.

And expecting him to advance by violence makes it too easy for us to accept that some other bloodbath we might be inclined to approve of now is right in some way. If “by their fruits you will know them”, then all of these results of this mindset ought to be enough to drive us to shun it with our every fibre.

And I believe changing thus will open the way to better Christian politics than anything we currently practice anywhere.

--
<1> Winter, Sr. Miriam Therese. “Come Christ Jesus”, I Know The Secret. 1966.

<2> The Genesis story can be read as a deity creating a temple, then to complete it, placing his image within it.

Parade of Follies -- Hierarchicalizing Ecclesiology

Okay, I admit it. I got addicted to two-word phrases and as a result some of the words got more and more esoteric. It was either that or make the titles ever longer and longer -- in which case they'd break with Wright's pattern and I didn't want to do that -- or flatten the words down to the point where they reduced the idea to the ridiculous and meaningless. So instead, I choose these $45 words and you can all laugh at that. Comedic potential everywhere! No matter.

Hierarchicalizing ... by which I mean, bringing in hierarchy where it's not wanted and/or bringing in more hierarchy than is absolutely needed. Two ends of the spectrum: in Lord of the Flies, the boys needed some kind of hierarchy that everyone could accept in order to stay something like safe and healthy (but, if you find the real life scenario where this happened, their humanity and communal care didn't need much -- look for "Tongan Castaways" on Wikipedia) -- versus the hierarchy in "The House" where most of the plot of the "Morrow Days" books by Graham Nix takes place. The main character is assigned an ever lower number (higher status) as the books wear on.

Ecclesiology ... how do people "do" church? From the -ology you see everywhere, as in study of, fronted by a derivation of the Greek word that gets translated "church". Pastors, elder boards, deacons, consistories, conferences, presidents? or rectors, vicars, bishops, deans, archbishops and a pope or popes (they seem to have more than one of these among Orthodox churches)?

With that introduction..

And do not call anyone on earth 'father,' for you have one Father, and he is in heaven. Nor are you to be called 'teacher,' for you have one Teacher, the Christ. (Matt 23:9,10)

Perhaps I have a “spiritual gift of mulishness” – I had that thought in re-editing one of these, where I reported having balked twice along the same lines. And perhaps that mulishness relates here. That it might be a dislike of authority, generally. I’d like to think not – I’d like to think I’m a good toes-the-line-mostly guy but maybe this item says otherwise. When you read the New Testament, it seems to me that Paul is divided on this subject: sometimes it’s “entrust this to faithful men” and choose people of good character as overseers; other times it’s there’s no difference, there’s no status gradient. With Jesus, it seems to me, the picture is much more consistent, culminating in that one verse, “Call none father”.

Of course, parents ought to be honoured as parents, but I have yet to encounter a healthy father who didn’t want, ultimately, to be more peer with rather than lord over adult children. And we have one Father, one Lord, so we definitely have some kind of authority structure. If Jesus, as a human, is that One, and if all humanity were mapped to real numbers, then I see this as a Dirac delta function (δ) which has the value 0 everywhere except at one point, where the value is "impossibly high".<1> If I had claimed this kind of egalitarianism as a young man (when I first felt it), I could rightly have been condemned as grasping for what I hadn’t earned. Now I’m over 60 and I still believe this. My record of co-operating with local norms regardless could open me to charges of hypocrisy, too. I deny them both.

When a family grows too big, it becomes difficult for the grandparently pair to keep track of all the grandchildren or great-grandchildren, though they manage – but perhaps for our Father, it’s different. His care for us is different from our grandparents’ or great-grandparents’ care, anyway: they, freed from the task of day-to-day maturation of the children, from the “difficult” lessons that the parents must convey, can be entirely “irresponsible” – he is not: he continues to be deeply interested in our advancement toward Christlikeness and character, love, compassion, etc. But his attention can be towards all of his children, and except for the practicalities of keeping a regular situation going, or for all the more mature to care for all the less, I am convinced that his view of us contains not one hint of hierarchy. As lovely as the final cantos of Paradiso may be, the hierarchy they (and Inferno, and Purgatorio) convey flow from Dante’s view of earthly structures and not at all the heavenly structure.

But this thinking has tainted other things, too. It has corrupted the meanings of “saint” (every believer, not just some heroes), “apostle” (missionary, emissary of the gospel, initially the eye-witnesses, but eventually more broadly), “deacon” (anyone who serves in any way), and obscures, for instance, how Jesus hijacked and subverted Imperial jargon in “gospel”, “salvation”/“saviour”, “lord” – and it has left room for “priests”: but we have only one Priest. I don’t think his sacrifice needs constant re-enactment.

We, as followers of the one who died and rose again, are already living in the new age to come, whether we are aware of it or not. To impose on the ones living that life, the hierarchical structure of the present age tells structural lies that have repeatedly borne bad fruit and will continue to do so as long as we perpetuate them. If you don’t believe me, ask the ones at the bottoms of those hierarchies how things are really going and be prepared to listen, really listen, aggressively, actively listen.

--
<1> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_delta_function

Ironic unnumbered haiku

On some socials I go by haikujester (Xwitter, BlueSky) -- those who know me will understand what's going on there. I've been posting so many there (as pithy-ish commentaries / slap-backs / summations) that any idea of serialization is COMPLETELY out the window. This evening I started composing a haiku which I wanted to leave unfinished as an expression of having no more words to say than that -- and somehow, I simultenaneously managed to "finish it" -- after a fashion:

I wasn't annoyed
until you said not to be
<incomplete haiku>...俳句

The other party echoed back (with a LOL) the same haiku with the last light, "Now I am livid". At first I thought they were saying THEY were livid, but they were not. The LOL arrived too quickly for that. But lesson learned:

Unless you want that
Others would finish your words,
finish them yourself....俳句

(And I know. These haikus of mine are dreadful ersatz things that nobody should trouble others with, but there it is...)

Another kind of folly

Today, I did something ridiculous. Under a banner ad from some astro-turf group wanting to support the development, distribution, and everlasting expansion of the burning of Methane (CH4, "Natural Gas"), when they wrote, "Natural gas isn't greenwashing -- it's historical accuracy under attack": I laughed. The term may be old but in the current "information-battlespace" "natural gas" is certainly trying to make us feel better about burning more fossil fuels. So I responded, thus:

nope, it's greenwashing. it's cleaner than coal but it's still burning, adding to the CO2 load that's leading to sequential heat domes in Europe this year.

Silly, foolish, I know. And I got two "haha" emojis and the terse reply from someone -- neighbour, troll or agent provocateur? I have no way of knowing: "You have physical evidence of that or do you lie?"

Although I did not mark that with a "haha" of its own, I nearly fell off my chair laughing mixed with pity on the inside: that someone should be slave to such a stark binary? It must be a troll, I thought, but just in case not, I waited until later and then answered:

Huh. that's a stark binary... here's the spectrum I see between your poles

• people who have paper records of long term observations that aren't, individually things that anyone could touch
• people who have no physical evidence may still have a memorial record of details that demonstrate the fact
• "argumentum ad vericundiam" is only an informal fallacy. if the "authority" you appeal to includes the physical evidence
• people who are speaking what is false may be ignorant or misinformed ("do you lie?" --> "yes" demands motivation not just a fact deficit)

I put myself somewhere between the second and third of those two points. I find the International Panel on Climate Change to be a competent and truthful source of a broad range of facts about the climate, several of which are simple enough that I remember them.

As long ago as 100 years, it was known that the more CO2 there was in the atmosphere, the more heat from the sun would be retained in the atmosphere. From the Industrial Revolution forward, humanity has been burning ever more and more quantities of fossil hydrocarbons. We abandoned wood for cooking and horses for moving and started using coal, oil and refined-oil fuels and CH4 instead, for both, in ever greater and greater quantities. The record is there for anyone to read in the Columbia Icefields between Banff and Jasper, Alberta. The record in numbers has been there for anyone with instruments at a purpose-built observatory at one of the highest points of Hawai'i. "350 dot org" took its name from the pre-industrial revolution proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere 350 parts per million isn't much but we've increased it by a significant fraction, to about 430 (between 20 and 25%). This is all a game of millimetres and not inches or miles, and such a small fraction is enough to have retained more heat in the atmosphere than we used to, progressively increasing over time, like a large ship turning in an arc with a radius of miles.

So much for science. Someone has those physical records, but I do not "have them".

Yet, my own experience has been a decided warming trend over two decades in the 90s and the 00s and evolution of year-over-year weather patterns since then where I live, from distinct spring-summer-fall-winter cycles to one more closely resembling a square wave, where chilly temperatures last into late springs and then tend to spike up to hot summer temperatures in a matter of days, to remain there until what used to be fall, when they crash back down again to chilly winter highs and lows -- and this in an environment of far less rain than I remember we got when I was a child. (This is supposed to be a rainfores. I start to wonder.)

And the oil companies' own scientists told them this was going to happen -- and so did scientists from the US Military -- seven or eight decades ago. And they buried it. And they continue to pour mountains of cash into sowing doubt that these things are so.

So, no. I don't "have the physical evidence" as you might insist that if I do not have it, I must be lying. But I am certainly not lying. Yet, I do not resent your accusation. I grieve that this systematic disinformation campaign has succeeded thus far with you and I pity your situation as victim of that campaign. I do not suppose this little discourse will convince you but I hope that it might convince some others of those who may overhear what we say.

And should you answer this with another "Haha!" response, I will take it as a badge of honour, not a sign that it is time for rage to awaken for my part. It will only deepen my pity, if indeed I pay it any heed at all. I hope we may meet in a happier hour to compare notes at where each of us are still deluded in some way and laugh at ourselves about it.

and again later:

also... yes, burning methane is MUCH cleaner than burning coal, except in very rare situations, such as the power station at Shearness Lake in Alberta. Again: I don't have physical evidence of that either but I know it to be true from seeing how clear the emission from its stack was against a clear blue prairie summer sky.

As for the heat domes in Europe... here in BC we had such a heat dome in this decade, for the first time since weather began to be recorded here -- a scant 100 years ago. Still, as a child, I remember summer after summer after summer when Lytton was "the hot spot in Canada", at usually no more than 40C degrees. For several days we had daytime highs here in Vancouver at a degree or two more than that and Lytton got pretty close to 50C (has since burned to the ground in the wildfires that have been having longer, more intense seasons than before -- when individuals weren't starting the fires through neglect or malice). Here in Greater Vancouver, over that heat-dome event, our overnight lows didn't drop anywhere near to the extent it is usual, and things were pretty oppressive until the dome passed and dissipated. I was there. I remember how things typically were 50 years before. I know this was nothing like that. Temperatures in India this May have been near the unusually high of 50C for more than a week. Take a look at the atlases I studied when I was a child -- their summer weather was never like that back in the day.

I'm just paying attention.

If any of this helps you to respond to someone in your closer circles, similarly ignorant or mis-informed about the state of these things, feel free to use the foregoing -- only, if you can tinge it with some gentleness, that would probably be well. I can be a trifle too mater-of-fact about these things and relationships are FAR more important even than being "right" about this kind of topic.

Parade of Follies -- Dehumanizing Christology

 So... this is now "me" in entire and not Tom at all. His model inspired me and these, while not as immediately problematic as the ones he called out, have their own pernicious side effects. They flatten some things out that should not be flattened (dehumanizing...), they stack other things that should remain relatively flat (hierarchicalizing...) and worst, they adopt what I see as the wrong kind of imperial structure (violence in its consummation vs. royal proclamation) about the wrong aspect of the event (the return, instead of the message) -- but there, I'm getting ahead of myself, but I'm being egged on inside by the overall purpose I have in mind that I even bothered to publish these half-2-pagers at this time in this way.

A lot of the theological fights in the first 300 years of the church were about Jesus’ nature. And I believe that they got it right: fully God, fully man. The Nicene Creed says the divine half of that most bluntly: ὁμοοῦσιον τῷ πατρί, of the same substance as the Father. They felt no need to say it – being 1700 years closer to the facts it might have felt useless – but they could have added, ὁμοοῦσιον τοῖς ἀνθρώποις, of the same substance as humanity. In the first 100 years or so that would have seemed tautological: “Why mention it? We know his siblings’ descendants, we know the grand-kids of the 500 etc. That’s not even a question!” Eventually, at Chalcedon<1>, some of them at least, did, with a pronoun (us): ὁμοούσιον ἡμῖν; but time and again, as I was growing up and things about Jesus were discussed in Sunday School, sermons and Bible studies, Jesus’ humanity was always under-played.

Occasionally the Bible points out that Jesus knew what they were thinking or understood people, but in those days, we often assumed that Jesus ALWAYS knew what EVERYONE was thinking (“he’s, like, God, right?”), and in many other ways, divine (in the sense of “super-human”) attributes were assumed of him even though the New Testament also clearly says he was “in all ways just like us” or “you made him a little lower than the angels”<2> – not to mention that there are moments when it seems like Jesus asked questions from a genuine need to learn something or broke down in very human ways. And even the church fathers knew better: he became what what we are to make us what he is, wrote Athanasius.

So these things, the thought that “of course he knew what they were thinking, he was God”, and “made like his brothers in every way” can be set at loggerheads. And that always bothered me.

The thinner your view of why Jesus entered humanity the hard way, lived to adulthood, died, was buried, rose from the dead, the less you need to notice the problem, the less important it is not to ascribe too many divine-like attributes to him in the gospel stories – which are so terse that they depend on an active imagination to fill in the details and the blanks – and I think it leads to impoverishing the ways we can look to the example of his life in how we conduct our own.

When exercising spiritual gifts, there’s always at least the thought, “am I right? Is this the moment?” And this thought made a conception of his full humanity more visceral, more of a missing-piece found:

When Jesus was wracked with the anticipation of the cross, what was he dreading? Was it separation from his Father? John 16.32 can be read to suggest, strongly: no. If it were so, would he contrast being abandoned by the disciples against togetherness with his Father? Wright does no more than hint at it in Jesus and the Victory of God, but I think he was onto something more profound than he let himself hint at: that, preparing to finish provoking the various power groups in Israel to hate him to the point of killing him; having predicted the temple’s destruction and promising to rebuild it; having preached, healed, raised the dead, etc, still: the shadow of uncertainty, of self-criticism to the point of potential doubt of what he was about to do, the “what if I’m wrong?” that every mature person about to commit to something as irrevocable and final as that would have<3>. That seems to me to be a compellingly credible possibility and forms one more confirmation to me that we just don’t take Jesus’ humanity seriously enough. And remedying that will enrich us all still more.

--
<1> sadly, this was one of the earliest points at which eastern and western churches began to split; I'd be curious about the east's view of this application of ὁμοούσιον. Their position about all of Chalcedon have been pretty clear since it happened. From something I read in T. F. Torrance, I am inclined to believe they were right about the filioque clause, for what it's worth. But now we really HAVE left the open market for a very particular ivory tower. Personally I prefer the market...
<2> Psalm 8; it's usually taken to refer to humanity generally, but these things often have multiple referents and if at no other time, Jesus' position was "a little lower than the angels" just like the rest of us. (cue up Joan Osborne's What if God was one of us?)
<3> Dickens, Charles: A Tale of Two Cities. What contemplation would Sydney Carton have had before committing to his final scene? 

Parade of Follies -- Continued!

I’m hardly a fit source of an antiphon to N. T. Wright’s pithiest critiques of western theology, but the more I thought about the damage that moralizing anthropology, paganizing soteriology, and platonizing eschatology have done to how we think about our identity in Christ and what it means in this world, the more I thought to answer those three critiques with three echoes of my own:

• dehumanizing Christology: probably in answer to the modernist/fundamentalist divide of 130 years ago, the more-devout-than-intellectual end of the faith (as of a tug-of-war rope) has clung so tightly to the resurrection and Jesus’ divinity that we’ve held less to his humanity than we ought to have. It has done us no good.
• hierarchicalizing ecclesiology: whether it’s a succession of bishops thing, or operating under a covering of authority, or just being loyal to the Pastor or whatever, we have given more allegiance to Paul’s saying “find trustworthy men to place over each congregation” than to Jesus’ earlier “call no one father”. You don’t even have to be a raging feminist to see what damage that has caused. (I suspect this is what Rev. 13.11's  “beast that looks like a lamb but speaks like a dragon” refers to: hierarchical authority becomes beast-like in the end, inevitably; lamb-like refers to its self-identity, largely accepted of followers of Jesus who was led like a lamb to the slaughter; dragon-like: ultimately the agenda is more congruent with the purposes of hell, with all the subtlety of a Screwtape, than with that of heaven)
• imperializing the parousia: we forget that the purity of the figurative raiment we want to claim comes from being dipped in the blood, not of Jesus’ enemies but of Jesus himself, and we anticipate his return as a moment when he will wreak mayhem on his enemies – as if he would forget his own teaching on how to treat ememies.

So I present here, in what Tom Wright might view as an unwanted tribute (but his three critiques inspired this from me) my quick list of three “other” baleful influences on our theology. I have no credentials that you should pay attention to what I say but if anything catches and holds your attention, take heed, not necessarily to what I write but to whatever truth Papa brings to your mind in interaction with it.

Of the three, I feel I am on shakiest ground around ecclesiology. The other two ring through my heart as truisms that should be obvious to anyone who has given the matters even passing examination, especially in view of the ways I see them playing out in the ways people calling themselves Christian are behaving in North America these days.