Ray Lewis, Faith, and the Power of Public Confession

The turnaround in Ray Lewis’ life has been a curiosity that many in the world of sports have watched for some time. Lewis’ larger-than-life personality and the emotion he brings to the game has been met with the support of fans and the incredulity of others who point to a fateful event 12 years earlier for which he has been unable to disentangle from the Hall of Fame career he has created. As the Ravens look towards Super Bowl Forty-Seven and Lewis gets set a second and final time to take the biggest stage in the world of sports, I would like to reflect a little bit on appropriate theological responses to a the man who claims to live his life by the faith he preaches to us every time a microphone or media opportunity presents itself.

Those who believe Lewis has been unjustifiably embraced are usually those who make up the larger majority of fans who support teams that the Ravens must face each season. Of course, Lewis is not the only person subject to the unforgiving scrutiny of opposing fans, and part of the trash talk in calling him a “murderer” or “criminal” comes with the unfortunate residue that accompanies every sport. But there are also those who feel strongly beyond the hash marks of the football field that Lewis should pay for his crimes – crimes that date back to an incident in which Lewis and his entourage was involved in an afterhours scuffle leaving two young men dead.  To what degree Lewis was involved we may never know. Reports from witnesses say Lewis fled to the limousine awaiting his group outside and they quickly left the scene. Lewis was reportedly overheard saying that he would not allow this to end his football career. He was eventually found innocent of all charges with the exception of an obstruction of justice charge. He later was sued successfully by the families of both men, echoing the course of events in the O.J. Simpson trial, in which Simpson was pronounced innocent of murder but was found guilty in civil court and had to pay the victims’ family. This kind of “divided justice” naturally leaves the court of public opinion confused since the stigma of guilt that was served in civil court resonates despite his formally acquittal in criminal court.

Lewis has maintained his innocence. And unlike O.J. Simpson, whose collisions with the law continued, Lewis took a different path. He had a spiritual awakening and the influence of this, along with lots of personal and protective counsel, shone for Lewis a new way of life and helped to recreate his image. He cut ties with the bad influences in his past and ventured towards a future that continued to be promising, as his game play continued to sustain his elite-player status.  So too, fans of Lewis found it much easier to forgive and forget as he continued to successfully rally a winning Ravens organization. Lewis would take the team to the Super Bowl and win the MVP. The social good of community pride eclipsed the personal drama in Lewis’ life.

The problem remains that Lewis has done a consistent job of not addressing his past publically or in a way that adequately provides closure or support for the families of the incident except to put it behind him. On the one hand, this has had the effect of creating terrible unease. The families, who lost their sons consider his role one of intimate knowledge if not complicity, despite the monetary settlements. Supporters of Lewis contest that they are still looking to drag his name through the mud or are seeking more damages, or simply they want Lewis to suffer the same way they are suffering but unlike his cohorts it is only because of his celebrity status, which turns him into a likely target. In not addressing the situation at all, Lewis has basically shone that his Christian faith, which he effectively promotes as an unbounded effusion of positive thinking and success, fails to grasp the communal nature of our responsibilities towards others, and not just those who want to hear us.

I would submit however that this tension appears in the scriptures, and so understandably, it is difficult to know where Lewis’ own understanding or intentions lie. The scriptures talk about making peace with one’s enemies, regardless of the cause or nature of their enmity. Yet other verses talk about wiping the dust from one’s feet when those you speak to will have nothing to do with you, and still other verses say that when all efforts towards reconciliation have been exhausted than those people are to be counted as outside the greater fellowship of the faith. No one knows what Lewis has done privately (if anything), but the families continue to feel that his lack of acknowledgement in the public sphere is an important indicator of his lack of taking responsibility.

When one looks at Lewis, we can make an appeal to the Apostle Paul, the man who did not say follow me to the Super Bowl, but “follow me as I follow Christ.” When one studies Paul’s life, the man who next to Jesus set the moral tone for many of our foundational understandings of the Christian faith, one sees that there was a past that continued to inhabit and even hinder the transformed Paul that he himself could never excise. Paul called himself the chief of sinners, and he publically wrote to the churches about his own remorse for his role in persecuting the church of Christ. Others questioned the authority of Paul’s apostolic office because of his role in these persecutions. One must wonder if those who rejected Paul were those who knew those early Christians who lost their lives on account of Paul or were simply aroused by the rumors. Nevertheless, Paul acknowledges what many suspect, and he is even relieved when those who know his past embrace him in Christian love.

Part of Lewis’ understanding of his past life is the transformational nature of his change. The question of how he takes in his past, however, has not satisfied his critics even while his supporters look to either what he has accomplished in the game as a moral good in itself and thereby ignore his failures or look to the future. The problem is that because Lewis has made such a spectacle of his faith on the field, it is hard to ignore his moral character, but somehow he has managed to skirt Tim Tebow faith fame and be his own person. It causes one pause, especially when considering the social-economic realities of life and whether Lewis’ relevant star status is not the reason that saved him from the same fate as O.J. Simpson.

In the remorse shone by rich young ruler who had defrauded people in the gospels, there was an attempt at restitution. Lewis instead speaks about the empowering promises of God to go beyond himself and to do his best. In post-game interviews after the playoff run in 2012, Lewis’ was at the height of spiritual sensitivities. Telling national correspondents that “no weapon formed against him shall prosper,” Lewis continues to promote a theological language of escapism, a future bright and full of possibility against a past that is virtually stomped out.

Is such an attitude consistent with the biblical witness of how we ought to see ourselves in Christ? Paul took a hard road of rejection, lose of status, and all these things haunted him. Paul’s road to Christ was one of persecution and loss but always done with openness and honesty. His humility came in learning to “die daily.” Lewis has ignored his past and in embracing his new found life in Christ, has alienated those to whom the effects of his conversion may have spoken the loudest. Becoming a Christian does not exonerate us from the world around us. In doing so, we create an alternate kingdom, not one that has planted itself into the soil of the earth and claimed it despite the perils it may bring.

I want everyone to understand that I cannot judge Ray Lewis because I do not know enough about the situation. Furthermore, my Bible warns me not to judge “another man’s servant.” In fact, my own personal judgment is that Lewis was unlikely to have murdered these young men. Moreover, his obstruction of justice charge most likely stemmed from immaturity and his fierce loyalty to a group of friends that did not show the same respect for his situation at the time and rather than protect their friend, drew him into near career suicide by their actions. So perhaps Lewis doesn’t feel the need to think of himself like Paul. Yet the Paul from his letters talked about wishing to take the place of others for Christ’s sake, and not just those whom he loved. Consider how in Romans 11, he says he wishes he could be accursed for Israel. I’m not sure this means that Lewis must confess to something he didn’t do for the sake of bringing spiritual peace to those who still hold him accountable.  Understanding however that while he may have been targeted because of his star status (and barring the motives of his dissenters), his obligation to meet any situation and the demands of those situations begins in Christ. And that my friends is a tall order for any of us, even Ray Lewis.

Bending Dietrich Bonhoeffer on Abortion: Why Conservative Evangelical Pundit and Former Veggie Tails Writer Eric Metaxas Fails to Understand Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Eric Metaxas’ recent hosting duties on Break Point, a conservative radio show founded by the late Chuck Colson, allowed him the opportunity to give yet another public interpretation on Bonhoeffer extolling the conservative virtues of the famous theologian. Like his National Prayer Breakfast appearance in March 2012, in which he raised his arms triumphantly to declare the coming together of right and left as a “Bonhoeffer moment,” in his latest foray, the always dapper Metaxas revisits a position, which he believes endears the 20th century theologian to his own religious crusade:  Bonhoeffer’s staunch opposition to abortion.

Before I begin, it should be noted that Metaxas’ work and expertise is not in the theology of Bonhoeffer, neither is his grasp of German or Continental theology of a scholarly nature, but comes as a journalist who is indebted to the important biographical work by Eberhard Bethge. In speaking with an acquaintance at Union Theological Seminary (a place of importance in Bonhoeffer’s theological career where the theological cult of Bonhoeffer still thrives), he asked the question why Metaxas’ felt the need to write another biography when we have good information already. I’ve asked myself the same question since there is absolutely nothing new in the field of scholarship that Metaxas brings. What is fresh is his bungled interpretation of Bonhoeffer. Certainly, there’s some motivation, especially where Metaxas’ conservative slant finds expression in the territory already covered, but it cannot be explored here. 

Metaxas’ biography on Bonhoeffer is staggeringly popular. Since January 2013, there are close to 700 individuals who have rated the book on Amazon and that’s only those who have chosen or cared to respond. Most of the reviews are favorable, which leads me to believe there are a lot of people reading it and walking away affirming what they already sensed about Bonhoeffer in their Sunday school readings, but in a much more dynamic context. While Metaxas exploits Bonhoeffer on his Facebook page with the joie de vivre of a rock star, advertising his 10 city tour of Bonhoeffer, where his schedule is filled by conservative churches and other politically motivated groups, the book has been heavily criticized by lesser known Bonhoeffer scholars and academics, and most lay readers are not reading their technical treatments en masse to get a sense of what these men who have invested their lives, rather than invest their time in a contract from Tommy Nelson, around this interesting person.

Unlike Bethge, who himself admitted his hesitation in interpreting the legacy of his friend, instead opting to allow others to do such work, Metaxas has little trouble summoning Bonhoeffer to the defense of some hot button issues that panic conservatives (I note for example an article from 2010 on Hitler’s Germany in which he compares the Reich’s program of Gleichschaltung to the repression of religion in our country).

During his Break Point broadcast, Metaxas wastes no time positioning Bonhoeffer as an opponent of abortion.  I found it interesting that along with Metaxas’ own vocal opposition to abortion, his wife’s duties include “running the Midtown Pregnancy Support Center” in New York. Thus, abortion is serious business in the Metaxas’ household, so it’s a good thing they have an ideologue like Bonhoeffer to bear some of the intellectual responsibility.

After spending a short time discussing the ongoing abortion issue in religious and secular culture, he suddenly introduces Bonhoeffer as a conversation partner, notifying his listeners that it is without a doubt that Bonhoeffer believed abortion to be “evil.”

He goes on to quote from Bonhoeffer’s unfinished work on Ethics in support of this position, on the grounds that the fetus has a right to life.  And so he quotes the following:

“Destruction of the embryo in the mother’s womb is a violation of the right to live which God has bestowed upon this nascent life.”

The passage above comes from “The Natural Life,” one of a number of manuscripts that were written independently over the course of three years and during his time at the Roman Catholic Ettal Abbey, later to be combined posthumously into the composition we know today as Ethics.
The first item of importance is that Metaxas’ uses the 1995 English edition, an older edition that in Bonhoeffer scholarship is known for its absence of an important passage, and what I believe is a clue that fleshes out the larger picture of Bonhoeffer’s view on abortion.

In the current authoritative edition of Ethics in the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works collection, the translation provided above is notably different:

“To kill the fruit in the mother’s womb is to injure the right to life that God has bestowed on the developing life.”

Of the obvious differences in translation, one might first note that between the two passages, the embryo, something on its way to viability is called fruit, destruction becomes killing, and the right to live, which treats rights as something inherent to the embryo’s own project, becomes the right to life, a change that creates a more conceptual appeal.

Equally interesting is the move from “violation” to “injury.” The German word here is verletzen.
While in some instances the word can be translated as violation, its most common usage translates “to injure.” The late Neville Horton Smith, who was responsible for the 1995 translation which Metaxas’ uses, to my knowledge left no justification for his translation. His rejection therefore of the more common usage “to injure” may be tied up with its implication of impermanency, and therefore seems equally awkward considering that Bonhoeffer follows by claiming that this violation is “nothing but murder,” an act that implies permanency. Perhaps, this translation decision can be blamed on an instinctual thought process that denies the same qualitative force to injury and murder.

The word “violation” enjoys a certain attractiveness that is undeniable, especially when one considers that at least two uses of the Greek word for sin parabasis and asebeia suggest violation, and a third term parabaino was used in cases in which a soldier directly violates a command from his superior. From here, it is only a short inference to evil for the modern evangelical mind. Violation is such a part of the traditional Western cultural concept of sin that qualifying the violation as evil has maintained a prominent place in the tradition.

The problem is that for Bonhoeffer evil (Böse) does not occupy the same conceptual ground as it does in the greater Protestant tradition. When Bonhoeffer speaks in Ethics of evil, the references usually do not speak to the overcoming of some ultimate abstract evil or mythic Satan figure that stands in direct opposition to God, but to the overcoming of socially accepted systems of ethics in which good and evil become inaccurate frames of reference to Christ, primarily because situations arise in which no true consensus of right or wrong can occur given their historical considerations, or the dilemmas which social ethical systems attempt to address become exacerbated by internal contradiction, the very baseline of crisis theology.  In Bonhoeffer studies, this is widely acknowledged in the use of contextualism and concretion, two themes that persist throughout the wider body of literature.

This is extraordinarily problematic for those like Metaxas who attempt to consign Bonhoeffer to positions of good and evil, which are then spun off entirely independent of the divine reality from which they are supposed to derive (one outcome for example are atheists who take up the call to justice without particular reference to any divine command theory). A pronouncement that at all times and in all circumstances an act is concomitant to the violation of the right to live as sin comes dangerously close to the kind of moral absolutism that no longer requires the revelation of God through Christ for its vitality. To paraphrase Bonhoeffer’s interpreter Ernst Feil, general principles do not give us access to reality.  It is precisely for this reason that Bonhoeffer calls Christian ethics to the person of Christ rather than to new laws that proceed from him. To put it plainly, Bonhoeffer is no deontological ethicist, and violations cannot be posed as deviations from abstract divine laws. Unfortunately, the language of “violation” suggests this very thing, and creates the kind of misunderstanding for which Metaxas is to be blamed.

How does violation than operate within the context of the larger passage? If violation is the correct translation solely on the grounds that rights are tied into Bonhoeffer’s concept of humanity (and one would argue that the intended end of the fetus is humanity), the same who reads the section in its entirety would be hard pressed to understand why Bonhoeffer’s logic here fails to harmonize the conditions given with humanity through marriage as it does with the fetus. On the one hand, the right to life, which is first presupposed in marriage, is not conditioned by biology, but rather is simply given in one’s participatory existence, i.e., in one’s being human. Yet, when Bonhoeffer speaks of the fetus, it seems a reasonable presumption that he must be defending a biological understanding of rights since no fetus can choose life for itself.  The idea of choosing has a much more prominent place in the tradition in defining what it means to be human than does biology. What clue do we have that Bonhoeffer might reject a biological basis for doing theology?

Bonhoeffer seems to give some insight for possible interpretative filters here.  In his early work Sanctorum Communio, Bonhoeffer writes about the biological basis of sin. He argues that this understanding creates incompatibles, inequities between various peoples (infants, mentally deficient, etc.) and ethical indifferent views. We therefore cannot start with biology as the basis through which we define sin. Rather we must define humanity through a collective view of sin, which he calls culpability (DBWE 1:114). Likewise, one might say that biology is not the starting point for understanding what it means to be human, but rather the rights which God intends.

Nevertheless, Bonhoeffer notes that the question of whether this fetus is human or not is wrong-headed, for the real question is what God intends. At this point, it might appear that Bonhoeffer has spoken ex cathedra, that our particular method of success need not matter much, since regardless of whether biology or God originates the right to life, the rights of the fetus are carried with its biology, and therefore we reach the same conclusion.  Immediately following this section where Bonhoeffer locates the question of humanity in God’s intention, he goes on to speak about the desperate circumstances that lead some to agree to such actions. In one particular case, he mentions the Roman Catholic practice of saving the fetus even while the mother’s life is in danger. Here, for the first time, viability is brought into relief. And so any question of whether Bonhoeffer is suggesting an absolute rejection of abortion is once again reshaped within the context of these circumstances. 

In the years since Bonhoeffer, viability has been redefined primarily because of advances in technology. A point similar to this actually serves to show how Bonhoeffer is not an absolutist. For example, he engages the Roman Catholic moral prohibition on contraception as a sociological critique, noting the technological developments which have made the social need for large families a thing of the past due to diminishing infant mortality rates. Better than his interpreters, Bonhoeffer avoids absolute ethical stands.

Lacking in Metaxas’ version of Ethics is a particularly poignant passage found in the German edition and was only recovered in the latest edition, in which Bonhoeffer offers an example of a mother who has to make a difficult decision against her own nature to abort her child and must take on the guilt of that decision. The question of course becomes what does Bonhoeffer mean by guilt, and does guilt imply wrong-doing? We certainly know from the broader context of the Ethics that anyone who will act responsibly, regardless of outcome, must take on guilt. Guilt in Ethics, is a sophisticated topic. I would argue it carries with it similar characteristics of culpability as expressed in Sanctorum Communio, in that both must first be interpreted as a collective activity.  The similarities also resonate in his own biography, as Bonhoeffer’s act of treason against Hitler, in which a small conspiratorial circle acted for what they believed was their nation (most of whom considered them traitors). Bonhoeffer addresses this topic indirectly in the Ethics, in which the hard decisions we take on ourselves are done responsibly, and we do so with the community in mind. Bonhoeffer does indeed note here that the community ought to take on guilt too. But guilt in Ethics is a continual standing in the place of the Other, one which guilt is not confined to an expression of personal sorrow or remorse. Guilt, for Bonhoeffer is “standing in place of,” just as Christ did so for us (Stellvertretung). Bonhoeffer scholar Larry Rasmussen has pointed to the particular difficulty here; especially since he believes Bonhoeffer does not satisfactorily distinguish between sins in which we are truly guilty and the taking on of guilt as an act of Christian vocation. Regardless, Metaxas should not assume acts of guilt refer to the former, as the evidence in the Ethics abundantly rejects this interpretation. This unfortunately is another topic for another time.

This passage concerning the mother also comes on the heels of one in which Bonhoeffer speaks of the need for pastoral counseling in such situations. Metaxas’ senses Bonhoeffer’s more obvious tone here, and makes the rather simplistic observation that we should not judge the sinner even as we judge the sin, and to “think twice” about such things.  This statement nearly bowled me over as it completely diminishes the acumen of this German scholar.  On this precise point, John de Gruchy, a noted Bonhoeffer scholar, asserts that this parsing of the individual and action on the grounds of such a theological cliché, is rejected by Bonhoeffer. The Ethics speaks against attempts to divide the individual into spheres of action and cognition. The reason for this rejection is that this kind of division fosters irresponsibility as it treats the individual as an entity that can be separated from his actions. This theme is consistently met throughout his writings, in his early rejection of idealism, the Christological lectures of 1933, and down through Ethics.  Yet what is important here, as it is throughout the broader context of these passages on abortion is that nowhere does Bonhoeffer relate, implicate, or qualify any action in which abortion is taken as inherent wrongdoing. Metaxas’ argument that abortion is evil is based upon a presupposition that “concepts” like murder, guilt, and violation are already decided in Bonhoeffer’s theological vocabulary. A larger view of the development of murder and guilt do not bear this out, while the word “violation” in my opinion is the wrong translation.

But we have yet to look at how “to injure” might work in our understanding of the offending passage. The trajectory of Bonhoeffer’s use of verletzen, while such an interpretation may seem foreign to a 21st century American Evangelical audience, is clearly not pointed at the fetus, but at the right to life that is given with humanity by God. Keeping in context the larger scope of the passage, the right to life is therefore located and originates with God. Just a few sentences prior, Bonhoeffer makes this point by indicating that rights are not in our hands, but are given by God with each individual. But how then might one injure a right given by God?

It may be that the translation “to injure” implies an unsuccessful attack on God’s intentions. Where God intends humanity through Christ, one ought not to oppose this by acting in a way contrary. In this way, it is true that injury does not produce a permanent effect because despite what we do, even if it brings us to murder, God intentions are not earthbound but eternal.

But furthermore, it should not go unnoticed that this section is developed alongside Bonhoeffer’s concept of Responsibility (Verantwortung). Responsible action for Bonhoeffer is of a kind that takes into itself both the entire individual and his entire relationship with Christ within a given context. This is why on the issue of procreation, Bonhoeffer rejects blind impulse. Every action must be confronted reflectively, thoughtfully, and the direction of these orientations must be within Christ. Of course to be “in Christ” is very different from being in some mandate given by Christ. Bonhoeffer rejects social ethical constructs that seek to import Christian ideals at the expense of losing the lawgiver in the process. It is the living, breathing, dynamic relationship that is constantly repristinated in the context.  This would also mean, and quite rightly I believe, the sin-as-violation interpretation that is so important to American evangelicalism was not an interpretative possibility for Bonhoeffer, if we hold to the logic of the rest of the section in which biology is never an argument for human rights.

Finally, there is one more thing to consider, and that is historical context. When one consigns Bonhoeffer to a thoroughgoing right-to-life campaign, I think it is only sound when it is accomplished within the context for the kind of compulsory activity in the Germany of his day, not as a general application that judges all abortion as sin. Even if we concede here that abortion was a violation of the right to life of the fetus, we must consider that it is a right to life that Bonhoeffer saw compromised by the compulsory efforts to abortion in which the State was culprit and infringing upon the rights of the individual. This is the context for Bonhoeffer’s comments. In our day and age, the situation is quite different. There are no compulsory orders (although circumstances such as economic hardship certainly have the force of compulsion). Rather, it is just the opposite. Freedom of choice is at issue. Bonhoeffer’s own interpretation of freedom never promotes a libertine freedom in which one is simply attempting to extricate himself from a tough situation. Freedom rather is always a freedom for responsibility, not from it. Those who bear the right to choice can only be responsible. Those who are already resigned to abstractions of divine law cannot be responsible for their actions because they are already always decided for them.  When reading the section on abortion closely then, Metaxas’ dogmatized selections are correct insofar as they are read from those passages where Bonhoeffer appears to reject decisions to abort. The problem however is these are those instances where Bonhoeffer is critical of irresponsible action not abortion as an interminable evil. Metaxas simply does not filter the context from the broader section that allows for a more compelling reading, in which the concept of responsibility is more crucial than the act itself.  I suspect this is why Metaxas reads Bonhoeffer’s call for pastoral counseling and guilt-sharing as a call for compassion and nothing more.

Like many of his American conservative evangelical pals, part of Metaxas’ symptomatic veneration of Bonhoeffer I believe is grasped by Stephen Plant’s diagnosis of the conservative infatuation with Bonhoeffer in general:

“Bonhoeffer’s rough contemporaries Paul Tillich, Rudolf Bultmann, and Karl Barth – are typically regarded by American evangelicals as something less than “true” believers whose theologies are all the more dangerous for their apparent orthodoxy. Yet today, when it is difficult to find a positive mention of any of these men in evangelical publications, Bonhoeffer (who had much in common with them and was a product of the same church and university systems) is honored by a broad array of evangelical authors, publications, and institutions.”

It is hard to summarize this strong attraction felt by many conservatives to Dietrich Bonhoeffer. One thing that remains is that Dietrich Bonhoeffer believed himself to have died for his faith. But even this, I would argue, did not mean that there was a heroic motif of confession involved. Rather, to call Bonhoeffer a martyr is an act that must be reserved for him individually since for Bonhoeffer to put a theological language to the worldview developing around him was most important. Because, he talked a lot about God and Jesus, and he died while talking about them, his faith “looked" meritorious and he became a figure worth venerating in conservative circles, because he paid the ultimate price. Certainly, if he were “liberal,” with their concessions to social order and cultivation of soft interpretations of Jesus, it would be a categorical mistake and existential impossibility to consider that one like Bonhoeffer who was entrenched in a tradition that had elements of these would actually have the conviction to die for his faith.

A Review of D. Brent Laytham's iPod, YouTube, Wii Play: Theological Engagements with Entertainment

A recent book review I wrote for The American Theological Inquiry. It can also be accessed here:

http://atijournal.org/Vol6No1.htm

iPod, YouTube, Wii Play: Theological Engagements with Entertainment. By D. Brent Laytham. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2012, 209 pp.

Growing up as a child in the 1980s, my household was besieged by technology. From televisions to video game systems, every new gadget seemed to herald the natural progression in an evolutionary chain of human ingenuity by bringing our species one step closer to eliminating the age-old problem of boredom. Yet, as humans constantly threatened by boredom, we do not simply experience the symptoms of our failure to pass the time purposefully but are victims to a deep existential crisis. Time, which lends acuity to our boredom, is both master and servant, and so we desperately look for ways to both control and contain the tedium of experiencing ourselves alone with ourselves.

In this work, D. Brent Laytham proposes that our love affair with entertainment is representative of a deeper disconnect despite the volume of interconnected activities that make up our lives. Entertainment has revolutionized the ways in which we relate to time, place, and one another. “For the past ninety years or so, entertainment has been aggressively colonizing our habitats, homes, vehicles, tools, bodies, schedules, and, most crucially, our habits and imaginations. Entertainment is normalized and habituated” (26).

In this readable and important work, Laytham has filled the pages with observations at the intersection of theology and entertainment. So too, many of his observations create opportunities for discourse beyond his own analyses. Laytham notes how these might be used to grow talking points in group discussions, and the book itself aids such organization by arranging the chapters with questions to introduce each discussion.

Chapter 1 introduces the challenges and discusses the pervasive extent of entertainment in contemporary culture. Chapter 2 represents Laytham’s own unique theological deconstruction that lies behind the posturing of entertainment as a power in the culture, and it is from this that a theological language crystallizes the dialectical structure of entertainment. Chapters 3 through 10 offer perspectives on types of entertainment. Chapters 11 and 12 examine the cult of celebrity and the people behind the power, while the final chapter is dedicated to the moral make-up of the silver screen. I will not attempt to address everything Laytham lays out, but instead highlight the most salient features of his presentation.

Early in his book, Laytham poses a question: Do you naturally imagine God and the gospel as belonging to one sphere of life and entertainment to another? In helping us to think in terms of relational dialectics, Laytham asserts that “we’ve settled for a world divided between loving God and enjoying ourselves–an easy, unacknowledged truce that divides our lives into zones of sacred pursuits and secular pastimes, discipleship and fandom” (3). Laytham is sensitive on this score; he insists that individuals encounter entertainment not as something whose nature is inherently bent on our destruction but as something subject to distortion by an ontology of sin that permeates our reality.

The nature of entertainment is not one openly opposed to our being, though in most encounters, it imitates the promises of spiritual fidelity, which Laytham describes by a language of theological mimicry. This mimicry disguises the disorderliness of its authority. An example of this comes in the form of devices like the iPod. Laytham claims there is an advertised transcendence, a sense of a world-denying, God-avoiding reality precisely because the transcendence one engages is “sensed within” rather than externally (37). Laytham summons Albert Borgmann’s phrase “regardless power” to explain this reality as something that produces for us desired results despite the encroachment of everyday hindrances that would otherwise prevent such access: “Technology promises this kind of regardless power, offering us an endless procession of ‘magic wands’ that provide an infinite stream of the commodities, products, experiences, and outcomes that we desire. And we become so habituated to the exercise of regardless power that we expect to exercise it everywhere and all the time” (40).

Furthermore, entertainment takes on a form of omnipresence that is a historical rejection of the transcendent reality of the omnipresent God. Taking up the work of Quentin Schultze, Laytham describes the being of entertainment as principality and power. These agencies, whether personal or impersonal, caricature, deceive, and seduce (27). But they are also far more than the activities they superintend: “A power’s agency is always more than the amalgamation of its individual human factors. A power’s fallenness, its capacity for and achievement of evil, is greater than the sum total of the human sinners involved. A power’s resistance to grace continually exceeds the resistance of its individual participants” (27).

This deeper problem speaks not to the ways in which entertainment affects our lives but its ability to overcome us. As a power, we look not to redeem it, but reorient it in its proper place. Laytham expressly rejects a position that inserts itself between the two extremes of media idolatry and technophobia. Laytham proposes instead a dialectical relationship: “One is to name entertainment as a principality, to refuse its quest for primacy in our lives, and to resist its seductive power. The other is to name entertainment as a triviality, and therefore intentionally to enjoy its freeing possibilities” (28). Humanity must resonate this dialectical movement in its mode of engagement, to “make discerning theological judgments whose purpose is neither to condemn nor celebrate entertainment per se, but to help ourselves imagine more fully the shape of fidelity to Christ...” (11).

The notion of entertainment as a triviality does not exempt entertainment as an event unworthy of God’s creative power. Laytham agrees with Stanley Hauerwas on this point, but steers away from his assertion that within entertainment one finds self-worth and purpose— for Laytham “there is no sense of ‘making a contribution’ in the passive form of many contemporary entertainments” (30). Laytham is certainly correct in a general sense, although one might point to video games, which, with their increasing sophistication, have spawned entire communities where players can vie for top scores, win praise, contribute to a digital world, and be noticed by those outside their true-life communities.

Entertainment culture also evolves and develops under the historic influence of capitalism. On the topic of play, for example, Laytham explores the concept with regard to its contemporary exploitation as a commodity for profit. Corporations are guilty of destroying the creativity and freedom essential to an authentic expression of play and instead have replaced it with scripted forms. Laytham reaches a far less optimistic conclusion than Walter Benjamin did last century on the place of art in an age of mechanical reproduction, saying that the controlling force of capitalism strips us entirely of our creativity so that “somewhere along that profit-seeking continuum lies the demise of play’s essential creativity” (13). Benjamin spoke similarly of the loss of authenticity, but he also questioned whether we ought to ignore what he considered (in the example of photography) a paradigm shift and whether the entire nature of art had been changed primarily due to the increasing volume of participation. It is clear that both Laytham and Benjamin agree that once the commoditization is complete, it is ripe for political exploitation.
The concept of community exists as a major theme both in its inauthentic expression driven by entertainment media and the call to community that resonates in the body of Christ. A negative trend reveals itself as the concept of community continues to transition from physical presence to virtual presence; it runs against the possibility of cruciform living. In its best incarnation, the secular model of the audience as community can only imitate the communion found in the body of Christ—for while audience claims oneness, its authorization remains controlled by vested interests: “So in the midst of this massive cultural transformation the Christian church, called to gather around the One who is worthy of all adoration and praise, struggles to form a people willing and able to assemble bodily as Christ’s body” (18).

These indictments against virtual community however should be advanced in full consciousness of the ever-changing expansion of social interaction. I would venture Laytham agrees that bodily presence alone is no guarantee of true community, even in the Church. And when presence was not possible, the history of Christianity recalls followers in Christ who pronounced their unending, intimate loyalty with those from whom they were separated. Laytham does not ignore this. Returning to his example of the Methodist layperson, he notes that this person could have very well sung in isolation, but even so would have been “joining with the communion of saints, even if none was visible or audibly present” (45). This notion that songs to God in private binding us to the larger community of the church leads to what I would acknowledge can be a very typical experience of many evangelicals outside non-mainline communities, the same who have become the biggest consumers of pop Christian culture. The availability of contemporary Christian music to one’s iPod allows us to manipulate content, control a range of moods, and choose to download the sermons we want to hear, which may very well aid in our praise and devotion. Laytham is on to something when he notes how the hymnal is a genetic marker of the shared fellowship of community and the iPod is not. Yet even the marketing of external speakers for the iPod has the potential of returning us to a more traditional communal experience, an option that was not pressed into service but is inherent to the technology’s realm of possible uses.

Laytham’s last chapter, in which he highlights four responses to Hollywood cinema, is a sturdy deconstruction of the seduction of easy moralizing, and offers a sharp and incisive analysis of the way we have accepted simplistic story lines and moral resolutions that more often than not stand in opposition to an appropriate theological encounter with the world.

While Laytham avoids a complete rejection of entertainment, his book continually challenges the reader to consider how he spends his waking moments in its grip. Laytham does a good job of asserting the dialectical balance of antithetical encounters with entertainment that is accomplished in the inherent tension of the model. Yet one senses it is the persuasive language of sin and fallenness insightfully applied and rooted in a recognizable biblical theology, rather than any affirmative feature (for example, in that of play, which Laytham readily admits, does not resonate in scripture) that captures one’s attention. This lack of a comparable grounding for the trivial in the biblical narrative and theological tradition requires Laytham to widen his theological lens to adopt a broader approach to cultural anthropology. In identifying play as a core task of becoming human, the question of the dialectic remaining a theologically constrained analysis opens the question of whether we are dealing with a natural theology, in which my insights are independent of a particular kind of revelation, or whether we can maintain these insights as a form of Christian revelation, as has been true with the identification of sin. Play invites our observation everywhere. Sin requires a theological mind. Concepts like thanksgiving, blessing, and the goodness of creation seem appropriate, though they are hardly intrinsic to the concept.

Entertainment still remains a moving target. There is need to allow for expansion, especially when entertainment functions in a way that violates our expectations and continues to evolve rapidly. Is entertainment, theology? If we mean by this “the study of the divine” in the proper sense, it is hard to see how even the church qualifies without becoming subject and self-referential. If entertainment is a trivial good as a part of God’s creation set in its subordinate place, then we ought to promote studies like this that seek to venture a theological understanding of our ever-changing world. No doubt Laytham’s book is an able attempt to diagnosis an entertainment culture that has been largely demonized or ignored by our theological communities.

Teaching Jewish Midrash

Today, I begin a three-part series with my adult education class on Jewish midrash at Trinity Episcopal Church. The topics will vary with the first on the ways earlier Jewish rabbis considered revelation in their commentary on scripture.

Unlike the traditions of reading canon in the Christian Church, which many Christians experience as a closed body of texts (but rarely the great commentaries of their traditions), Jewish believers are accustomed to reading the opinions of the rabbis as a part of their experience of Torah and even more broadly Tanakh. This also raises the question of authority, another topic, which is much more loosely constrained, although there are some sects that accept certain writings with greater authority than others.

Thinking about Ehrman's "Demythologizing Jesus' Ethics"

Today in his blog post entitled "In Favor of Demythologizing Jesus' Ethics," Bart Ehrman raised the interesting question about the significance of Jesus' ethical worldview. Bible-believing Christians of course regularly take for granted that Jesus could be speaking globally and with complete foresight into an unchanging reality where ethical rules like stealing, murder, or fornication remain largely immoral. Of course, this is punctuated by the fact that many Christians think Jesus would have answers for abortion or homosexuality as a clinical and scientific disposition, or even fresher, the issue of stem-cell research despite the context of his world where the issues are not breached.

Ehrman writes the following as a teaser to his paid blog site. But there's enough here to think about the issue:

In previous posts, in answer to the question of whether I think that Jesus was a great moral teacher, I have said that I think the answer is Yes, but that there is a very serious caveat.  Jesus’ ethical teaching is based on a view of the world that most of us today no longer hold.  Jesus’ ethical teaching – just as all of his teaching – is deeply rooted in a form of Jewish apocalyptic thought that can be dated and localized to his time and place.   Jesus thought that the culmination of the history of God’s people, Israel, was soon to come, that the climax of all human history was at hand, that God was soon to intervene in the course of history to overthrow the powers of evil that were in control of this world to bring in his good kingdom, here on earth.   People were to live ethically in order to inherit that kingdom; and in fact, they were to begin to model the ethics of that kingdom in the here and now, so that when the cosmic judge of the earth came froam heaven, they would be saved from the wrath of God that would strike the planet before the true people of God were exalted and made rulers of the earth.

So, the short story is that I do not subscribe to this apocalyptic view myself (though I once did, in its modernized form).  I do not think there are actual cosmic forces in the world – the Devil, demons, cosmic powers of sin, and death, other principalities and powers that are wreaking havoc here.  I don’t think that Jesus was right about when the end was going to come (during his disciples’ lifetime) or how it was to come (with the appearance of the Son of Man from heaven).  I think that the entire framework for Jesus’ teaching was a form of Jewish mythology distinctive of Jewish thinkers in Jesus’ day, and that our modern world (again, except for modernized fundamentalist forms of apocalyptic thought) has a different way of looking at history, the powers who make things happen in this world, natural forces (that lead, for example, to disaster and devastation), and so on.

If Jesus’ basic world view (on which his ethics were built) does not translate into our modern world, does that mean that his ethical teaching, built on and rooted in that world view, also cannot be taken over into our modern world?  If the ethics was rooted in a system we don’t subscribe to, don’t we need to abandon not only the underlying foundation but also the structure built on it?

Ehrman admits he doesn't know. The tropological reading being entirely suggestive of an eschatological reality again, like so many things, requires we agree on the terms and conditions of what eschatology means. Ehrman uses the term "demythologizing Jesus' ethics" - a nod to Rudolf Bultmann, but he clearly is not thinking of eschatology in the sense that Bultmann does, namely an in-this-world experience that brings about existential crisis. For Ehrman, the literalist reality of a Jesus who thinks God is about to break into history as a supernatural event would be what he has in mind. As an historian this makes sense. To consider an ethical theory in a way other than one that has a literalist reality seems to grant too much to latter-day efforts by theologians to read back into Jesus' day an ethical reality that was perhaps too sophisticated to address the challenges of the kind of world he inhabited. When one thinks about Barth, Brunner, Bultmann, we may have the sense that these brilliant thinkers were simply trying to recover the biblical observations and insights of Jesus' time by channeling them through the category of theirs. I feel this as well. I could never entirely read Bultmann without a sense that he (and Tillich) thought that existentialism was something that always was. That is, wherever opportunity arose, Tillich could pick apart the pre-Socratics to find existentialism. Whether it is or is not there, perhaps the real problem was that the last century, so categorized by existentialist thought was not itself "existentialist," but given the realities of two world wars, an opportunity to "think existentially" came about. I would like to think this, and in doing so, this allows us to avoid the charge that modern ethicists are projecting a worldview on the past that wasn't there. I think this is what we can find in an affirmative reading of the existentialists like Bultmann who interpreted eschatology in an altogether unique way. And I think many theologians of our day have found traction in the idea that Jesus' eschatology was not about ushering in an "otherworld" but about bringing the kingdom to this world. Was this purely through political and ethical means. I don't think so. The idea remains how we approach scripture and how we want to read it. Enter in the very real situation of four different gospels with potentially four different communities and the way they thought of Jesus and there is a lot of opportunity for difference, a lot of opportunity to ask what we mean when we turn "Jesus' ethics" into the thought of an individual, rather than a community, the most severe of which comes in the gospel of John.

Anyway, it is a question worth thinking about and recovering. Certainly, the fact that we continue as the community of Christ to find his ideas resonating with us is reason enough.

Updates - January 2013

Much of my professional work has kept me from active blog entries recently. So I wanted to just update those who may peer into this electronic page. I just finished a review of Dr. D. Brent Laytham’s new book  iPod, YouTube, WiiPlay: Theological Engagements with Entertainment (Cascade Books, 2012). This was an excellent read and was accessible to opening a dialogue beyond the pages that contained his observations. I also have something similar in the works and so his insights were appreciated with regard to my own analysis. The review should be available in the next issue of the American Theological Inquiry.

I have had the privilege of working with some fine Bonhoeffer scholars, including Drs. James Pat Kelley, Holger Roggelin, Michael Lukens, and Philip Ziegler all of whom have promised or have provided feedback on my own Bonhoeffer manuscript. I believe that my position is a unique one with respect to an approach to ethics. Dr. Reinhard Krauss, also a well-known participant in the field of Bonhoeffer studies, will be writing the foreword to my book. This is a great honor.  My hope is to finish incorporating any necessary clarifications and have it off to the publisher by February.

Finally, I was also invited to prepare a paper for the 38th Spalding Symposium at Merton College, Oxford in April. This paper will focus on prison writing coming out of British colonial India and Nazi Germany. While there will be some component of colonial discourse theory, the challenge of this exercise is to compare two different global situations and to see how the writing from political and religious figures helps us to understand the influence of the incarcerated experience on those writing from within.

I was hoping to present a paper on Bonhoefferian ethics, the question of homosexuality and marriage to the Koinonia Graduate Student Forum at Princeton Theological Seminary in March, but alas, I submitted my abstract at the tail-end of the call for submissions. I was informed this week they had 85 entries and only a small number were invited to be presented. The paper I was planning to present there is basically finished. So I guess I’ll need to find another venue.