Open letter to US Congress

Dear US Congresspersons:

Thank you for having the courage to stand up against the President and Wall Street and vote down a package of aid of $700 billion to the extremely wealthy megacorporations who brought this economic crisis crashing down on our heads in the first place. I know the Dow Jones "Industrial" Index fell several percentage points, but I do believe the market will get over it. Seriously. It's in the best interest of the market to do so.

Now that we have kept $700 billion from going down the drain of an unsustainable economy, lets put that money where it belongs: into building citizen confidence (note that I am not using that awful word, "consumer") in our communities and our institutions of government. $700 billion dollars is enough money to invest in citizen "bailouts" averaging almost $2500 per American adult and child. Every family of four could get around $10,000 to help make those mortgage payments, keep food on the table, pay down student loan and credit card debt, and make up for the retirement and college savings they just lost in the stock market crash.

$2500 for a single man or woman might make the difference between defaulting on student loans and just getting by. It might make the difference between affording those health insurance premiums and copays or going without -- as the cost of treatment doubles or triples. It might make the difference between having a bed to sleep in and becoming one of the nation's hopeless homeless. 

So, what do you think? Lift up the people on whose backs our economic house of cards has been built, or prevent a few megacorporations from merging, buying each other out, and otherwise having a bad year? My answer is to help the people.

Taking a longer view, it is time to follow the example of our European neighbors and partially socialize our economy. It is time for us to shift from a notion of each individual and company pursuing their own best interests to a notion of the Greater Good. The individual must exist within a community, and if the needs of the community are not taken care of, the individual is at risk. We must switch from an economy of consumers to an economy of producers: the job of the individual (and especially the corporation) is not to make money for itself, but to provide for the common good...of which it is a part!

Very truly I tell you: by the end of the next decade, we must provide every human being in America with a bed to sleep in, three meals a day, and access to at least basic preventative health care or our country will fall apart at the seams. FDR saw this, and he held the country together with duct tape, self confidence, and federal job programs. We must do this again. We must build sustainable communities, sustainable economies, and sustainable ecology or there will be no community, economy, or ecology for my children and yours to inherit. The future depends on what we do today.

We must do this...why not start today?

Yours sincerely,

James Camp

More thoughts on the Trinity

Believe it or not, Theology class hit on the Trinity again today. And, believe it or not, I have some thoughts on the subject. 

The current best-defense of the idea of the Trinity seems to be that God is inherently relational and therefore must exist as a relationship. (one argument seems to go: if "God is Love," God must have someone to love or God would cease to exist; if God created the universe, there must have been a point when the universe did not exist, and God was alone; in order for God to exist alone, God must consist of multiple persons that can love each other.)

I don't buy it. If God needs to be in relation to someone, why not create someone to be in relationship with. Oh, wait...God did! But, you ask, what about before God created us? UU process theologian Charles Hartshorne posited that God has always existed in relationship to one universe or another; that this universe may have been created out of the ashes of a prior one, and so forth. Not a bad idea, though honestly it smacks of circular reasoning.

But let's just say for the sake of argument that God does need to exist as a relationship. Why three? Haven't theologians ever heard the saying "two's company, three's a crowd"? God could easily exist in relationship with Godself in the guise of a male-female dualism (which, as any person married longer than a few years knows involves many different kinds of love in addition to the obvious erotic-generative love), a parent-child dualism (which models the creator-created relationship to some extent), or even a "dyslexic dualism:" God and his/her Dog (modeling that God is God's own best friend, rubs God's own belly, fetches those subatomic particles that keep getting away during creation, etc). Why do you need a third person? 

My theory: because those crazy pagans already have the god-goddess dipole set up, and the parent-child dipole smacks of hierarchy unless you add a third person and make it a triangle instead of a line. But, then, why not four? or five? or an infinite number of Divine facets, each of which can "relate" to the others?

And finally: my suggestion for a new, post-feminist, post-modern, post-everything-else Trinity:

• Mother - sophia - wisdom, nurture, love
• Father - logos - reason, teaching, divine order
• Child - lumos - illumination, guidance, the "still, small voice," that-of-God-within

Gets rid of the Divine Patriarchy implied by the Father-Son-Spirit Trinity, gets rid of the modalism of the "economic" Trinity (Creator-Sustainer-Redeemer), and totally eschews sexism in either direction. Mother and Father share generative love that creates life; Mother nurtures, Father teaches - to use classic gender roles - Child exists in solidarity with the created: Immanuel, the God-with-us (and -within-us) that permeates life in the universe and provides us with our leadings/nudgings/callings and other forms of guidance. 

Neat, huh?

On the Trinity

I feel the need to say this: Unitarian does not mean the same thing as "anti-Trinitarian." There, I've said it. 

The Unity of God (and its corollary, the humanity of Jesus of Nazareth) is the idea with which we have been labeled, but it is not at all the idea on which we hang our hats. Putting it another way, "unitarianism" is not the island on which we live, but rather the bridge by which we originally got there. Rather, we live on the Island of Human Goodness (as opposed to Calvin's Island of Human Depravity). And we live there quite happily, Trinity or no.

I can't believe the number of people at Seminary this week who have been tossing Trinity-related jokes, barbs, and generally good-natured ribbings my way -- probably in the wake of Dave Jensen's comment in theology class that "a number of anti-Trinitarian movements have cropped up over the years...hey wait, where's James?" (this happened to be the only Seminary class I have missed this entire semester, and perhaps the one where I most needed to be there to defend myself!) I'm not sure what people thought my response would be, but the general expectation seems to be that sparks would have flown or I would have burst into flames or something.

That said, my Unitarian ancestors-in-the-faith found the Trinity to be:

• unnecessarily complicated (that is, God could be understood perfectly well without the idea),
• doxologically unhelpful (that is, the core teaching of human moral perfectability, that Jesus was able to live a perfect life and therefore so should we, was obfuscated by the teaching that Jesus was both God and human and therefore Not Like Us), and
• unbiblical (that is, they could find no point in the Bible where Jesus claimed to be of one substance with the Father or where God was described as being three persons - rather, the Hebrew Bible goes to great lengths to assert that God is One and worship of substitute persons, idols, emanations, etc is bad - if soli scriptura is really the way to go, then the Trinity is right out).

Modern Unitarian Universalists find the Trinity to be:

• unnecessarily complicated,
• kinda weird, and
• so (exclusively) Christian it hurts.

Other than that, we don't really give it much thought. So we are not really anti-Trinitarians. Sorry to confuse you. You Trinitarians can go about your business, we will not be burning any of you at the stake.  ;-)

The Great Emergence

I had the great and rare pleasure yesterday of getting to listen to Phyllis Tickle -- billed as "founding editor of the Religion Department of Publishers Weekly" among other things -- discuss her new book, The Great Emergence. Phyllis has quite obviously spent a life studying, contemplating, and writing about the social history of the Christian religion...and she has a great deal to say about it.

The thesis of her "conversation" today (everything in the Emergent Church movement seems to be labeled a 'conversation' of some sort or another) was that the "emergent" or "emerging" movement we are starting to see is part of a grand tradition in western religion of periodically breaking down and completely re-forming or re-building our religious basis. To this end, Phyllis makes two possibly-controversial but simultaneously very revealing assertions: first, that the Abrahamic religious traditions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam -- does the Baha'i faith count?) reach a breaking point roughly every 500 years at which the present basis of authority and religious understanding can no longer hold and must be re-formed; second, that we are in the midst of one of these 500-year reformations right now.

Looking at the first assertion as it impacts the Judeo-Christian tradition:

• 1000 BCE: King David, the consolidation of Israel and worship of Yahweh; religious authority from oral tradition and a divine monarchy, temporal authority from divine monarchy
• 500 BCE: Second-Temple Judaism, the "invention" of monotheism; religious authority from a vaguely-defined collection of written scriptures and a priestly class, temporal authority from a priest-sanctioned monarchy
• 0 BCE/CE: The Coming of Christ, beginning of the decline of the Roman Empire, the first universalization of monotheism (ie, our God should be everybody's God); religious authority from Christ and his directly-appointed apostles (and their appointees, the Bishops) - or in Jewish tradition from the Rabbinate, temporal authority from the Emperors
• 500 CE: Catholicism/Orthodoxy, fall of Rome and beginning of teutonic warrior-states; religious authority from the Pope (west) or the Emperor (east), temporal authority from whoever has military strength to own the land
• 1000 CE: The East/West Schism, beginning of feudal monarchies; in the west: religious authority from the Pope, temporal authority sanctioned by the Pope
• 1500 CE: The Reformation, beginning of modern nations; religious authority from the canonized scriptures as interpreted by an educated pastorate (typically sanctioned by the national Church), temporal authority from a sense of national identity - evolution of the idea of 'consent of the governed'
• 2000 CE: The Emergence, globalization-pluralism-multiculturalism; religious authority from spirit-led individuals in community, temporal authority from a sense of global human identity - notion of government as ensurer of social justice, eco-justice, and common welfare of all people

It seems like a reasonable fit to the data, no? It is not, however, the only fit to the data, nor does it account for the fact that other revolutions have happened out-of-sync with this cycle (eg, the American Revolution / American Reformation and the onset of the individual-in-community as source of authority was about 250 years out-of-sync with this cycle)

And the second assertion? That we are in the midst of one of these great upheavals right now? I have to admit that my wife and I have been sensing "the end of the world as we know it" for a few years now: global climate change is driving home the point that we really must all work together to make our culture sustainable or my kids will not inherit a very nice home, global religio-civil conflicts are driving home the similar point that we really must all learn to talk to (and listen to, and work with) each other or we just may all end up killing each other, and the fact that we can't even all agree to talk about these issues because we'd much rather hate each other on religious or political grounds says that we really do need a new religious and cultural basis for our society. 

To borrow a phrase from a friend of mine: what better time than now?

Why UUmergent?

I was introduced to the idea of the Emergent (or Emerging) Christian movement sometime this summer in one of those wonderful synchronicities that flag something for me as important: or, put another way, important things always come in threes. First, I saw a book titled something like "why we aren't emergent (by two guys who ought to be)" in the Seminary bookstore...picking it up, I quickly decided that whatever "emergent" was,  if the authors were against it I was for it! The next day I saw the "emerging church" mentioned in a news article with a quote from some guy named Brian McLaren. Interesting. The next time I was in the Seminary bookstore, I happened on a copy of Peter Rollins' How (not) to speak of God  on clearance. I picked it up, quickly read the first two chapters (amazing for me) and decided I was an Emergent Unitarian. 

Soon thereafter, a series of conversations with new friend and fellow seminarian Mike Clawson convinced me that there is a tremendous synergy between what the Unitarian Universalist movement is trying to do and what the Emergent Church movement is trying to do. We come at it from opposite angles, perhaps -- Mike, from a post-evangelical perspective of working to broaden the scope of conservative Christianity, and myself, from a post-liberal perspective of trying to remind Unitarian Universalists that the Christian message is at the heart of everything we believe and do. But we find common ground, I think, in three principles (correct me if I'm wrong, Mike!):

1. Nurture the Spirit / Heal the Broken. Provide a home for the religiously damaged to rebuild a positive faith in community with others who are on the same journey.
2. Heal the World / Be the Change. Build a just, loving, and sustainable world community one small step at a time.
3. What you believe is less important than how you act out your faith, and how you let your beliefs be in conversation with those of others.

Sound like a good description of Unitarian Universalism? Turns out it isn't a bad description of the New Christianity, either. Imagine that!