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Saw this in Knoxville while visiting my mom:

If it’s not King James, it’s not Bible.

I grunted in disgust, and my mom asked what was wrong. I pointed out the bumper sticker in front of us, and she (daughter of a Baptist preacher and faithful church goer) just muttered “Oh good grief.”

I mean, how do you even answer something like this? It sets new heights for both arrogance AND stupidity. First of all, Mr. KJV, what authority has told you that the KJV is the only true Bible? Did God send you an email? Oh, sorry, I forgot — you have another bumper sticker that says “if it’s not rotary, it’s not a phone.”

Even conservative Biblical scholars agree that the Greek texts on which the KJV is based are not as good as the texts translators work from now. And those texts are not the autographs. We are working with translations of copies of copies of copies. And, a single word in the Greek may need more than one word in English to even come close to the thought (and vice versa). Since, then, any English Bible is going to be an approximation of the original text, why not get the best translation we can get? Why not strive for one that is true to the best texts we have AND that is readable by today’s seekers and learners?

Ultimately, of course, my biggest objection to such a bumper sticker — and to the faith approach it represents — is that it is such a troubling example of majoring on the minors. Every minute we spend trying to convince someone that the KJV is the only “true” Bible is a minute we don’t spend meeting the real needs of the world.

Let’s see if we can move beyond — or around — issues like this, a la McLaren. Let’s major on the majors.

From Connie Schultz, panelist on last night’s Bill Maher show:

I was raised by a born-again Christian who taught us that being a good Christian meant fixing yourself and helping others, not the other way around.

Okay, folks, there’s your sermon for today; no need to attend tomorrow.

Seriously — spend ten minutes, or ten hours, thinking about this sentence and its implications for your own life, and for the life of your faith community. What percent of that life is spent in this sentence, and what percent is spent in its inverse?

Many non-Christians see today’s Christian community as promoting two things: “God wants us to get ours” and “God hates everyone not like us, so let’s join him in that.” Unfortunately, we haven’t always done a good job of reversing that perception. We need to do a better job of that — and of calling out the getters and the haters.

::

More on Connie Schultz at Wikipedia. Here’s hoping I can be half that pungent in MY writing.

I wrote a big, long introduction to this, trying to find some way to explain it — but I just can’t explain it. Perhaps their good intentions can be their excuse.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/10/30/145245/63/817/647006

We’re working through Brian McClaren’s book Everything Must Change at church on Sunday nights, and it’s been a good study of a challenging book. (There are still some weeks to go — come join us.) Today’s section contained a point that really helped crystalize a thought for me, and challenged me as well. Here’s the gist of it.

How do you reconcile a First Coming of good news, of love and acceptance, with a Second Coming of retribution and destruction? Does God finally give up on reaching people through love, and resort to violence and imperial force? If in the end, love doesn’t work, and God through Jesus kills everyone who disagrees, then was the Incarnation just a big fake-out — a feint, if you will, in the ongoing God-human relationship, like a parry in warfare, or a false-flag operation?

McClaren sort of mentions this issue in passing, as if he is going to return to it later. (I haven’t finished the book; don’t know if he does.) It is part of the larger theme he is pursuing, that Jesus came to introduce a new narrative that is neither Imperial nor Counter-Imperial — the way of the Kingdom, the way of love. But still, it struck me as I read it, and it helped me to realize why the “Left Behind” books have always bothered me.

I think, if we are to believe in God, then we almost by definition must believe that God ultimately triumphs. (I realize that’s not completely true; there are some that believe in God that also believe God ultimately fails. I’m not there.) So, if God ultimately triumphs, what does that mean? What sort of triumph is Godly enough, in your estimation?

The “Left Behind” view is that God, in the end, conquers all, including those who oppose him, and destroys anyone standing in his way. There is certainly Biblical basis for this view, much of it in the Revelation of John. McClaren posits, though, that this is actually a defeat for God, in that the way of love fails, finally.

How much more of a triumph would it be, in McClaren’s view, if God’s love is ultimately victorious in all cases? Is that not the more compelling victory for the One who came in love?

I’m still working this out in my own mind. For one thing, I’m not sure how free will fits in with the second scenario. If everyone is ultimately drawn to God, and to adopt the way of love, by the power of the love of God, does that make a mockery of free will?

But one thing is clear to me — the triumphalism of the Church of the Left Behind is, in many cases, simply the need of humans to be more right than their neighbors, and even perhaps to rejoice that the ones who don’t agree with them “get it in the end.” And that, one can say with certainty, is not the point of the Good News.

(More on this, and on the book, as we work through it.) 

I’ve started re-reading the book Stages of Faith (Amazon link) by Fowler. It’s an important book, and I’m sure I’ll post some more on it as I work my way through it. For tonight, though, I want to touch on an opening idea: the difference between faith and belief.

Here’s the nut of it — up until about the Enlightenment, all major religions understood faith as having to do with heart, as in "On what do you set your heart?" Some would expand on this to "Around what do you organize your life?" Belief, on the other hand, was focused on the idea of fact and non-fact, or un-fact: "Do you believe the earth goes around the sun?"

At some point, the two became conflated: faith became agreement with a set of facts, a set of beliefs, rather than the core organizing principle of our lives, the way we both see everything and relate to everything. We changed the question from "Is your live focused on, oriented around, based on the Eternal One?" to "Do you believe the statement ‘Jesus is the Son of God’ to be true?"

As I think about my life at 55; as I try to be honest with myself about myself; as I try to make the most of the life remaining to me — I find this distinction tremendously important and insightful. It is an extremely challenging question: "What is the organizing principle of your life? What drives the way you relate to yourself, to others, to life, to time, to the universe? What is your faith?" Next to these questions, "what do you believe" is not only silly, it is also irrelevant.

I’m too much of a thinker, too much of a wonk to give up the Q&A of head work. It’s important, at times, and even fun, at times. But after reading this opening discussion in Fowler, I wonder if my goal should really be: Believe less, even while bringing more and more of life into faith. 

I’ve been reading an interesting book (if you’re a policy wonk like me) called The Utility of Force. It’s by a British general and military historian who explores the changing ability of military force to be useful politically, or as the author puts it, to "have utility."

It got me thinking about the word "utility" and its application to other things. Instead of saying "Is this useful?" you ask "Does this object have utility?" To me the first question is more about the object’s usefulness to you, while the second is more about the object’s usefulness to anyone. There is also the question of exactly what the utility is — a hammer has a somewhat limited utility, while a computer has an almost infinite utility, depending on the software available for it.

So, here’s the question of this posting: Does a church have utility? And if so, to whom and for what?

Many people would answer "Yes" to this question, immediately and without hesitation. Many others would answer "No" just as quickly and with just as much certainty. My answer? "It depends." So much for easy answers.

It seems to me that many, many church people just assume that their church has utility. If pressed to explain how their church is useful, and to whom, and for what, they would probably move first to some variant of this:

The church (read: my church, not The Church) is useful to me as family, as home, as place where I feel loved and accepted, as place where I learn about God and the Bible, as place where I get to live out my gifts. The church is useful as activity, as entertainment, as avocation.

Some people, when pressed, would admit that many of these things can be done on your own, or outside an organized church, or indeed outside religion at all. So then they might move to some variant of this answer:

The church is useful to those not in it. It serves as a beacon of hope, of love, of acceptance, and of new life. For some it is a haven they seek; for others, it is a haven they stumble upon. In either case, it is a source of life for those who are hurting, lost, and dying.

Finally, a few people who are either more spiritually mature, or who have thought about these things at some point, may respond with the third and most theological answer of all:

The church is useful to God. It is God’s instrument in the world, used to make those within more spiritually mature and to give those outside a sense of who God is and how God is. The church is the Body of Christ, and therefore is the chief way that Christ continues to influence the world.

Impressive answers, all. A church that was useful, that had utility, in all these ways would be a wonder-full example of Church, a true oasis of the Eternal in this present age. But if these are the three possibilities of utility for the church — to its members, to other humans, and to God — then the next questions must be asked:

Is it possible for a church to only be useful to two of the three? To one of the three? Is it possible for a church to have no utility at all? Is it possible for a church to be, in reality, completely useless? And what would that look like?

As I said at the beginning, ever since I started reading The Utility of Force I’ve been wondering if we also need a book called "The Utility of Church." I have concluded, sadly, that it is certainly possible for a church to have less utility than it should, or even to have none at all. Furthermore, it is possible for such a church to not only survive, but to thrive. It is possible for a church to be very successful, in fact, and yet to have none of the utility that God intended it to have.

For utilmately, what we are looking for is not the church that is useful as an organization, or as an activity, or as a club. We are looking for the church that has spiritual utility. Only that quality deserves the name "church." All the others, in God’s economy, are useless.

The first in an occasional series on The Useless Church. Feedback welcome.