On Telos

Chris: I was thinking, ‘Gus.

‘Gus: No you weren’t, you were reading.

Chris: Well, yeah, I was re-reading After Virtue.

‘Gus: No you weren’t, you were reading Living Faithfully in a Fragmented World.

Chris: Well, yeah, as I initially said, I was thinking… and there is a hole in our thinking about those 21 questions.

‘Gus: Oh?

Chris: Yeah. Alasdair MacIntyre thinks that all modern moral reasoning is flawed because it ignores the question of telos the aim the objective of the thing… He thinks moderns ask “Where are we at, what do we need to do to get there” and forget the most crucial step, where are we going?

‘Gus: And?

Chris: We’re doing the same thing!

‘Gus: Ha! You’re learning on your own!

Chris: Yup… So… we have:

An analysis of where we are, the 3d’s.

And 7 habits to get us where we are going.

But, we have no Telos, no idea where we are going… what the idea end is.

‘Gus: You don’t know what the goal is, what the chief end of the Christian faith is?

Chris: Well, as a Lutheran we’re a little more ambiguous than some, right. Luther wasn’t a systematic thinker, so we don’t have an answer like the Presbyterians, “Q. What is the chief end of man? A. Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.”

‘Gus: I'm not Lutheran... but... sure you do.

Chris: No, Luther has a whole bunch of Solas—Grace, Faith, Scripture.

‘Gus: You might not be systematic, but Luther does better than you are letting on, look back to the Catechism.

Chris: Okay, well, the goal of Lutheranism is to help people have awe, love, and trust toward God above all others.

‘Gus: There you go.

Chris: So… that means… the context of our 21 questions is this:

1. Our world is Decentralized, Disestablished, and changing Demographically.

2. We seek to help people be awe-filled, love, and trust God above all things.

3. We do this through the 7 central things of the liturgy both inside and outside the church.

‘Gus: That’s right on. Break it down even more simply.

Chris:

3D’sà7CenteralThingsàAwe,Love,Trust.

Meaning all 21 questions ought to be phrased slightly differently. For example, “How do we gather without the explicit approval of our society, so that people might fear, love, and trust God?"

‘Gus: I think you’re now asking the right question.

21 Questions about the Future Church

‘Gus: Dear Lord man, you may be the most unsystematic thinker I know!

Chris: How so?

‘Gus: I’ve been poking through your “blog” and I wonder how you’ve not noticed you have all the pieces to think deeply about the faith for the world as it is, in order to get a sense of what the Church shall be.

Chris: I what now?

‘Gus: My Lord… you’ve done a lot of work on thinking about how a piety centered on what happens in worship can widen out into the day to day life of Christians. You even created a prayer book devoted to the idea. At the same time, you’ve also diagnosed a few trends in the world where this faith is to be lived—your “3Ds.”

Chris: Oh, you mean Decentralization, Demographics, and… oh, I never remember the third one…

‘Gus: Disestablishment!

Chris: Yeah, that’s the one.

‘Gus: Your 3Ds that will shape the church have shaped the church before. In fact, they were all bubbling up in my world too.

I wrote City of God in response to the reality that disestablishment was happening, that support of Church by State was deeply in jeopardy. The Church saw in the Roman Empire the culmination of the Kingdom of God, we’d fused the two, we’d become an established church. The sack of Rome called all that into question, it was a kind of shock disestablishment.

There was plenty of decentralization of authority—by what authority were the Donatists making their divisions? Pretty soon any ass with a quill—I think especially of Pelagius of Brito—could make a claim on Christian doctrine.

For that matter, demographic shift within Christianity is not new—though in my day the weight was shifting from South to North, instead of North to South, as it is now. I mean, what were we to do with all these non-Mediterranean Christians? They had their own culture, and ideas, which of them were amenable to the faith and which were not?

Chris: So, nothing new under the sun.

‘Gus: I wouldn’t go that far… my point was that the church faced deep changes, and we made it through faithfully, and so can you. Some of it is just asking the right questions, and that’s what I think we should take some time with tonight.

Chris: Shoot.

‘Gus: Look at this chart:

	Disestablishment	Decentralization	Demographics
Gathering in Community	How do we gather without the explicit approval of our society?	What does gathering look like in a scattered world?	How do we gather in a racially ethnically and economically diverse world?
Confession and Forgiveness	How do we confess and forgive in a disestablishment world?	How do we confess and forgive in this decentralized world?	What especially needs to be confessed and forgiven in these new demographic realities?
Baptism	What parts of our baptismal identity shine through differently in a disestablished church?	How can we be centered in our Child of God-ness in a decentralized world?	As racial and economic identity shifts in our society how do we affirm our baptismal identity—in what ways does it shift or stay the same?
Word of God	What themes in scripture draw attention to themselves when read from outside the cultural mainstream?	How may the Word of God be preached and trusted in a decentralized world?	How do we hear and respond to the Word of God differently when we are ethnically and economically different than we were a generation ago?
Thanksgiving	For what aspects of disestablishment ought we give thanks?	What new ways can we give thanks when everything is decentered?	What methods of thanksgiving are found in non-Eurocentric cultures?
Meal	In what ways have we wed Holy Communion to the powers that be in our society?	Where do we have the holy meal in light of decentralization?	What aspects of Holy Communion can be expressed differently for a wider variety of cultural contexts?
Sending	Who have we neglected to go to in order to impress the powers that be?	Where and how are we sent when we’re already dispersed?	How are we sent differently to the new demographics in which we live?

Chris: Oh, wow, I can start answering those questions… for example,

How do we gather without the explicit approval of our society?

Gathering in community is harder when there are no blue laws, and employers aren’t embarrassed making their employees work on the Sabbath, and being a good sports ball player is now as important to being a good citizen as being a Sunday school attender or weekly confirmation student.

‘Gus: Sports ball player—is that what they call them these days?

Chris: Maybe…

‘Gus: But yes, those are the kinds of questions and thoughts that this should raise, but also the positives. For example, what opportunities arise from being community when its not the norm?

Chris: Okay, let me try again, when we think about

What does gathering look like in a scattered world? We can note some plus sides. We learn the ways technology can help, even as we stay aware of its potential negatives. Can we do online church? Does our society’s propensity toward decentralization mean small groups are a necessity, not a luxury? How does worship need to change to change with the times? Does it require decentering the pastor… any authority figure? How can egalitarian church be done?

‘Gus: How about:

How do we gather in a racially ethnically and economically diverse world?

Chris: Yeah, I mean do we lean into multiculturalism, and try to ensure all churches are diverse, or does it make sense to invest in communities of non-white backgrounds, even if they are mono-culture? For that matter, there is the economic angle, what it means to be middle class is not what it once was, we are more time and money poor… but could that mean our gathering together could look less like a hobby group and more like people seeking salvation together?

‘Gus: You’re getting the idea… but maybe you just need to sit with those 21 questions, otherwise you’ll shoot from the hip, and that’s likely to put an eye out. So just pray on those questions for a while.

City of God is a Response to MRGA

Augustine: So, Chris, I saw this hat…

Chris: Indeed… they’re all over the place, 39% of Americans like him.

Augustine: Well, it reminded me of this hat.

Chris: Well, that’s a novelty hat.

Augustine: No it isn’t. It is the genesis of my writing City of God.

Chris: Really?

Augustine: Yeah, everyone looked at the sacking of Rome and started shouting Make Rome Great Again! MRGA! MRGA! MRGA! 

Everyone blamed the Christian faith for Rome’s ills. They thought Rome was great before it adopted Christianity. 

I simply took out my literary brass knuckles and boxed that idea back into a corner. I reminded them the Roman “gods” were in fact foreign Trojan “gods”, that the wars between the Alban and Roman armies were far from great, that many of Rome’s kings met small ends, from Romulus on, that the Punic wars would make you puke, that her civil wars were all rather uncivil, that there was, in short, no time when Rome was great and pure and right over against the moment we were living in—no “again” to go back to.

Chris: Right… and… imagine if someone wrote a new City of God! They could point out that our foundation was on the backs and bodies of Indians and Slaves, the Founding Fathers were o’ so human, the war of 1812 was a defeat, the Civil War pitted brother against brother and the North did not see itself as fighting a war to end slavery until the latter part of the war, Reconstruction was stillborn, the Gilded Age…

Augustine: I get your point. But, I think someone has already written that book, though not aimed particularly at MAGA.

Chris: Oh, right...

On Theatre

‘Gus: How’d that feel, doing a sermon as a skit, acting it out?

Chris: Fine. I did okay, and the actress did great.

‘Gus: I didn’t ask about the performance, but about how it felt?

Chris: Good… what are you getting at?

‘Gus: Having those two things together—theatre and liturgy... I’d never dreamed of doing such a thing. It seems innately sinful.

Chris: Really?

‘Gus: Yeah, after all, theatre is a form a liturgy, there are set lines, they shape the audience in certain ways, move them emotionally. Really it forms a certain type of faith.

Chris: There might be something to that. After saying my set lines in the skit/sermon I led everyone in confessing the Apostle’s creed, then my Deacon said particular prayers paired with particular responses…

‘Gus: Indeed. That’s why theatre scares me.

Chris: Well, ‘Gus, theatre has fallen on hard times, the few who show up now are kinda old, there are a bunch of empty seats. The theatre I go to can’t even give away its tickets to students. It’s not a popular thing, well, other than Hamilton.

‘Gus: Huh, much like the average mainline church.

Chris: Ouch.

‘Gus: Yet, I think there is a hearth religion that has sprung up in this age. Those TV’s, they make you invest in characters, their stories. Don’t you wonder about this Walking Dead thing you watch, on a Sunday night… religiously you could say. Isn’t there an almost sacramental quality to it? In fact, after you experience the terror, or triumph, or whatever, of the characters for an hour, then there is Pastoral Care in the form of Talking Dead. Just as you talk through the faith expressed in worship in pastoral conversations after service, so too, Chris Hardwick ministers to those who participate in this TV-Hearth religion.

Chris: So, you think I’m a syncretist?

‘Gus: We’re all syncretists, but yes, I think there is an aspect of liturgy in TV, just as there was an aspect of liturgy in theatre in my age. I wonder, in what ways do the theologians of your day wrestle with this competing faith? At least acknowledging it for what it is, even if you decide that it is value neutral and not a threat to the gospel.

Chris: …

Psalm 51

Augustine: Why’d you pull punches on Ash Wednesday?

Chris: I didn’t, I preached about our sinfulness and fallibility.

Augustine: But, you didn’t make the connection between President Trump and the sin of David that caused that psalm.

Chris: You mean all the adultery and sexual assault President Trump has committed?

Augustine: Psalm 51 isn’t just about adultery or sexual assault. It is also about Uriah the Hittite, who David callously sacrificed in order to get what he wanted. He sacrificed this foreign-born man and used his wife Bathsheba.

Chris: Okay, so Trump is definitely sacrificing foreign-born people for the sake of the election.

Augustine: Yes, and he’s also sacrificed one of his warriors—Ryan Owens—and then used Owens’ widow for political ends.

Chris: That’s a stretch.

Augustine: The raid was inadvisable and the earliest reports suggested it didn’t get any useful information. It killed Ryan, injured six other Seals, killed 9 civilian children—including the daughter of an American—and 16 adult civilians.

Chris: Well, the 8-year-old daughter was the daughter of an American member of al Qaeda.

Augustine: So, the US has now killed two of this guy's kids, and him… that seems horrible. Are you okay with killing children, especially children of your countrymen?

Chris: Of course not… so, you think Trump acted like David. He hastily ordered a bad raid before his State of the Union to look like he is “bombing the hell” out of ISIS, got a bunch of people killed, lied about the intelligence gathered to justify the raid, and then paraded Ryan’s widow around in order to look presidential?

Augustine: All I’m saying is if disaster strikes, you know who to blame.
Chris: I think you are going too far—I couldn't preach that to myself, let alone to my congregation—but I do understand how I can be seen as being pretty quietist in my preaching, considering all that is happening in my country.

A Response to Brian McLaren's "Church in the Trump Years"

C: As we think about those two ways of being, the separation of wheat and weeds, good fish and rotten fish… I can’t help but notice this article that separates out clergy into two camps “Active Collaborators” and the “Silently Complicit.”

G: Those both seem like negative categories, weeds and thorns, rotten fish and lutefisk… I don’t think those categories fit the Kingdom of Heaven.

C: Agreed… but the image of a “way” is instructive… isn’t that the way Matthew and the Didache and Psalms and Proverbs… the whole wisdom tradition really,…talk about two ways of being human, the wise way and the foolish way, paths of righteousness and paths of wickedness.

G: So perhaps all those #Resist signs outside of that Congressman’s office you hold vigil at could give us new categories—there are two ways for clergy to act in the Trump era—the Highway of Cooperation and the Highway of Resistance?

C: I like that, and we could even keep the slow lane/fast lane distinction.

G: We?

C: Okay… I could keep them. Then you have Cooperators in the fast lane—they support Trump as ruler even if they disagree with his policies, and you have the slow lane of people focusing on personal morality to the detriment of the social good… and on the other side, the Highway of Resistance, you have a fast lane, the clergy who have made every sermon about resisting Trump, protest in their collars, hungry to get arrested so they can be seen as the new Bonheoffer, or even hungry to get other clergy arrested so they become radicalized and move into the fast lane.

G: You’re being a little harsh there.

C: I’m harsh because I was them in the Iraq War—I wasn’t clergy but I was all in in the Fast Lane, and I don’t think what I did stopped the war or made for better policies. In fact, I think some of the stuff I did was counter-productive… we weren’t the adult in the room, or at least we didn’t look like it.

G: Processing your stuff much?

C: I am. So, the slow lane are those resisting by writing letters and making phone calls, bringing signs and granola to the vigils, and preaching in a way that their congregation can hear the incongruities between the Beatitudes and “Winning” without making it a referendum on the Presidential vote those congregants cast. They tear themselves in two making sure folk recognize they are respected, even as they deeply disagree about taking in refugees, and… well, everything.

G: You do realize you are sounding a lot like those clergy Dr. King wrote against, right?

C: I don’t sleep well at night.

G: You aren’t making it plain, put it in proverbs, maybe you’ll get there.

C: Okay… ummm…

Happy is the Pastor who brings along the weak ones.

Sad is the Pastor who rushes out ahead and can no longer find their flock.

Happy is the Protestor who supports women's healthcare and reproductive rights from cancer screenings to contraception to safe abortions--can that not be said to be pro-life?

Sad is the Protestor who decides to “take back” the term Baby Killer.

Happy the Pastor who conducts herself more presidentially than the President.

Sad is the Pastor who leaps into the mud to be slaughtered by the pig.

G: But you aren’t happy.

C: True. But, my greatest fear is that the fast-lane folk are going to wreck and in the process clog the slow lane of resistance as well—delegitimize all of us—our congregants won’t be able to hear us, or care to, and then we have a one-way street to 8 years of Trump and decades of cleaning up. I fear that I’ll be an old man before we recover from the damage Trump will bring to this country and this world.

G: Aren’t you a sunny one today.