9/11 and the Dangers of Conflation

Conflation: the process or result of fusing items into one entity.

10 years... September 11 I think will always be a scar that aches a bit, with the ache asserting itself more aggressively when that date rolls around every year. The round numbered anniversaries of course tend to be occasions to more consciously rub that ache and remember what that day means to us. This is one of those years. Christians living in the US remember along with everyone else. We were no less affected by the violence because of our faith, and struggled to make sense of the senselessness of it all just like all of our neighbors. Our anguish, fear and even our injuries and deaths were no different than those of our fellow Americans who don’t count themselves as followers of Christ. While we all experienced the attacks as Americans, those of us who identify ourselves with Christ also experienced the attacks as Christians, meaning both identities experienced the trauma simultaneously. I would suggest this experience and our response to it reveals a tension that exists between these two identities which plays itself out in our experiences of both our common communities and our communities of faith. I would suggest our attempts to resolve this tension between our Christian identity and our American identity can sometimes carry us to places which are dangerous to both our faith and our nation. It’s this danger, which also plays itself out in the shadow of this anniversary, that I think I’d like to briefly survey here.

I want to acknowledge up front that there are a lot of sacred cows in play here, and the probability of divergent takes and visions are a given, particularly given the brevity of this format. This will in no way be an even remotely exhaustive, comprehensive, or thorough exploration. It’s just a few thoughts on this tension played out in 500-600 words or so. That being said, I want to begin on the civic side of this tension and acknowledge the Biblical ideas and principles that found their way into much of the mythic narrative of our founding and into many of our founding documents. We are a nation born partially out of the frustration with the sectarian persecutions and wars which took place in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. This “new” land presented people of marginalized faith practices with economic and religious opportunities not accessible to them in their old home. Even as the Enlightenment pushed the theological heart of these nascent ideas toward the margins of public discourse in the 18th century, the country’s founding generation still leaned on the existing religious, philosophical and linguistic framework as they constructed the governing bodies and institutions of this country. Many were men and women of faith themselves. Many were not. But most kept to some form of faith, which was part of our collective national heritage to that point.

It’s because of this framework, and the founders’ choices to work within it that Jefferson is able to write, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…” Jefferson is building on a Christian theological foundation, asserting that all are created equal because of a common Divine Creator who values all equally, while simultaneously tweaking those constructs to reflect contemporary Enlightenment thinking, citing, “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” just a few lines prior as the core foundation upon which his Declaration of Independence was being built. The point here is that this nation was built on a unique foundation of faith which was already morphing before the Constitution was even written. The nation was built on a civic faith in these ideals which was not necessarily a theologically “orthodox” faith. Christianity here was politically engaged toward a civil end, much as it has been throughout its history to both noble and ignoble ends, from Constantine to Jim Crow.

In contrast, the Christian experience, both individually and collectively, particularly as it is described in the New Testament, seems to be markedly unlike this civic faith. In fact both Jesus and Paul seem to acknowledge the tension in loyalties that exists within one choosing to follow after Christ, with both counseling their listeners and readers to show respect for and demonstrate appropriate loyalty to those in positions of civic authority and the political institutions they represent, Jesus in Matthew 22, Mark 12 and Luke 20 and Paul in Romans 13. However, these same readers and listeners are also instructed to actively resist immoral and corrupt cultural practices, replacing them with moral and just ones, which will of course have subversive political implications and thus reveals the tension I spoke of in the opening paragraph. This tension seems to be assumed in the Bible. It seems to be a subset of the larger tension between the Kingdom Jesus speaks of and every political establishment that demonstrates little or no interest in that kingdom.

The difficulty we as Americans face is that our political establishment does have some vestigial and perhaps even some active interest in the principles and actions that characterize Jesus’ Kingdom. I would suggest however that this seeming slackening of that tension is more apparent than it is real. Anecdotally, if this were not the case the reigning general consensus among Evangelicals regarding the state of our culture and government would probably not include the words “hell” or “hand basket.” So where does this leave us? I would suggest that Biblically speaking, this tension between the Christian and their government, even if that government takes a welcoming stance toward them, is a good thing and that some of the confusion we often feel and experience, which often makes it way into our liturgies around civic holidays and remembrances such as Memorial Day, Independence Day, Veterans Day and 9/11, has its roots in our attempts to resolve or work out this tension. We are right to want to recognize the faith of our country’s founders. We are right to recognize the unique role the ideas that rose from that faith have played in our national and political institutions. But we do a disservice to both our faith and our nation when we merge the two into one entity, and then merge both into one personal identity. Without the tension we lose the ability to speak prophetically to those in power. We become more easily co-opted by those in power as a means to accomplish the ends of this kingdom. And most dangerous of all we begin to lose our identity and the unique identity of Jesus’ Kingdom. This is dangerous then not only to us, but also for our nation in that it loses the unique Christian voice that in many ways serves as its conscience. Attempting to resolve this tension allows it to be quieted and silenced. Something to keep in mind as we struggle to live with both identities…

Tell Me a Story

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it. – Hannah Arendt

I’ve come to love the often long, arduous narrative portions of the Bible, particularly those in the Old Testament. I love indulging in the imagination necessary to create that “movie in my head.” I blame this squarely on Tolkien. For some reason The Lord of the Rings trilogy fostered a respect and enjoyment of a lived in, deeply historical, acutely human, epic narrative. The first time I finished The Return of the King I found myself wanting to experience that disquieting epic urgency present in his story; that feeling of kairos, and inter-connectedness; the experience of the veil of divine meaning momentarily lifted so one might get a passing glimpse or scent or breezy touch of the divine mystery; the hint of holistic reality, the trace of divine condescension. For some reason, I found this experience often repeated when reading the epic tales recorded in the Old Testament.

This wasn’t always the case for me. I grew up with a strong preference for the enlightening pedagogy found in the Apostle’s letters. Meaning was much easier to find there. The writers came right out and told you what they meant. They explained those epic tales. They told you what was going on behind the scenes in heavenly places while folks slogged about trying to make sense of their lives down here. They gave you the moral of the story. They clarified the ambiguities of history... to a point, but as it turns out, not always to a particularly sharp point. This stood out to me as a Bible study I am involved in was trying to make sense of Romans 9 through 11.

Paul here is trying to reconcile God’s actions in the history of the life of Israel with God’s actions in the young history of the life of the Church. It may seem at first blush that God has abandoned Israel to engage the Church. Paul makes the historical case that this isn’t so. This is Paul doing his best to clear the muddy waters of history. Of course this clearing is necessary because history doesn’t interpret itself. Even when God acts to intervene in history, or perhaps especially when God acts to intervene in history, God’s motivations and intentions are often not entirely clear. Take as an example any narrative representation in scripture. When God extended daylight in the book of Joshua, what did God intend to communicate to humanity? When God allowed Job to suffer, what was really going on there? When God allows Jonah’s shade to be eaten by worms, what are we to take from that? Granted, we’re often given partial answers to these questions, but we are typically left with more questions than answers. Some might be uncomfortable with this predicament, which is why we may tend to embrace only the explanations in the New Testament, however I would suggest this ambiguity is one of the strengths of Biblical historical narratives. In the words of philosopher Hanna Arendt these narrative reveal meaning, I might add “experientially,” without defining it.

One of the most amazing outcomes of a good story, at least to me, is the wordless glimpse it provides into transcendence, into places where denotations and definitions are powerless to go. A good story allows one to experience something beyond the walls of the visible, and allows the unseen to be perceived, imagined and experienced. These experiences though are, again at least for me, often difficult to impossible to articulate. Words as human creations are often not capable of containing the descriptions or meaning of these kinds of experiences. The meaning simply overflows the words. This is part of the challenge I think Paul faces in Romans 9 through 11. He’s trying to condense a story God had been telling over thousands of years into a few paragraphs. He brings to light the key points he wants to highlight to boil the story down for his readers, but there is far more that God was and is doing in those relationships than can be contained in those few chapters, which I believe Paul himself would acknowledge.

This then I believe is part of the value of reading the narratives of the Old Testament on their own; that the reader gets to experience these glimpses first hand. They get to experience the wildness of a God who is good but not safe, to cite Lewis. They get to experience the meaning the Holy Spirit is intending to reveal to humanity, even while that meaning isn’t entirely defined, and in this case, I believe that lack of definition is a good thing.