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How to Stay in the Same Faith as JD Vance

Gideon YutzyLeave a comment

With much of the Christianity you find online, it’s good to steer as wide a berth as possible. That includes the brand of Christianity associated with the current Republican Party in America.

Vice President JD Vance recently wrote a book about his journey into the Catholic Church. I’ve watched a few bits and pieces of his promotional interviews. Now, I know Christians ought to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, but somehow it’s hard to see this conversion as genuine. Vance insists that Mr. Quiet-Piggy Trump really is a virtuous man after all, despite calling him Hitler a few short years ago. And that rounding up vulnerable people Gestapo-style as if they’re cattle is simply ‘enforcing the law.’ Vance’s entrance into the church was convoluted at best and politically motivated at worst, and the only miracle I see is how he has managed to scrupulously avoid any real contact with the Christian faith.

But hey, we must remember the parable of the wheat and tares, and the old truism, ‘Christians don’t get to choose family.’ Let us go outside the camp and bear the reproach he endured, amirite. But I could almost develop an ulcer if I think too long about how that slippery, smiling man seems to drag Christ’s name through the mud at every turn, how he weaponises the Christian faith to create divisiveness, and not the noble divisiveness that comes from a politics that serves ‘the least of these,’ but rather the kind that furthers his shallow political ambitions and agenda.

And yet I know it’s easier to criticize than build. If I reject the Christianity associated with the current religious right–and I do reject it, roundly–then what form of Christianity do I espouse? I remember Tony Campolo’s story about eating at a greasy spoon restaurant in Hawaii during one of his many speaking tours. Unbeknownst to him, the little diner was located at the entrance of a brothel. A prostitute was talking to her colleague (if that is the correct word) and telling her it was her 40th birthday. Impulsively, Tony Campolo planned an impromptu party and had a cake brought in. The burly chef, seeing Tony with the cake, along with ‘wall-to-wall prostitutes,’ wiped his hands on his dirty apron and gave him a look of utter disbelief. ‘I thought you were a preacher!’ he said to Tony. ‘Say, just what kind of church do you belong to?’

Tony said that in one split second, the Holy Spirit gave him the exact right response: ‘I belong to a church that throws birthday parties for sex workers at 2 o’clock in the morning.’ I’m not sure if JD Vance would be throwing birthday parties for the down-and-out, probably not the Haitians in Ohio anyway. Unless the Holy Spirit has been working on him more than what is public knowledge, and that certainly is not outside the realm of possibility given the mischief the Spirit can get up to.

I also remember the great Richard Foster’s seven streams of Christianity. I don’t remember all of them but I think they included missional, sacramental, contemplative and doctrinal. Maybe, given the alarming rate at which the broader church is fragmenting, it’s worth considering which stream of the church we are going to draw from for our sustenance. To me, the stream of Christianity that challenges and questions has always seemed the purest, though I am also aware of how important it is to stay grounded in the faith. You have to know what the basics are before you become too provocative and experimental. Just as all runners need rest and healthy food, so all Christians have to commit to the basics. You have to say your prayers, do penance, recite the creed, receive the eucharist.

Of course. I grant all that. But I also think there is a viable stream within Christianity that sometimes appears divergent to those in some of the other streams. I honestly did not set out to join that stream, but it is, shockingly often, the one I feel most at home in. I have never been able to feel at home in a certain brand of Christianity. I don’t quite know how to describe it other than it’s a little campy and they like to ‘own the atheists’ and toss shibboleths around in order to suss out who else is in their tribe. It’s always felt alien to me. So it seems good and right to put into writing where my allegiance lies: to Christianity, yes, but more specifically the stream that flows turbulent at times. Why should a Trump sycophant get to determine what the faith looks like? If JD Vance can be so bold about his understanding of the Christian faith, perhaps the rest of us can, too. Perhaps it’s our only real hope of staying Christian.

Is Free Will an Argument Against Universal Salvation?

Gideon Yutzy3 Comments

On several occasions, I’ve met people who recognize the elegance of a Gospel that saves all, but they stop short of embracing it because they think it turns us into robots. To them, a soteriology of universal restoration smacks of God saving people whether they like it or not.

Fair enough, and it’s not the worst argument. They don’t want anything shoved down their throats. I get that.

But part of me also wonders whether they are more affected by a rugged Western individualism than they might realize. If I see myself primarily as an individual, then yes, my salvation comes down to my choices and decisions. However, if I see my identity as woven in and through community (nobody is an island), then it starts to make sense that salvation is a project aimed at the human race rather than individual people.

What, after all, is the essence of a human? Is it our physical body? Hardly. The cells in our bodies change completely every seven years. That’s not to mention the speedy decay and ultimate decomposition of our bodies after we die.

Is it our achievements? Is it our memories? Our experiences? That might be getting closer. In truth, most of us probably attach our identity to non-physical markers such as these.

And that’s where it gets interesting: these markers are all intertwined with other people. Take memories and experiences. If we remove even one person involved with our memories and experiences and consign them to eternal damnation, our identity falls apart.

In other words, we can go ahead and remove people from the picture because they failed to make the heroic act of free will and assent to God’s offer of salvation. But our own identity will be fundamentally altered because of it.

Would we rather enter eternal bliss as robots, or as truncated, lobotomized versions of ourselves?

“That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth” (Philippians 2:10). “For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Corinthians 15:22). Adam and Eve’s race is saved–or doomed–as one.

Yes, we have free will. Yes, we should make good decisions. Yes, our actions here have a profound impact on our trajectory. But there is a danger of overemphasizing these truths. We also desperately need God’s grace. As much as we want to will what is good, we find that our will is impoverished. Sick. Broken. Our very will is in need of divine intervention, in need of healing.

“Batter my heart, three-person’d God… Take me to you, imprison me.” That’s not New Age fluff, that’s John Donne writing four centuries ago.

Donne understood that if he was to be saved, it had to be the work of God, not the result of his heroic free will. And upon even a moment of cursory reflection, surely we must reach the same conclusion: the entire human race is saved by grace. (Unless, of course, we’re to go full Calvinist and say God will batter the hearts of some but not others, although poor Calvin probably said it with much more sophistication than we give him credit for.)

This Easter, it is good and right to celebrate God’s resurrection power in my life. Salvation is personal. Jesus loves me, this I know.

But it is far more glorious to consider Easter as a harbinger of salvation for all, as extending far beyond the vaguely-defined contours of my puny self to an entire human race and indeed the cosmos.

God, Grant Us the Courage to Be Countercultural–and Mainstream

Gideon YutzyLeave a comment

My theory is that 99.9% of us are mainstream when it comes to certain things. With Novocain injections, for instance, we’re probably more than happy to go mainstream, or in deciding which side of the road to drive on or which calendar to follow (I’m using the Gregorian one this year). And heretical as this may sound, I think part of *being a good Christian* is going mainstream when we’re meant to go mainstream. After all, Jesus practiced radical identification with the masses.

Jesus prayed that God would not take his followers “out of the world,” but that God would keep them from the evils of the world because, “They are not of the world.” Or, in the memorable phrase I grew up hearing, Christians are to be in the world, but not of the world. It’s a great phrase, but unfortunately it’s all too easy for me to reverse it and be of the world, but not in it. In other words, I chase the same shallow goals everyone chases–reputation, status, money, comfort–but I don’t enter the brokenness of people’s lives. I’m like the purity-obsessed Levite in the Parable of the Good Samaritan: I actively cross over to the other side of the road and avoid the beautiful yet broken and messy people I could encounter day by day.

As with so many things, we Christians tend to go for quick formulas (formulae, if I were feeling more pretentious) on this issue. If we stay separate from the world–i.e., we homeschool our kids, attend church every Sunday, have an abiding mistrust of the medical sytem–then surely we aren’t of the world. If only it were that simple.

But as Christians, the world is where it all happens. In As You Like It, Shakespeare has Jaques say that, “All the world is a stage.” There’s an excellent video from the Bible Project in which they teach that “All the world is a temple.” Every human face, every human interaction, every human invention–it’s all sacred. Why? Because God chose to scandalously and irrevocably unleash the divine image into inhabitants on this particular planet (and maybe several of the other billions of planets, but as of yet nobody can prove that). Ultimately, any split between the sacred and the secular is artificial. It may be useful and even necessary for a time, but it is nonetheless artificial. The whole experience of life on our planet is wildly remarkable. As Rabbi Heschel said, our top priority is to cultivate radical amazement.

None of this means that we disregard the ancient practices and sacraments that come down through the church, even the most ascetic ones. Ascetic shares its etymology with exercise. We strip away all the noise and distractions so that we can live in greater wonder and worship, yet we must always make sure we have the right motives in practicing asceticism and separation from mainstream society: we withdraw so we can return to participate with more zest, not to judge it with our holier-than-thou purity codes.

I take it as an axiom that world is used in two different ways in Scripture. In John’s epistles we’re told not to love the world, but in John’s Gospel we learn that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son to redeem it. Additionally, in Psalm 24, we find that the entire earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof. In the Great Commission, Jesus tells us to go into all the world.

A final passage, Romans 12, instructs us not to conform ourselves to the world, which might contradict my earlier assertion that it’s all sacred. But I don’t think it has to be seen as contradictory. In fact, if you keep reading in Romans 12, we are to be transformed by the renewing of our mind so that we can prove what is pleasing and good. Where else can we do this proving except among the thoroughfare of everyday life in the real world? It’s true that our base impulses are not all that sacred, but even those can lead us to good places if we allow our redemptive God to bring it to pass.

The best I can say it for now is that we are to reject not the world, but certain spirits and mindsets present in the world. I remember some friends taking us to the Philadelphia airport once, and because of a faulty battery, the car broke down before we got there. It was a highly religious area of the US, but as the time for our flight’s departure drew steadily nearer, hundreds of Levite cars streamed past us. (If you were driving one of them, don’t worry, I would almost certainly have done the same.) Finally, a man covered in tattoos and with questionable bumper stickers on his Prius stopped and charged our car battery.

I know it’s almost cliche to lift up irreligious folk with tattoos, but on that hot, still afternoon in Pennsylvania, he really did remind me of someone who was in the world but not of it, and it doesn’t hurt that we caught our flight because of his actions.

It’s Time to Bless Women in Their God-given Leadership Roles

Gideon YutzyLeave a comment

As the great Iain McGilchrist documents in his ponderous yet brilliant book The Master and His Emissary, we use the right side of our brain to perceive and experience. Religion is concerned with the transrational, meaning it embraces logic but also goes beyond it. Religion thrives in intuition, emotion, and experience.

The left brain, in the parlance of McGilchrist’s title, is the Emissary. It belongs to the realm of concept—those things that can be rationalised and categorised. The right brain, by contrast, belongs to percept: that which we enter into as sacred mystery. Left‑brained activities require black‑and‑white, binary thinking. We engage the left brain in the realm of machines and in any activity where the laws of physics are in motion. We are thankful for the left brain’s role in determining the laws of physics, whether a jet’s engine is big enough, for instance.

The problem arises, says McGilchrist, when we switch the roles of the Master (the right brain) and the Emissary (the left brain). When we try to approach mystery with logic, it leads to all sorts of chaos in our society, especially in religion. Humans are not machines. Churches are not machines.

Here is where I wish to make a connection between the brain’s hemispheres and leadership roles in the church. Too often, we elevate the Emissary—left‑brained thinking—in our vision of the ideal church leader. We exalt leaders who can verbally defend the faith, those who can articulate doctrinal traditions with precision. Yet doctrinal purity is subservient to the weightier matters of the right brain, such as mercy and care.

This is where my contention may become contentious. Despite our different understandings of the strengths of women and men, most societies and cultures have agreed that women, more often than men, are well suited for mercy and care. Does it not follow that women would make excellent pastors? This is not to say that no men exhibit pastoral qualities, or that all women do. It is only to say that women, by their very nature, are equally suited for pastoral leadership.

But (our left brain screams) doesn’t Scripture forbid women in church leadership? I have already written some of my thoughts about that and I invite you to read them. Here, I will simply make the plea that we stop using 1 Corinthians 14–“Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak.”–as a proof text. Something else must be going on in that chapter, because earlier both men and women are exhorted to share “a hymn, or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation.” It would be difficult to do that while remaining silent. This explanation might be helpful in understanding the context.

Sadly, in many circles Christians still hold a strong taboo around women in pastoral roles. Similar to heinous crimes like cannibalism or human sacrifice, the topic is avoided—or, if it is addressed at all, spoken of only in hushed whispers. And I get it: change cannot happen overnight. Sometimes centuries, not days, are needed for societal change to take place.

Yet hasn’t this discussion already dragged on for centuries? Someone may express resistance to same‑sex marriage on the grounds that the church has only been talking about it since “five minutes ago.” Whether or not that is true of same‑sex marriage, the discussion on women in leadership is as old as the hills. It has existed as long as Scripture itself. Consider just one chapter—Romans 16. Phoebe was a deacon. Priscilla was a co‑worker with St. Paul. Junia was an apostle among apostles.

The church has not reached a consensus prohibiting women in leadership roles. If anything, a pattern of suppression of female leaders has developed. Julian of Norwich, possibly the first woman to write in English, wrote authoritatively and prolifically about the Christian faith, yet the church hid her writings and even actively blocked their publication. Likewise, Junia’s name in Romans 16 has at times been deliberately mistranslated as a man’s name. More recently, a woman who founded an Anabaptist Bible college was asked by the all‑male board to step aside as president to make way for a new president—male, of course. I do not know all the details. Perhaps the decision was legitimate and appropriate. But given the church’s past treatment of women, the optics are egregious.

Furthermore, we deceive ourselves if we say that no female members—half of the church—should hold any leadership roles whatsoever. The undeniable reality is that women already lead. Leadership has many components, including organisation, mentoring, teaching, and articulating a vision for the future. Even in congregations most intent on reserving leadership for men, women lead. Why not formalise those roles, and even ordain the women who are already exercising them?

A critical reader may say that I, as someone who has traded a more cautious church for a less cautious one, am overly chipper with my newfound liberty. They may be right. I will even go one step further and say that I am probably coming off like the ex‑Mennonite who cannot stop gushing about the benefits of ayahuasca in curing her anxiety and judgmentalism. Let us grant that. Still, is it not better to envision a full‑orbed Christian faith—one that offers life‑giving opportunities for all Christians, men and women alike, to grow and be transformed into the image of Jesus Christ—than to cling to a stultifying belief that is becoming increasingly difficult to defend? That which is no longer prohibited can now be accepted, embraced, and even celebrated.

Let me end on a note of charity. I agree with my more cautious brothers and sisters that men and women are profoundly different. We are all better served by acknowledging and celebrating that reality. In homes and churches, at work and at school, men’s and women’s roles will—and should—look different.

But this should not keep us from experimenting with new roles for either sex. Let each congregation be guided by this question: how are both our men and our women being stretched so that more of God’s glory may flow through them? If a man has a calling and ability to deliver sermons, let him do so. If a woman has a calling and ability to bring in the flowers for the sanctuary, let her do so. But equally, if the Spirit wishes to reverse the roles, we should never allow our left brain to hinder God’s work.

April Musings

Gideon Yutzy3 Comments

It’s never been surprising to me why Joe Rogan is one of the most popular podcasters in the world. He has obviously worked on the skill of conversation–not easy amid all the preachiness and outrage of today. His pacing is good, people don’t talk over or past each other, and you get a sense of who each guest is as a human being. Every week he keeps millions of listeners engaged with episodes that are nearly half as long as the average audiobook.

But over the last year or two I witnessed, in real time, a tragic change in the mood of Joe Rogan’s podcast. His signature ability to host people with a variety of views, the very thing that made him interesting, has practically vanished from his show.

Then, a few weeks ago, I was heartened to see someone who I knew held different political views than those Rogan has been championing so vociferously in almost all his recent episodes. Great, I thought, Joe is finally getting out of his slump. But alas, in that one episode he avoided the subject of politics–and any opportunity to be challenged.

My takeaway is not so much that Rogan is a coward, but that few media personalities can withstand the terrible self-reinforcing feedback loop that goes with the enterprise. It traps them into telling their audience what they want to hear and getting rewarded for it. Audience capture is the neologism that describes this phenomenon–a term that, tellingly, has entered the parlance since the advent of podcasting.

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The Christian faith teaches us to pray and then say, “Praise God,” even if the answer is different from what we wanted. In the words of Daniel’s three friends, “God is able to save us but even if he doesn’t we will stay true to him” (Daniel 8:17-18).

As a practicing Christian, something about that teaching has always sat heavy with me because it can feel as if it lets God off the hook. But recently I heard something that brought clarity to the conundrum. A group of us from church watched a short presentation by Pete Greig. He believes God does answer prayer but that we all exist in a labyrinthine ecosystem of 3 W’s: World, War and Will.

World–Our world has to work a certain way for life to continue. Except for occasional miracles, God must remain true to the laws of nature or we would experience utter chaos. This affects how our prayers are answered.

War–Satan (original meaning: the accuser) works against God in individual situations, although Christians believe Satan will ultimately be defeated. This also affects how our prayers are answered.

Will–Despite our best intentions, our perspective is finite, and sometimes we are praying outside the will of God. Again, this affects how our prayers are answered.

While the 3 W’s don’t eliminate all the tension–tension is an integral part of faith–it reminds us that we do not exist in a vacuum. Each prayer we breathe is interrelated to countless parts of our lives, not to mention the lives of people around us.

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One of my personal goals is to be less judgmental and that people could feel mercy and acceptance from me. It occurred to me the other day that I often feel judgmental toward people because I feel indignant toward them. How can they do or think or say that, and I don’t! Sometimes, if we’re honest, we are judgmental because we secretly wish we were experiencing something of what they’re experiencing. If you think about it, a close relative of judgment is envy.

Of course, if the other party’s actions are truly wrong, the end results can never be attractive. Once we see things as they are, we either accept the merit of those we have been judging and join them, or we see the pain they are headed for. Either way our heart softens toward them. We certainly don’t get bent out of shape with any form of judgment, or of envy, which is its evil twin. Compassion and goodwill are the beautiful antidotes to judgment.