The Bible and Culture

The newly minted PhDs are in the forefront of the picture— Adesola Akala, David Shreiner, and Mark Awabdy. You may recognize a few other souls in the picture. Your’s truly is on the back row wearing his puffy hat and lots of Durham and Jerusalem red.

Finding good concerts with stars of the 60s and 70s who still play and sing well is of course becoming more and more difficult. Too many of them are in the morgue, or at least they sound like they are dead, and I’m grateful I’ve managed to avoid most of those kinds of concerts. But when the opportunity arose to see a clean and sober Bonnie Raitt back on top of her game, and on top of that, an opening act of Marc Cohn who still sings and plays wonderfully, even after he was shot in the head in Denver about seven years ago, was too good to pass up. This was especially so because they were performing in Louisville’s Whitney Hall which is sonically magnificent.

Jeff, the tune dude James and I headed to Louisville a bit early on a Sunday afternoon so we could wander around in downtown Louisville since the concert hall is almost on the banks of the Ohio, and there’s much to see in the area. As it turned out, Jeff being the native Kentuckian knew all the venues and the menus, and so we ended up having a light supper at Vicenzo’s a truly nice Italian restaurant within five minutes walk of the concert hall. Bring on the tiramisu and coffee!

Since we got there early we snuck in and saw Bonnie rehearsing, and got a quick glimpse of the hall itself. Wow. It looked like La Scala– with two giant wrap around balconies. And thank goodness somebody bothered to hire an acoustician to help build the hall in a sonically appropriate manner, so the sound would be good for all sorts of concerts.

Credit Marc and Bonnie for knowing their audience would be mostly people well over 40. Hence the concert began sharply at 7 p.m. and was done before 10 so the geezers with the tweezers could get home before they turned into pumpkins. Speaking of geezers I don’t think but one member of Bonnie’s band was under 64 or so….. wow. And boy could they play. That’s one of the great things about music, unlike sports. Your shelf life can be quite long if you stay in good shape. Look at Tony Bennett.

Marc Cohn of course is an example of what I’d call the last wave of original rock and roll. He did not really surface until about 1990 though he had been trying for years before that. His musical influences and heroes were people like Bonnie Raitt and James Taylor, from the first great wave of rock n’ roll.

Then he wrote a little song called ‘Walking in Memphis’ really more of a gospel piano song than anything else, that catapulted him into stardom– it was nominated for a Grammy and his first album which had the song won the Grammy. He was a ‘Best New Artist’ over night, which of course will definitely change your life. Suddenly he was playing with his musical heroes like Crosby and Nash and Taylor. The problem was, he had come late to the dance, and the d.j. playing the tunes preferred other kinds of music. The good news was, Marc had a lot of juice left in the tank compared to most burned out rockers from the first and second wave of ‘classic’ rock. And so there were more great albums by Marc in the 90s.

Sadly, he only played for 30 minutes at this concert, as I could have listened to him for hours. It was just him on the piano, or playing a guitar left handed, with one side musician to assist him. Spare but not sparse, simple but not trite, beautiful but not sugar coated pop. More than anything else Marc Cohn, a Jewish boy, sings Gospel with slightly different lyrics than ‘the eye was on the sparrow’. He grew up in Cleveland where there is a very large Jewish community, but his musical heroes were not klezmer artists. You become what you admire.

He told the story of having writer’s block and making a road trip to Memphis, where he went to Al Green’s church one Sunday for several hours. He quipped “after the first couple of hours of church, I began to think that my people had made a mistake about their home boy, that Jesus fellow.” He also told the story of running into one of the great female black gospel artists playing in a little shack of a club and singing ‘His Eye is on the Sparrow’. It was clear that the whole thing had deeply affected his soul.

2005 however was the year he was shot, and various of us were praying for him. I am happy to say the story has a happy ending. He recovered, and as he was recovering he wrote a whole slew of new songs, because Katrina hit while he was recovering. The album is called Join the Parade, which came out in 2007, and I commend it to you. Like Dylan, like Taylor, like Simon, Marc is a songsmith, each one carefully crafted, complex, and rich. Marc also married Liz Vargas the TV commentator, and is living happily in N.Y. for the last 25 years with his four girls. Some rock n roll stories don’t end with the words ‘crash and burn’.

Bonnie Raitt is that rarest of all female artists— a blues singer who plays a mean blues slide guitar. Bonnie has a lot of miles on her, but she looks like a classic red (headed) Thunderbird. She’s just great, and her voice is still wonderful, though it may have lost a bit of its power. But for about an hour and a half we were treated to vintage Bonnie and brand new Bonnie, mostly brand new Bonnie from her fine new album Slipstream.

Unlike Marc Cohn, Bonnie does not write most of her songs, but she sure knows how to commission other people to write great songs for her. There are some fabulous new songs on Slipstream, though as a whole album I would say Luck of the Draw is a better album. What the new album shows is that Bonnie is alive and well, clean and sober (which was not always the case), and enjoying life. She too commented on her religious experiences, telling us she grew up going to Quaker meetings in So Cal (she lives in Pasadena). Mostly she sang beautifully and let her band do most of the playing, except for some slick slide blues licks, and we were left wanting more of her classic numbers from Grammy nominated lps.

But how did Raitt and Cohn come to tour together, since they live world’s apart? Well turns out they had toured together before— in Australia and New Zealand a long while back. And it also turns out that they love each other’s music. That makes for a fun tour, and a mutual admiration society. Were I too rate this concert I would place it very high indeed. Perhaps a notch below last years Paul Simon extravaganza, but still fantastic.

It is always sad to watch the dying of the light, but then sunsets are the most beautiful part of the day anyway. If rock n roll is in its dotage, these concerts remind us of what we’ve recently been missing, and how wonderful and enduring so much of that music was and is. More recent artists would do well to: 1) actually learn how to play some musical instruments, not just sing, and 2) learn how to write their own songs as well. It’s a consummation devoutly to be wished.

( I don’t normally do more than offer links and small quotes as requested from the NY Times, but this article strikes a major nerve and is so important that I am making a one time exception….)

The Flight From Conversation

By SHERRY TURKLE
Published: NY Times April 21, 2012

WE live in a technological universe in which we are always communicating. And yet we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection.

At home, families sit together, texting and reading e-mail. At work executives text during board meetings. We text (and shop and go on Facebook) during classes and when we’re on dates. My students tell me about an important new skill: it involves maintaining eye contact with someone while you text someone else; it’s hard, but it can be done.

Over the past 15 years, I’ve studied technologies of mobile connection and talked to hundreds of people of all ages and circumstances about their plugged-in lives. I’ve learned that the little devices most of us carry around are so powerful that they change not only what we do, but also who we are.

We’ve become accustomed to a new way of being “alone together.” Technology-enabled, we are able to be with one another, and also elsewhere, connected to wherever we want to be. We want to customize our lives. We want to move in and out of where we are because the thing we value most is control over where we focus our attention. We have gotten used to the idea of being in a tribe of one, loyal to our own party.

Our colleagues want to go to that board meeting but pay attention only to what interests them. To some this seems like a good idea, but we can end up hiding from one another, even as we are constantly connected to one another.

A businessman laments that he no longer has colleagues at work. He doesn’t stop by to talk; he doesn’t call. He says that he doesn’t want to interrupt them. He says they’re “too busy on their e-mail.” But then he pauses and corrects himself. “I’m not telling the truth. I’m the one who doesn’t want to be interrupted. I think I should. But I’d rather just do things on my BlackBerry.”

A 16-year-old boy who relies on texting for almost everything says almost wistfully, “Someday, someday, but certainly not now, I’d like to learn how to have a conversation.”

In today’s workplace, young people who have grown up fearing conversation show up on the job wearing earphones. Walking through a college library or the campus of a high-tech start-up, one sees the same thing: we are together, but each of us is in our own bubble, furiously connected to keyboards and tiny touch screens. A senior partner at a Boston law firm describes a scene in his office. Young associates lay out their suite of technologies: laptops, iPods and multiple phones. And then they put their earphones on. “Big ones. Like pilots. They turn their desks into cockpits.” With the young lawyers in their cockpits, the office is quiet, a quiet that does not ask to be broken.

In the silence of connection, people are comforted by being in touch with a lot of people — carefully kept at bay. We can’t get enough of one another if we can use technology to keep one another at distances we can control: not too close, not too far, just right. I think of it as a Goldilocks effect.

Texting and e-mail and posting let us present the self we want to be. This means we can edit. And if we wish to, we can delete. Or retouch: the voice, the flesh, the face, the body. Not too much, not too little — just right.

Human relationships are rich; they’re messy and demanding. We have learned the habit of cleaning them up with technology. And the move from conversation to connection is part of this. But it’s a process in which we shortchange ourselves. Worse, it seems that over time we stop caring, we forget that there is a difference.

We are tempted to think that our little “sips” of online connection add up to a big gulp of real conversation. But they don’t. E-mail, Twitter, Facebook, all of these have their places — in politics, commerce, romance and friendship. But no matter how valuable, they do not substitute for conversation.

Connecting in sips may work for gathering discrete bits of information or for saying, “I am thinking about you.” Or even for saying, “I love you.” But connecting in sips doesn’t work as well when it comes to understanding and knowing one another. In conversation we tend to one another. (The word itself is kinetic; it’s derived from words that mean to move, together.) We can attend to tone and nuance. In conversation, we are called upon to see things from another’s point of view.

FACE-TO-FACE conversation unfolds slowly. It teaches patience. When we communicate on our digital devices, we learn different habits. As we ramp up the volume and velocity of online connections, we start to expect faster answers. To get these, we ask one another simpler questions; we dumb down our communications, even on the most important matters. It is as though we have all put ourselves on cable news. Shakespeare might have said, “We are consum’d with that which we were nourish’d by.”

And we use conversation with others to learn to converse with ourselves. So our flight from conversation can mean diminished chances to learn skills of self-reflection. These days, social media continually asks us what’s “on our mind,” but we have little motivation to say something truly self-reflective. Self-reflection in conversation requires trust. It’s hard to do anything with 3,000 Facebook friends except connect.

As we get used to being shortchanged on conversation and to getting by with less, we seem almost willing to dispense with people altogether. Serious people muse about the future of computer programs as psychiatrists. A high school sophomore confides to me that he wishes he could talk to an artificial intelligence program instead of his dad about dating; he says the A.I. would have so much more in its database. Indeed, many people tell me they hope that as Siri, the digital assistant on Apple’s iPhone, becomes more advanced, “she” will be more and more like a best friend — one who will listen when others won’t.

During the years I have spent researching people and their relationships with technology, I have often heard the sentiment “No one is listening to me.” I believe this feeling helps explain why it is so appealing to have a Facebook page or a Twitter feed — each provides so many automatic listeners. And it helps explain why — against all reason — so many of us are willing to talk to machines that seem to care about us. Researchers around the world are busy inventing sociable robots, designed to be companions to the elderly, to children, to all of us.

One of the most haunting experiences during my research came when I brought one of these robots, designed in the shape of a baby seal, to an elder-care facility, and an older woman began to talk to it about the loss of her child. The robot seemed to be looking into her eyes. It seemed to be following the conversation. The woman was comforted.

And so many people found this amazing. Like the sophomore who wants advice about dating from artificial intelligence and those who look forward to computer psychiatry, this enthusiasm speaks to how much we have confused conversation with connection and collectively seem to have embraced a new kind of delusion that accepts the simulation of compassion as sufficient unto the day. And why would we want to talk about love and loss with a machine that has no experience of the arc of human life? Have we so lost confidence that we will be there for one another?

WE expect more from technology and less from one another and seem increasingly drawn to technologies that provide the illusion of companionship without the demands of relationship. Always-on/always-on-you devices provide three powerful fantasies: that we will always be heard; that we can put our attention wherever we want it to be; and that we never have to be alone. Indeed our new devices have turned being alone into a problem that can be solved.

When people are alone, even for a few moments, they fidget and reach for a device. Here connection works like a symptom, not a cure, and our constant, reflexive impulse to connect shapes a new way of being.

Think of it as “I share, therefore I am.” We use technology to define ourselves by sharing our thoughts and feelings as we’re having them. We used to think, “I have a feeling; I want to make a call.” Now our impulse is, “I want to have a feeling; I need to send a text.”

So, in order to feel more, and to feel more like ourselves, we connect. But in our rush to connect, we flee from solitude, our ability to be separate and gather ourselves. Lacking the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people but don’t experience them as they are. It is as though we use them, need them as spare parts to support our increasingly fragile selves.

We think constant connection will make us feel less lonely. The opposite is true. If we are unable to be alone, we are far more likely to be lonely. If we don’t teach our children to be alone, they will know only how to be lonely.

I am a partisan for conversation. To make room for it, I see some first, deliberate steps. At home, we can create sacred spaces: the kitchen, the dining room. We can make our cars “device-free zones.” We can demonstrate the value of conversation to our children. And we can do the same thing at work. There we are so busy communicating that we often don’t have time to talk to one another about what really matters. Employees asked for casual Fridays; perhaps managers should introduce conversational Thursdays. Most of all, we need to remember — in between texts and e-mails and Facebook posts — to listen to one another, even to the boring bits, because it is often in unedited moments, moments in which we hesitate and stutter and go silent, that we reveal ourselves to one another.

I spend the summers at a cottage on Cape Cod, and for decades I walked the same dunes that Thoreau once walked. Not too long ago, people walked with their heads up, looking at the water, the sky, the sand and at one another, talking. Now they often walk with their heads down, typing. Even when they are with friends, partners, children, everyone is on their own devices.

So I say, look up, look at one another, and let’s start the conversation.

Sherry Turkle is a psychologist and professor at M.I.T. and the author, most recently, of “Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other

(Here is a fine homiletical research piece by one of my students in Asbury’s ACE program. See what you think).

Whether a cram sermon writing session on Saturday night or a well thought out sermon series prepared over weeks’ time, pastors, at least the good ones, hope their Sunday morning messages do not fall on deaf ears. A greater hope may be that those who have come did not just “hear the Good News,” but are so inspired to go out and apply the content of the morning message and Scriptures to their daily lives. What would this look like? Maybe a family lunch before taking communion to home bound congregants? Maybe delivering food and hygiene items to the homeless community downtown? Maybe calling those who have fallen on hard times and offering a meal and a prayer? Maybe opening the Bible and studying independently throughout the week? That would have to be a pretty great morning message.
However, more often than not, the masses leave the church and rush to beat the crowds to Luby’s or rush home to see opening kick-off. Some may rush to the grocery stores to buy up their meals for the coming week. Others head out to the ball fields for an afternoon of recreational soccer. The sermon did not fall on deaf ears, but quite possibly onto complacent lives. A recent study of adolescents and young adults found staggering results on the perceptions and realities of the American Christian church. The results did not only identify issues among young people, but how their issues reflect a deeper problem in the church, “an adherence to a do-good, feel-good spirituality that has little to do with the Triune God of Christian tradition and even less to do with loving Jesus Christ enough to follow him into the world.” Such a watered-down understanding of Christianity does not produce fruit.
This paper will examine how the lack of sound biblical teaching and independent study only continues the cycle of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism in American churches. It will point to the significance of understanding the inspiration of the Scriptures, grasping the power of the living Word of God, and of applying reason and imagination to biblical study. “Too often church programs and worship are geared to the entertainment and ‘event-full’ gratification of its membership, while the preaching of the cross and the call to radical discipleship, incarnation, and justice are absent.” Radical discipleship shifts the American church back in line with the God they are meant to know and worship, an eternal focus where justice matters.
The chronic disease of passive Christianity is perpetuated by political correctness that has found its way into pulpits over the past several decades. Moral absolutes scare potential members away so they are not discussed or taught. Surface level teaching is all-inclusive and easier to understand and live out. All this creates a new religion that no one claims to be a part of, but is growing rapidly. Moralistic Therapeutic Deism believes in a god that created, ordered and watches over life on earth. It, like most other world religions, expects people to be nice and fair toward each other. Thirdly, followers simply want to be happy and feel good about their life. Rounding out the creeds of this watered down religion is an understanding that God is not involved in life on earth except when a problem arises, and heaven is the post life destination. Unfortunately, many people would say these creeds are the same as what Christians believe, though it lacks any mention of the Holy Spirit and the Holy Scriptures—or servanthood, community and relationship with God, for that matter.
Hebrews 5:12-14 speaks to the issues of discipleship stagnation, “In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food! Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness.” In depth biblical study, studying from the original languages and looking to scholarly commentaries make more of the Bible than just a way to know good from evil. Proper study gives the Holy Spirit “more to work with” so that God is revealed more fully. Casual acceptance leads to “a world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world and might even be more difficult to save.” Studying the Scriptures, by the power of the Holy Spirit not only teaches what he has done, but who he is and his desire to save his Creation.
Without the desire to study or the guidance of the Holy Spirit believers begin to look like everyone else in this era. The Information Age rages on often without questioning the credibility, validity or responsibility of the information. Society has access to the “answers” to many of life’s most difficult questions in their handheld, continually connected devices, but the pursuit of knowledge is no longer about the truthfulness, source and inspiration of the information. It is about how quickly any answer can be accessed. This is in sharp contrast to the importance of understanding the inspiration of Scripture. Paul writes in 2 Timothy 3:16 that “All Scripture is God-breathed…” (NIV). He was aware that the actual hand of God did not put pen to paper, so to speak, but God was the source and inspiration for the Law, the history and the works of the prophets he had studied since he was a young boy. The Spirit of God guided the hand of the authors. “The Spirit found their particular psyches, their intelligence, their readiness, their social location, their historical placement, useful to the divine plan and purpose, and spoke through them to and for all.” Such reverence for the text seems lost. Countless translations and versions, and possibly the shear availability of the Bible, has believers taking it for granted, mindlessly following without fully knowing. Losing sight of God’s hand in Scripture reduces it to mere fantasy and moral recommendations.
Throughout the New Testament, Jesus, Peter and Paul claim the Holy Spirit inspired the work of their ancestors. In Matthew 22:43, Jesus pointed to David’s authorship of Psalm 110 as being inspired by the Spirit, as did Peter in in Acts 25 when speaking of Psalm 2. While in Rome speaking to the Jewish leaders Paul says, “the Holy Spirit spoke the truth to your forefathers Isaiah the prophet.” There was no doubt that the Words they had been raised on were truly from God and were relevant and steadfast. The same is true for their own words that are now included in the canon of Scripture. In John 1:14 we see clearly that Jesus’ words were not only inspired. In him, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” All that Jesus spoke was and is God’s. The whole of the New Testament carries the same inspiration of the Spirit.
Grasping the Bible as a direct, inspired work of God must progress into an understanding and acceptance of its power. Casual treatment of the Scriptures is ignoring its power. Ancients treated the Word of God as sacred and holy, to be relished. Its power is frightening and comforting at the same time. One touch of the Ark of the Covenant could kill, but knowing its presence nearby was knowing that God was close to the people he loved. Ancients also believed that same power came when the Scriptures were read aloud. The power could move a community. The Scriptures were prayed with expectations of response because they had power. The present American Christian Church that relies on surface level knowledge does not recognize the Scriptures as power, but opinion. The call to be like Christ is never answered because the real Jesus has been “hijacked…portraying him as an open-minded, big-hearted, and never-offended-anyone moral teacher.”
Christians cannot be like someone they do not know. The authors of Scripture wrote with the intent that “God’s word is alive, and when it is heard and received it changes human lives and takes up residence in them…” To be like Christ, believers must read what the Scriptures say about him and expect to be changed, expect the Word to be made alive in them. God created humanity’s tireless desire for knowledge, truth, justice beauty, perfection, and love. In return, much of humanity has distorted or displaced this quest and “few things are so haunting as the stories of the very greatest seekers falling short.” The written word of God is his self-disclosure. It preserves and triggers memories. As American churches lackadaisically acknowledge Scripture, they are selling themselves short and those whom God had hoped to reach through them. Believers “are called to a Christian phronesis – to the mind of Christ. This Christian phronesis is expressed in kenosis, in self-emptying of prestige, prerogatives, and power.”
In Romans 12:2 Paul writes, “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Transformation through God’s word is the opposite of conforming to the tolerances and expectations of this world. This passage also calls for use of the mind. People have to reason how to process the rich complexities of life, to probe and test and stretch their faith from the perspective of a Christ follower. Paul writes of the Bereans who studied and compared his teachings to the Scriptures before believing in Jesus as the Messiah. They applied reason and intellect, an act that was praised by Paul. It is that same ability to reason that can empower Christians today to progress in the faith, “Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, now that you have tasted that the Lord is good.” Craving God’s truth in exchange for the world’s, growing up in his truth to strengthens relationships both with him and with others. Reason does not contradict faith, rather they are interlocking practices. Reasoning through Scripture, tradition and experience allows Christians to better understand the truth of Scripture and guard against self-contradictions.
Intellect also invites the reader to look at the author’s intent. What was the primary message of their narrative or letter? Who were they writing for? Who was their primary audience? When were they writing? Where were they writing?
Within the mind is not only the ability to reason and apply intellect, but also the ability to imagine, to think creatively. The prophets used their imaginations when conveying the messages of God to the people of Israel. Isaiah’s “woes” were a result of his ability to imagine what life would be like for God’s chosen people for generations to come if the people now did not turn from their wickedness. Jesus used his imagination as he taught in parables. He pulled the environment in which his listeners were surrounded into his lessons. He pulled from the traditional way of storytelling his people knew to create a new lesson, to help them relate to the kingdom language he was using. Paul and John of Patmos could imagine what the second coming of Christ would be like and, from that, worshiped and warned with a sense of urgency to compel the masses to understand and imagine along with them.
The American Christian church has lost its imagination and thus its ability for “making the invisible kingdom visible.” It has lost its ability to see itself as part of God’s story, a story it can no longer accurately retell. A lack of imagination makes it difficult for followers to know the historical Jesus, the Jesus who was a first century Jew. Keeping Jesus out of his cultural context keeps believers from relating to him as fully human. Readers are invited to imagine what the writers and their audiences were feeling—like Paul writing from prison to Timothy. Readers can read between the lines of Scripture to imagine and better interpret the truth at work while being careful to stay within the writer’s instruction and away from fantasy.
An intentional effort to study and know God’s word seems like a radical inclination in a culture where careless information sharing reigns, where knowledge goes in one ear and out another. A follower, a member of the American Christian church must recognize that “Word is the appointed means by which God’s grace is made known to men, calling them to repentance, assuring them of forgiveness, drawing them to obedience and building them up in the fellowship of faith and love” The Word is worth knowing and relishing, and radically sharing through relationship not conversion. A shift in the church back to a focus on creating disciples opens believers up to revelation, which occurs because God chooses to make himself known, not because we have chosen to have certain experience or have perfectly interpreted Scripture or have participated in the traditional sacraments. A focus on discipleship encourages pastors to preach the real Jesus, not the hi-jacked Jesus. It encourages congregations to listen and learn under the guise of the Holy Spirit. It reminds them that church is not a place you go, worship not an hour on a Sunday morning, but who you are and what you do well into a Sunday afternoon and each and every day.

 
Works Cited

Dean, Kendra Creasy. Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers Is Telling the American Church. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Guiness, Os. The Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life, Kindle Edition. New York: W Publishing Group, 1998.

Kinnaman, David and Gabe Lyons. Unchristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks About Christianity. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2007.

Oden, Thomas C. Classic Christianity. Kindle Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 2009.

Smith, Christian and Melinda Lundquist Denton. Soul Searching. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Witherington, Ben III. The Living Word of God. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2007.

Villafane, Eldin. Beyond Cheap Grace. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2006.

James Howell is the senior ministry at my home church– Myers Park UMC in Charlotte. See what you think of the following post.

http://revjameshowell.blogspot.com/