Walking the Empty Path: A new spinoff blog on Substack

Time’s Arrow (1987) by Hiroshi Sugimoto

Friends,

In recent months I have added a spinoff from this blog on Substack: Walking the Empty Path.

Time’s Arrow (1987) by Hiroshi SugimotoI will continue to post occasional longer “think pieces” here on The Empty Path. However, I wanted a way to share shorter pieces with a larger audience. My orientation on Walking the Empty Path has more to do with how to apply in daily life what decades of study, worship, and sharing of faith community are teaching me about faith and practice in the human world.

Please consider exploring with me on this new platform.

Blessings, Mike Shell

 

Image Source

“Time’s Arrow, 1987,” lithograph by Hiroshi Sugimoto.

Evangelicals’ emotional vulnerability to Trump: the sacrament of affectivity

“Trump rally crowd,” U.S. Bank Arena, Cincinnati, OH, by Hayden Schiff on Flickr (10/13/2016) [CC BY 2.0 – Attribution 2.0 Generic].

Reading Richard Beck’s recent three-part essay “The Sacrament of Affectivity,” I suddenly understood how Donald Trump exercises such a perverse power over politically right-wing evangelical Christians.  I say “perverse,” because both his personal behavior and his slash-and-burn politics are so antithetical to true Christian faith and practice.

Beck explains how, during the Reformation of the 16th century, “low-church Protestants” moved away from encountering the presence of God’s grace materially (objectively) in sacraments like the Eucharist (Lord’s Supper).  Instead, then and now, they look for affirmations of that grace subjectively via faith.  Such people become aware of grace through their feelings (affectively).

This presents a challenge for preachers and worshippers.

In evangelical spaces, by contrast, where grace is mediated affectively, the preacher has to make you “feel it,” has to emotionally move you…. You go to church, therefore, not to meet something but to feel something. And it’s the preacher’s job to make you feel it.

Consequently, the sacrament of affectivity drives demand…for charismatic communicators, speakers who make you “feel something”…. The goal is to be emotionally moved. That is how you know you’ve encountered God in worship, through your feelings. (Part 2, You Gotta Feel It)

“Trump rally crowd,” U.S. Bank Arena, Cincinnati, OH, by Hayden Schiff on Flickr (10/13/2016) [CC BY 2.0 – Attribution 2.0 Generic].

This is just the charismatic power that Trump uses instinctively.

We may be horrified by his person and his self-serving agenda (and by those who use him cynically as their carnival barker).  But for Evangelicals who are already in the grip of resentful right-wing ideologies, Trump’s preaching makes them feel…something.

It’s the shared feeling of “persecuted righteousness” that Trump stirs up in his crowds so masterfully.  That’s what seduces people who might otherwise suspect or doubt or even be repelled by him.  That is what they want in order to feel justified, included, safe.

And he gives it to them.

Image Source

“Trump rally crowd,” U.S. Bank Arena, Cincinnati, OH, by Hayden Schiff on Flickr (10/13/2016) [CC BY 2.0 – Attribution 2.0 Generic].

Person

The infant comes into
+++being
within another
+++person,
and most of what it learns
comes from other
+++persons
before language.

Self-portrait. Mirrored archway, 23 E. Adams Street, Jacksonville, FL (11/18/2012)So
we naturally imagine that the
+++ground of all being
is a
+++person.

That’s where the trouble starts.

Trying to squeeze
all of reality
into the fickle confines of a
+++person.

Image: Self-portrait. Mirrored archway, 23 E. Adams Street, Jacksonville, FL (11/18/2012)

The Sermon on the Mount as storytelling, Part 6: What do we do now?

“The Road to Emmaus,” Claes Moeyaert (Dutch, 1591–1655), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

My original faith crisis arose from trying to embrace the formal Apostles’ Creed. Looking back at it today, I find it profoundly disturbing. There is nothing in it about Jesus’ human life except for one clause: “born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried.” What I need is for Jesus to teach me moment by moment, not in some fossilized doctrinal past or imagined metaphysical future. And he always provokes me to return to the basics of living in the kingdom already present in the world.

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The Sermon on the Mount as storytelling, Part 5: From preventing murder to opening one’s hand

“Oblivious,” affluent young couple beside a homeless woman on a bench, Montreal, by Mike Shell (8/8/2013).

In Matt 5:21-25, Jesus expands upon the prohibition against murder. Is premeditated murder the only serious offense that the commandment means to cover? In answer, he conveys the danger of angry words. In Matt 5:42, he demands giving without restraint. This recalls the rich young man in Matt 19 who, although Torah faithful, was still attached to worldly wealth.

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The Sermon on the Mount as storytelling, Part 4: Bringing the Torah’s guidance into daily life

“Carrying a Roman soldier’s furca,” from Backpacking in Ancient Rome: Old School, Minimalist, YouTube video by Kenneth Kramm.

We are exploring the here-and-now of Jesus and Matthews’s first audiences. Galileans before the Temple’s destruction and exiles from Jerusalem afterwards. How to live as faithful Messianic Jews under the brutal dominion of Rome. “Turn the other cheek asks more than ignore the problem; giving the coat is not about being generous; go the extra mile’ demands much more than make an extra effort. When heard in their first-century context, the three injunctions all serve to prevent the escalation of conflict.” – Levine & Brettler

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The Sermon on the Mount as storytelling, Part 3: “Building a fence about the Torah”

Part of Dead Sea Scroll number 28a (1Q28a) from Qumran Cave 1

Jesus’ amplification of Torah passages is what rabbinic Judaism calls “building a fence around the Torah.” He offers his listeners a deeper understanding of the intent behind those passages. What, he asks, are the moral boundaries of social behavior that these advices and commands aim for?

We need to read the Sermon on the Mount as if we shared the knowledge of first century Jews. How did they hear and understand Torah, how did they experience life under Rome, and how did Matthew’s audience experience exile after the fall of the Temple. Without these perspectives, all we may be doing as we read is imposing our own modern theological and societal expectations onto the story.

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The Sermon on the Mount as storytelling, Part 2: Historical contexts, audiences, and textual sources

The Bible with and without Jesus: How Jews and Christians read the same stories differently (2020), Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler

The Sermon is not just moral pronouncements for people awaiting a metaphysical end-time. Matthew is teaching living Jewish audiences in the first century by crafting a story about Jesus. And Jesus is telling stories to his own listeners to help them apply Torah instruction to their lives under the rule of Rome and its Jewish collaborators.

It helps to understand what those people know of Torah from oral traditions, how Jesus reapplies those teachings to the lives of his disciples and followers, and what contemporary biblical scholarship posits about the gospel’s writer and first audiences.

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The Sermon on the Mount as storytelling, Part 1: Storytelling by and about Jesus

"Portrait of Jesus," Jacob Barosin (c. 1955)

We human beings are vulnerable to the spurious power of the written word, particularly when it comes to our sacred texts. The organic, evocative, ever-renewing power of oral storytelling can become frozen into words. It is essential to read the Bible as a collection of stories told to living human beings, not merely as a collection of historical or theological texts. Stories evoke what can be experienced yet not put into words. Storytelling “is not a matter of authorship. It is a matter of embodiment.”

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