“The Christening” (season 7, episode 7) is the most explicitly religious episode of The Office yet, and interestingly, it contains a subplot which illustrates Jesus’ teachings about discipleship.

The setup: the entire office turns up at the christening of Jim and Pam’s baby, Celeste, and the episode revolves around the misadventures during the service and then at the reception in the hall next door. The church is not identified; it seemed to me the writers were striving to make it generically Protestant. But it’s obviously not Baptist and there is a woman minister; furthermore, several seasons ago Pam mentioned she was a Presbyterian.

In one of the subplots, the christening service is also the send-off for the youth group, who are heading off to Mexico to build a school for the poor. Michael Scott, the office’s selfish and immature boss, is enchanted with the level of community and meaning which the youth group enjoys, wishing he could be a part of it. He tries to convince the others from the office:

Look at that, look at that – that’s fun! We need to do stuff together, outside of work. Let’s go help Africa… Let’s go build an airport. We’ll start small, we’ll have a carwash, we’ll send some cheerleaders to regionals.

When the others object, Michael says:

Okay, we don’t have to volunteer, but I think we should hang out together more… Look at these people – these are churchgoing people and they know how to party… What is wrong with you guys? What is so horrible about trying to get together and do something nice?

Michael (and then Andy) decide to get on the bus and join the youth, who embrace them. The idealistic youth leader says:

If the whole world were like you guys we wouldn’t have so many problems! … Nobody I know would leave their jobs and friends and families to do manual labour for three months.

A little while into the trip all the youth are trying to sleep and Michael is bored:

Michael: How long till we get to Mexico?

Andy: Well, two days minus, how long we been on the road… forty-five minutes… so like two days, basically.

Michael: What are we building over there again? Like a hospital? School for Mexicans?

Andy: I don’t know – I thought it was like a gymnasium…

Michael: Why aren’t they building it?

Andy: They don’t know how.

Michael: Do we know how. I don’t know how – do you know how?

Michael and Andy’s conversation might suggest some of the pitfalls of short-term mission trips – how much better do we rich white people know? But more than that, it is the falling apart of Michael and Andy’s resolve to do good and be a part of this community which seemed so attractive forty-five minutes ago:

Michael: I didn’t sign up for this. You guys are young! You want to give back to society! I’ve done that – I need to take!

Michael and Andy get off the bus. They hadn’t counted the cost, and they didn’t want to pay it.

It is a flattering portrait of Christianity – it shows Christian community as attractive but difficult, and the Christians themselves as welcoming and genuine.

*

‘Why have you always got to be so mean to me?’ – the only clip I could find from this episode isn’t from Michael Scott’s counting-the-cost story. Instead, Toby was once training to be a priest, and it’s his first return to church, presumably since his divorce. He hides outside (in the extras, even in a tree) before coming in alone to ask God the big question.

Despite its disclaimer (‘a dream’), the book must surely horrify many evangelicals with its set-up of the afterlife. People’s fates are not fixed; they have the opportunity of visiting heaven and even staying. Their entry seems to depend upon their letting go of the sins which they have become attached to.

Lewis performs a deft twist at the end to exculpate himself and maintain his orthodoxy; the encounters we have read of are perhaps ‘only the mimicry of choices that had really been made long ago’ or perhaps ‘anticipations of a choice to be made at the end of all things’ (107). Better to say neither, advises George MacDonald (C.S. Lewis’s literary hero and his guide in heaven) – ‘do not ask of a vision in a dream more than a vision in a dream can give.’ MacDonald, warns him to be sure to ‘give no poor fool a pretext to think ye are claiming knowledge of what no mortal knows’ (108).

It is one of those rare books which inspire me to be a better person. Actually, perhaps it scares me to be better as much as inspires me – it is frightening to see parts of myself in all these people who are shutting out heaven and holding onto sin. The worst sin in The Great Divorce seems to be joylessness – those who shut out joy will shut out God. This is hard for a gloomy person like me to hear. It’s not the sin Jesus spent the most time on, but I see much truth in Lewis’s depiction of a series of people who will not embrace joy and truth because they are holding onto resentments of various kinds:

…it begins with a grumbling mood, and yourself still distinct from it: perhaps criticising it. And yourself, in a dark hour, may will that mood, embrace it. Ye can repent and come out of it again. But there may come a day when you can do that no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticise the mood, nor even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself going on forever like a machine. (60)

Also frightening is Lewis’s depiction of a liberal bishop, who would rather return to the ambiguities of his theological reading group in the gloomy city (hell) than embrace the certainties of knowing God face to face. This is how he became what he is:

Having allowed oneself to drift, unresisting, unpraying, accepting every half-conscious solicitation from our desires, we reached a point where we no longer believed the Faith. Just in the same way, a jealous man, drifting and unresisting, reaches a point at which he believes lies about his best friend: a drunkard reaches a point at which (for the moment) he actually believes that another glass will do him no harm. (28)

There should be more books like this. The Shack probably belongs in the same genre, but unfortunately not in the same league.

Chapter 1 is called “Why You Don’t Have to Hear God’s Voice in Your Heart: Or How God Really Speaks Today”. It certainly does challenge present day evangelical practice, whereby many evangelicals are ‘listening out’ for God’s promptings in their heart. Cary insists God doesn’t speak to our hearts; what we’re hearing is our own (fallible but often helpful) inner voice. Mistaking it for God can only give it an absolute authority it shouldn’t have. Instead of speaking in our hearts, God speaks through the Gospel, Cary insists – particularly, I suspect, the proclamation of the Word.

If he’s right, does this mean God’s silent, even as we pray to God? Is the Holy Spirit not even prompting or prodding us gently? I think I’d find it hard to pray if I completely agreed with him.

Anyone remotely charismatic will find themselves at odds with Cary. I’m keeping an open mind. He has a good point when you think of the way God speaks in the Bible – dreams, visions, audible voices, proclamations by prophets, but not so much voices in our hearts. But what about the charismatic gifts in the assembled church? I’m sure God speaking isn’t meant to be the private affair evangelicals make it, but I think Paul would say that God speaks new words to the congregation through people with the gift of prophecy, a gift God particularly poured out on a diverse range of people.  Not sure what Cary would say to that; in short my hunch is that’s right in relocating God speaking away from the individual’s heart, but that he has not given enough consideration to God speaking to the body in Pauline churches of the NT.

Olson describes hard postmodernism like this:

On the one hand is deconstructive thought that seeks to expose the oppressive power of truth claims and especially of metanarratives. Philosophers such as Jacques Derrida, Michael Foucault, and Richard Rorty engage in this hard kind of postmodern philosophy, which seems inevitably relativistic. For them, all truth claims are but masks for will to power. Some critics have described this hard type of postmodern philosophy as “cognitive nihilism.” Its main purpose is to relativize truth.

This is the kind of postmodernism which is more familiar to people. I think it is only of limited usefulness and insight. More helpful and insightful is what Olson calls ‘soft’ postmodernism:

On the other hand is a softer kind of postmodern philosophy found in thinkers such as Alasdair MacIntyre, who does not deny ontological reality or objective truth but seeks to show that even reason always operates within a narrative context. In other words, knowledge may be relative even if truth is not… This is not relativism but recognition of the relativity of perspective inherent in all human thinking. All reasoning and judging takes place from within some local context shaped by a narrative about reality and carried forward within a community of tradition created by that narrative.

Conservatives will tend to assume postconservatives are embracing ‘hard’ postmodernism, when in fact they are only using the insights of ‘soft’ postmodernism.

The housing bubble is one of the social evils of Australian society today. The baby boomers are largely to blame. Not all of them, of course. But as a generation, they have pushed up house prices to insane levels, to the point where houses are not affordable. This has happened through speculation, media infatuation (property shows), negative gearing, and an obsession with property.

John Howard is partly to blame too. He and his government loved making Australia’s middle aged middle class feel incredibly wealthy because their houses were ballooning in value. It was part of the reason for his electoral success. Rudd’s government introduced the first home buyers’ boost just when property was correcting, and all that money went into the hands of real estate agents and baby boomer investors.

The outcome of this situation is that nobody has any time. Two incomes are the norm, and working hours are long. The average house price is something like seven times the average annual income – while historic averages are more like three. So everyone is so very busy paying off ridiculous mortgages making some other people feel wealthy.

A colleague commented the other day that the death of volunteerism in churches has led to the rise of the megachurches. I say the death of volunteerism is surely linked to the busyness due to the housing bubble. (Volunteerism, of course, is not entirely dead; but it’s not as flourishing as it once was. The reason for this is not simply the selfishness of Gen X and Y.)

So with no time to volunteer or help, people need/want churches which do it all for them, with a large paid staff to do all the things which the ‘laity’ once had the time to do. My colleague’s theory, then, is that this situation means megachurches work best for the busy lifestyle of today.

I feel angry and disenfranchised by the way things have gone. I hate this obsession with property; I hate that I have ended up spending a lot of time thinking about it. I think we have a huge house of cards, and there is this part of me which longs for it all to come crashing down. The other part of me dreads the pain this will case so many people, the overly-indebted Gen X and Y, particularly.

But the society which will emerge in the aftermath of the coming financial crisis has to be better than the one we have now. In hardship and humility, we may just reconnect with each other. We may have time for each other. We may lose the Australian obsession with property and wealth.

In outlining the difference between conservative and postconservative evangelical theology, Olson makes a fascinating proposal. For him, evangelicalism has always faced the challenge and rewards of its dual origins in two different streams of Christianity – Puritan and Pietist. The Puritan stream has emphasised doctrinal correctness and seen theology as the task of systemising the Bible into doctrines and then defending these formulations (basically already completed) against innovations. The Pietist stream has tended to make the experience of conversion and discipleship the primary mode of faith, with doctrine flowing from this. (This is a simplification of his generalisation, so bear that in mind before picking holes in it.) I don’t identify with either of these streams, but I am very sympathetic to the postconservative evangelical theologians.

Today, conservative evangelicals (inheritors of the Puritan stream) tend to look at the Bible primarily as a means of information. Postconservative evangelicals (inheritors of the Pietist stream) look at the Bible just as much as a means of transformation and encounter; just as important as propositions are stories, parables, poetry in the Bible which call for our response and participation. Postconservatives also believe that no post-canonical formulation of doctrine can be seen as final and beyond questioning; they tend to encourage theological imagination and creativity.

Olson believes conservatives are susceptible to an ironic kind of traditionalism. Despite the fact they tend to downplay tradition as a source for theology, conservatives will often defend Reformation (or later) formulations of doctrine as fixed and final, because they take them to be the only faithful way to understand the biblical witness.

I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence. I can understand a wrathful God who’d just as soon dangle us all from a hook. And I can understand a tender, unprejudiced Jesus. But I could never quite feature the two of them living in the same house. You wind up walking on eggshells, never knowing which… is at home at the moment.
– Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible

I’ve been listening to The Poisonwood Bible in the car. I didn’t read it when it came out; I was biased against it because it was a book club favourite. But two tapes in, I’m finding it an enthralling novel. A Southern Baptist family move to the Congo to live as missionaries there in the 1950s; Nathan Price, the father, is a harsh and stubborn man, not willing to learn from the Africans – or his wife, from whom this quote comes.

Jesus is tender sometimes, but is just as often harsh, especially with hypocrites. But still her quote resonates with me. Faith asks us to live out a particular way of life, at odds with the world. And we have do that without certainty. We shouldn’t think of salvation as ‘life insurance’ – yet often we do, and if it doesn’t pay out, then we have just been given a life sentence.

²³ When you are persecuted in one place, flee to another. Truly I tell you, you will not finish going through the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes.

We might be conditioned to hear it eschatologically, but then it makes no sense. What if it just means they won’t finish going to all the towns before Jesus catches up to them? In that case, it is a strange way to say something so simple.

But what was most strange to me is that there is no record of the Twelve leaving or coming back. Chapter 11 has Jesus teaching and preaching in the towns of Galilee; the disciples reappear in chapter 12, with no mention of their big mission. How long did they go for? What happened? Matthew must have had something in mind, and the record of some tradition, but he gives us no account. Luke at least records, rather barely:

¹⁷ The seventy-two returned with joy and said, “Lord, even the demons submit to us in your name.”

I looked at three major commentaries at lunchtime; none even mentioned the (problem?). F.W. Beare gave a paper on it in 1969 to SBL; I’m going to read it properly, but his gist was that the lack of an account was evidence for it not happening. That doesn’t really answer my question, of course, and I’m not so sceptical. Just a passing question as I read.

Yes, in many instances, and in the best of times, we can function without denominations. But we are not always at our best, taking into account our temptation to turn in upon ourselves (and the reformers defined sin in this way) and the complexity of creating and sustaining community. I am convinced that every church and every member of the clergy, over a span of time, needs to belong to a denomination.

Interesting post on Christian Century by Kenneth Carter on why congregations need denominations. I’m sympathetic to what he says. My own congregation doesn’t have a denomination, and is unlikely to ever have one again, after being mistreated by the hierarchy and leaving en masse. I think it’s healthy the way my own church has cultivated strong ties to a wide variety of congregations of various denominations in the area. We might even be well connected enough to have the help we would need from outside in times of conflict. That said, I think denominationalism or some other co-operation is something the church overall is poorer without.