Rebelling Against Indifference

It’s always satisfying when you find different things you’ve read and listened to coming together to form a cohesive argument, helping you to look at a subject from different angles that you wouldn’t have thought of without those outside sources informing your thinking process. Earlier this week, I was listening to the highly entertaining and informative 2008 Terry Lectures Series from Yale University, given by Terry Eagleton, on Faith and Fundamentalism: Is Belief in Richard Dawkins Necessary for Salvation? One of Eagleton’s points in his second lecture gave me an epiphany on how to make a point in an essay I had been working on over the weekend, and also connected arguments Irish philosopher/theologian Peter Rollins makes in his second book, The Fidelity of Betrayal, with the larger subject I was working on. I’ve reread a couple chapters of Rollins’ book this week, and in doing so, was reminded of this statement on faith and the “transformative truth” of Christianity, from the chapter Eclipsing God.
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I was rereading Reinhold Niebuhr’s first book (published in 1929) earlier today – it holds the distinction as having my favorite book title, Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic – while Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Evening Service, Op. 37 was playing on the record player in the next room, and a pork sausage omelette was cooking on the stove. The book is a series of journal entries from Niebuhr’s first pastorate, where, fresh of out seminary, he would serve for 15 years before returning to the academy where he would spend the rest of his life. The entry that jumped out at me today was written in 1916, when he was just 24 years old. It immediately made me think of several conversations I’ve had recently with friends about the place of honesty and discernment in what to address in our work, especially as it relates to writing about childhood faith, my primary area of interest at the moment.

I had a letter from Professor L___ today suggesting that I return to college and prepare myself for the teaching profession. A year ago I was certain that I would do that. Now I am not so sure. Nevertheless the academic life has its allurements. It is really simpler than the ministry. As a teacher your only task is to discover the truth. As a preacher you must conserve other interests besides the truth. It is your business to deal circumspectly with the whole religious inheritance lest the virtues which are involved in the older traditions perish through your iconoclasm. That is a formidable task and a harassing one; for one can never be quite sure where pedagogical caution ends and dishonesty begins.
What is particularly disquieting to a young man in the ministry is the fact that some of his fine old colleagues make such a virtue of their ignorance. They are sure that there is no Second Isaiah and have never heard that Deuteronomy represents a later development in the law. I can’t blame them for not having all the bright new knowledge of a recent seminarian (not quite as new as the seminarian imagines); but the ministry is the only profession in which you can make a virtue of ignorance. If you have read nothing but commentaries for twenty years, that is supposed to invest you with an aura of sanctity and piety. Every profession has its traditions and its traditionalists. But the traditionalists in the pulpit are much more certain than the others that the Lord is on their side.

The one tradition I have on this blog, so it seems, is to post Mark Twain’s The War Prayer every other year on the National Day of Prayer. I did so back in 2006, again in 2008, and here we are in 2010. This is my favorite short story, with a concluding line that I think is brilliant. It seems especially apropos this year, in light of the recent Nashville Flood, in the way it examines the words behind our words. My friend Scott wrote a good post related to this earlier in the week, God’s blessings are mysterious sometimes…”

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Earlier this week, I wrote a piece for the Rabbit Room about one of my favorite theologians, Walter Brueggemann, and a trip I took with my friend Scott down to Waco, TX, to attend a conference where Brueggemann was the featured speaker. I included an excerpt from one of his sermons, found in his book The Threat of Life: Sermons on Pain, Power, and Weakness, and a pretty good discussion developed in the comments. Here’s how the piece starts:

Listening to Walter Brueggemann, it is impossible not to feel a sense of history. At 76 years old, as arguably the preeminent Old Testament scholar of our day, Brueggemann has written more than 58 books, many about the prophets of old. To hear him talk is to become convinced that you’re listening to one of those prophets, someone delivering a message directly from God. At a recent conference at Truett Seminary in Waco, TX, where the topic was prophetic preaching, I sat under his teaching for two days with a sense of reverence and gratefulness for the opportunity, and a growing understanding that what I was hearing would shape the way I approached the scriptures in future readings.
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