Diana Butler Bass
IMAGINE AN UNLIKELY DUET. One singer is National Review senior editor Jonah Goldberg, a conservative political columnist who admits he indulged in “smash-mouth” rhetoric and once did a video mocking “social justice” as meaningless mush. The other is religion scholar Diana Butler Bass, a progressive liberal and author who champions social justice as central to a life of faith. Both published books this spring, and as they made separate media rounds, they sang the same song—an ode to gratitude.
Gratitude is having a big turn in the spotlight right now as influential writers, university researchers bolstered with millions in foundation grant funds, #blessed social media mavens, and more tout thankfulness as a boon to one’s spirit and health.
Woodiwiss: We're coming up on Good Friday and Easter. And a lot of strains of Christianity teach the story of Good Friday as, “God also gave us this gift of Jesus’ death. It was horrible, but Jesus did it to pay for our sins, so we have to worship him.” There's this implied debt.
Bass: It makes absolutely no theological moral or biblical sense at all. So where do we get that? It's very complicated, but Protestantism was built on this idea of faith: On one hand, they said that salvation was a free gift, that it was the act of grace. On the other hand, they complicated that free gift with this idea of economic exchange.
But, interpretation of who Matthew 25:40 refers to as “the least of these” has gained attention most recently with many claiming that Jesus was speaking solely about his disciples or other Christians instead of the marginalized and oppressed communities that the verse so clearly seems to point to.
Four mornings a week, in the tranquil, blushing hours of morning, Diana Butler Bass drives to a familiar walking trail along the Potomac River and embarks on a two-mile stroll.
Creeping sunlight peppers the wooded scene. And the babble of active water silences the jangle of daily life.
Some days she finds a comfortable bench along the river where she can journal. Other days, she observes creation.
For Bass, a learned nature connoisseur, ardent gardener, and noted religion academic, God does not merely exist inside reverent, adorned church spaces.
God also lives in the soil and exists in the elements.
JUDAISM AND CHRISTIANITY urge followers to seek heavenly things, to model their lives on heavenly virtues, and to have hope in heaven. In the New Testament, heaven most often appears as the “kingdom of heaven,” God’s political and social vision for humanity, an idea that Jesus uses to criticize the Roman Empire’s oppressive domination system. Jesus’s own prayer, “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10), seeks to align earthly ethics with the divine order of God’s own dwelling place. Heaven is an intrusive reality, the ever present realm of God hovering all around, sometimes even synonymous with God, as Marcus Borg writes. The Bible says the kingdom of heaven “has come near” (Matthew 4:17), and if heaven is nearby, so is God. Heaven is here-and-now, not there-and-then.
To speak of heaven, therefore, is another way to speak of the earth. But the vision for the earth that “heaven” presents is not in keeping with the world’s violence, oppression, and injustice; rather, it is an alternate vision of peace, blessing, and abundance, the world as God intended it to be. Heaven has been depicted as far away, unattainable in this life.
Everyone who calls me to speak somewhere, it seems, wants me to address the issue of declining church membership, and particularly how to connect with younger adults. The problem is that sometimes the invitation is built on a false premise. It’s the hope of many churches that if they can find a way to connect with younger people in a relevant way, those young adults will join the church and save the institution for future generations.
And while this is possible in some situations, it’s really the wrong question to be asking.
The explicit question I get asked, time and again, is “How do we better serve younger people?” And if the question really ended there, we could have a pretty productive conversation. But there’s an implied subtext in most cases that we have to tease out, and often times, the church isn’t even willing to admit that this footnote is married to their question. So although the words above are what are spoken, here’s what they really want to know:
“How do we better serve younger people (so that they will come back to our institutions and save them)?”
Here's a recent conversation I had with Diana Butler Bass, author of the new book http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0061448702?ie=UTF8&tag=sojo_blog-20&lin...
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