[beck on the gospel & COVID]

"Basically, in the Bible and throughout most of church history, the Christian ethic of love has been one of approach and contact, even in the face of disease and plague. Jesus touches lepers, Christians rush toward plague victims. Love embraces. That's how Christians are taught and morally formed, we love by moving toward each other."

From Richard Beck's post "The Gospel & COVID-19: Part 3, Love as Distance" at
http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-gospel-covid-19-part-3-love-as.html

[stranger god: meeting jesus in disguise, by Richard Beck (book)]

"When Richard Beck first led a Bible study at a maximum security prison, he went to meet God. His own faith was flagging, but Beck still believed the promise of Matthew 25, that when we visit the prisoner, we visit Jesus. And sure enough, God met him in prison.

With his signature combination of biblical reflection, theological reasoning, and psychological insight, Beck shows how God always meets us in the marginalized, the oppressed, and the refugee. And stories from Beck's own life illustrate this truth - God comes to him in the poor, the crippled, the smelly.

Psychological experiments show how we are predisposed to like those who are similar to us and avoid those who are unlike us. The call of the gospel, however, is to override those impulses with compassion, to "widen the circle of our affection." In the end, Beck turns to the Little Way of St. Thérèse of Lisieux for guidance in doing even the smallest acts with kindness, and he lays out a path that any of us can follow." (from Amazon)

Read what Richard says about this new book on his blog Experimental Theology.

Read quotes from other things that Richard has written, sometimes with commentary and sometimes with great cartoons (by yours truly), right here on my blog.


Buy the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Stranger-God-Meeting-Jesus-Disguise/dp/1506433758

[heathens and the church]

Really love the song Heathens by twenty one pilots, and then found that Richard Beck, one of my favourite bloggers and authors, has just written about them in his blog. Here's a snippet of what he says:

"Heathens" makes many of the points I try to make in Unclean. The speaker and audience of "Heathens" is unclear, but I'd like to read the song as Jesus speaking to the church, as TØP preaching to their fellow Christians. Read this way "Heathens" is both a prophetic rebuke to the church as well as an invitation into Jesus' lifestyle of radical hospitality.

Read the entire post:
Lovin' On the Freakshow Sitting Next to You: The Church According to Twenty One Pilots


If you haven't heard the song, you can hear it in this video. Note that as the song was used for a movie soundtrack, the images in this video are not related to what Richard Beck is speaking about!


Watch on YouTube.

Lyrics:

All my friends are heathens. Take it slow
Wait for them to ask you who you know
Please don't make any sudden moves
You don't know the half of the abuse

All my friends are heathens. Take it slow
Wait for them to ask you who you know
Please don't make any sudden moves
You don't know the half of the abuse

[practice resurrection]

Would love to be there! Am hoping that the talk is posted online and if so, will put the link here.

[... space that protected and cared for the most fragile bodies]

Richard Beck, in his series discussing "The Gospel According to Ta-Nehisi Coates" (particularly in reference to Coates' book Between the World and Me), says this about what Jesus' kingdom looked like:

Jesus, by contrast, created communities centered around giving care to the most vulnerable in his society. Jesus carved out of Empire space that protected and cared for the most fragile bodies. That's what Jesus did as he moved from town to town, he created a community where the most oppressed and marginalized were welcomed and cared for. Communities of care that were open to agents of Empire, tax collectors and Roman soldiers, who were willing to work to buffer fragile bodies.

And this is what the early church did as well. The church carved out of Empire communities of care. Imperial Rome knew Christianity to be religion popular with women and slaves because of how these communities buffered their fragile bodies from the ravages of Empire.

To my eye, these communities of care carved out of Empire are what Jesus meant when he said "the kingdom of God is in your midst."

(source, emphasis added)

---

Read the rest of the article (the really good stuff is in the latter half of the post).

Read the series from Part 1.

subvert the moral circle!

If you have not seen my previous post about moral circles, read this first and then this.

The concept of the moral circle makes for a great diagram, and can be thought of as "going around me and my family," kind of like a fence around your backyard with you and your family happily inside it, and those who are "not family" (like strangers and stray dogs) kept outside. Kind of like the walls that used to encircle towns and cities in medieval times.

Jesus subverts the boundary-oriented moral circle...

moral circles

Did you know that you have a moral circle? And while it might sound like something positive, for the most part it isn't positive at all. It divides our world into family and not-family, kin and not-kin, into us and them, into people and "ends to our means".


Here's how Richard Beck describes our moral circle:

... These two instinctive processes [differentiating kin from non-kin, and extending '"kindness" toward our "kin"'] create what Singer calls our moral circle. That is, we psychologically draw a circle around a group of people whom we identify as "my kind," "my tribe," "my clan," "my family." This circle is initially populated with family members, but as we grow the circle includes more and more non-biological relations, "friends" who are "like family to us."

... In Kantian language, people inside the moral circle are treated as ends in themselves while people on the outside of the moral circle are treated as means to our ends. We treat those inside the moral circle with love, affection, and mercy, and those outside the moral circle with indifference, hostility, or pragmatism. And all of this flows naturally from a simple psychological mechanism: Are you identified as "family"?

Richard Beck, Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality

(pp. 100-101)

[embedded]

Richard Beck on the kingdom:

'The eccentric Kingdom doesn't claim territory over against the world. The eccentric Kingdom doesn't erect walls to create a gated community. Rather, the eccentric Kingdom, like salt and leaven, is embedded in the world.

The eccentric Kingdom is the embedded, pilgrim, landless, possessionless, homeless, sojourning, itinerant missionary community called and commissioned to live lives of radical service and availability to the world.'

Isn't that quote just delicious?! And I wonder, why is such fare so rarely found?

Read the whole post.

[mercy not sacrifice]

From Richard Beck's blog, a simple post called "Jesus in Microcosm" giving us two verses contrasting the way of sacrifice and holiness with the way of mercy:

Leviticus 13.45-46
Anyone with such a defiling disease must wear torn clothes, let their hair be unkempt, cover the lower part of their face and cry out, "Unclean! Unclean!" As long as they have the disease they remain unclean.

They must live alone; they must live outside the camp.

Matthew 8.2-3a
A man with leprosy came and knelt before him and said, “Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean.”

And Jesus reached out his hand and touched him.

(source)

Jesus could have just told a parable about lepers, or added another paragraph or two in the sermon on the mount:
"You have heard it said, 'Lepers must live outside of the camp,' but I tell you, live outside the camp with them!"

That would be pretty extreme. Due to the emphasis on purity and holiness,the people of Jesus' day would have had trouble living with lepers anywhere, especially the religious leaders. I might have trouble with that too, as I like a clean house with all the comforts. And invariably, it would be possible to 'live in the camp with them' while still keeping a distance.

But Jesus was talk and walk all in one. The life he lived showed us the better way. He reached his hand right through the rules to touch the man with leprosy.

What rules do we need to reach through to touch the lives of others? How can we embody Jesus' teaching that God desires mercy, not sacrifice?

wheat and weeds

Then Jesus told them another story:

"The kingdom of heaven is like a man who planted good seed in his field. That night, when everyone was asleep, his enemy came and planted weeds among the wheat and then left. Later, the wheat sprouted and the heads of grain grew, but the weeds also grew. Then the man's servants came to him and said, 'You planted good seed in your field. Where did the weeds come from?'

The man answered, 'An enemy planted weeds.' The servants asked, 'Do you want us to pull up the weeds?' The man answered, 'No, because when you pull up the weeds, you might also pull up the wheat. Let the weeds and the wheat grow together until the harvest time. At harvest time I will tell the workers, "First gather the weeds and tie them together to be burned. Then gather the wheat and bring it to my barn." ' "

Matthew 13: 24 - 30 NCV

The pastor in this cartoon is being "inclusive" at one level, but also judgemental – he has decided who is the wheat and who are the weeds. And that is exclusionary and othering. That is tolerance of the religous sort but has nothing to do with Jesus.

In what ways do we judge who is in and who is out, whether on a social level or an eternal one? In what ways does the way we treat other people reflect the judgements we have made?

---

Richard Beck in a recent post says:

Should we pull out the weeds?

This question goes to the heart of one of the greatest temptations amongst religious people wanting to serve God: the impulse to sort the good people from the bad people, the saints from the sinners, the church from the world, the saved from the damned.

He then goes on to look at what the farmer says, and suggests that this parable offers two visions of what the kingdom could be like:

On the one side are the weeding Christians, those wanting to identify, sort out and burn the weeds.

And on the other side are those Christians who live alongside the weeds manifesting forgiveness and patience.

Cuz in real life, people are people.

[denying status boundaries]

From Richard Beck's book, unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality.

Given all this, and combined with the central place of table fellowship in Jesus’ ministry, it is not surprising that hospitality was a defining feature and virtue of the early church (cf. Acts 2:42-47, 4:32-37; I Tim 3:2, 5:10; I Pet 4:9; Titus 1:8; Rom 12:13, 15:7). As Christine Pohl notes in her book Making Room, these practices continued to be a distinctive feature of Christian communities during the first centuries of the church:

Hospitality to needy strangers distinguished the early church from its surrounding environment. Noted as exceptional by Christians and non-Christians alike, offering care to strangers became one of the distinguishing marks of the authenticity of the Christian gospel and of the church. Writing from the first five centuries demonstrate the importance of hospitality in defining the church as a universal community, in denying the significance of the status boundaries and distinctions of the larger society, in recognizing the value of every person, and in providing practical care for the poor, stranger, and sick.

Given the impact of sociomoral disgust upon human affairs, it is not surprising that the act of hospitality is fundamentally an act of human recognition and embrace. If exclusion is fundamentally dehumanizing, hospitality acts to restore full human status to the marginalized and outcast. As Pohl writes:

For much of human history, Christians addressed concerns about recognition and human dignity within their discussion and practices of hospitality. Especially in relation to strangers, hospitality was the basic category for dealing with the importance of transcending social differences and breaking social boundaries that excluded certain categories or kinds of persons … Hospitality resists boundaries that endanger persons by denying their humanness.

Beck, pp. 122-123 (Pohl quotes from Making Room, pp. 33, 62, 64)

And a quote from Henri Nouwen to wrap it up:
“Hospitality means the creation of free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy.”

[outside the moral circle]

From Richard Beck's book, unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality.

But what about those people on the outside of the moral circle? Those we identify as strangers? People on the outside of the moral circle are treated instrumentally, as tools to accomplish our goals in the world. In Kantian language, people inside the moral circle are treated as ends in themselves while people on the outside of the moral circle are treated as means to our ends. We treat those inside the moral circle with love, affection, and mercy, and those outside the moral circle with indifference, hostility, or pragmatism. And all this flows naturally from a simple psychological mechanism: Are you identified as “family”? Once the identification is made (or not), life inside and outside the circle flows easily and reflexively.

….

Does humanity end at the edge of the moral circle? That is, is the way we treat people outside the moral circle symptomatic of something darker and more sinister? Do we see outsiders as less than human?

The phenomenon of seeing people as less than human is called infrahumanization. Historically, infrahumanization occurs when one group of people comes to believe that another group of people does not possess some vital and defining human quality such as intellect or certain moral sensibilities. These infrahumans might be human from a biological perspective, but they are believed to lack some moral or psychological attribute that makes them fully human, on par with the "superior” group.

Beck, pp. 101-102

In Jesus' day, lepers were seen as less than human. So were Samaritans and Gentiles. Whom do we think of as less than human today?

See the untouchable jesus cartoon in the previous post.

untouchable jesus

From the gospel of Matthew:

When Jesus came down from the mountainside, large crowds followed him. A man with leprosy came and knelt before him and said, “Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean.” Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. “I am willing,” he said. “Be clean!” Immediately he was cleansed of his leprosy. Matthew 8:1-3 NIV.

Cartoon aside, here's what Richard Beck in unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality says about what the true Jesus did:

What is intriguing about this story is the sequence. Jesus touches the leper first. Then the command “Be clean!” is offered. That is, Jesus’ first move is into ritual defilement. By first touching the leper, Jesus intentionally and willfully seeks contamination, standing in solidarity with the unclean. This is striking because the expected sequence would be initial purification followed by contact. Jesus, surprisingly for the onlookers, does the opposite. Contact occurs first. Purification follows solidarity. And one can only wonder how various Christian communities approach this sequence in their own missional endeavors.

Beck, p. 76

Beck then goes on to discuss how the writer of Mark gives us several examples of how Jesus overturns the traditions of his day: when Jesus heals an “unclean” man in the synagogue, and then when he heals a leper after touching him first. Beck then comments,

… in this healing Jesus reverses the directionality and power of pollution (the attribution of negativity dominance). Rather than the unclean polluting the clean, we see, in Jesus’ touch, the clean making the polluted clean. Here, in Jesus, we see a reversal, a positive contamination. Contact cleanses rather than pollutes….
Soon after these events, in a parallel to Matthew 9, Jesus is found admitting “unclean” persons—tax collectors and sinners—to the sociomoral space of table-fellowship.

Beck, p. 81

Contrast Jesus' actions with what you see in church. Are "unclean" persons welcomed? How are those who are different treated? Are we willing to love and accept others where they are at?

[negativity dominance]

From Richard Beck's book, unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality.

Finally, consider the attribute of negativity dominance. The judgment of negativity dominance places all the power on the side of the pollutant. If I touch (apologies for the example I’m about to use) some feces to your cheeseburger the cheeseburger gets ruined, permanently (see above). Importantly, the cheeseburger doesn’t make the feces suddenly scrumptious. When the pure and the polluted come into contact the pollutant is the more powerful force. The negative dominates over the positive.

Negativity dominance has important missional implications for the church. For example, notice how negativity dominance is at work in Matthew 9. The Pharisees never once consider the fact that the contact between Jesus and the sinners might have a purifying, redemptive, and cleansing effect upon the sinners. Why not? The logic of contamination simply doesn’t work that way. The logic of contamination has the power of the negative dominating over the positive. Jesus doesn’t purify the sinners. The sinners make Jesus unclean.

Beck, p. 30.

See the naked jesus cartoon in the previous post.

There is an online discussion of the book at uncleantheology.blogspot.com

[love and disgust]

From Richard Beck's book, unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality.

As the self gets symbolically extended so does disgust psychology, the primal psychology that monitors the boundary of the body. Disgust accompanies the self as it reaches into the world, continuing to provide emotional markers denoting “inside” versus “outside,” the boundary points of the extended symbolic self. With this understanding of the self in hand, we are well positioned to understand human love, intimacy, and relationality. Specifically, as the notion of “one flesh” highlights, love is a form of inclusion. The boundary of the self is extended to include the other. The very word intimacy conjures the sense of a small, shared space. We also describe relationships in terms of proximity and distance. Those we love are “close” to us. When love cools we grow “distant.” We tell “inside” jokes that speak of shared experiences. We have a “circle of friends.” “Outsiders” are told to “stop butting in.” We ask people to “give us space” when we want to “pull back” from a relationship. In sum, love is inherently experienced as a boundary issue. Love is on the inside of the symbolic self.

….

What we discover in all this is that disgust and love are reciprocal processes. Disgust erects boundaries while love dismantles boundaries. This was the conclusion of St. Catherine noted in the quote at the start of the chapter: sound hygiene was incompatible with charity. One also thinks of St. Francis rushing up to kiss the leper. Love is, at root, the suspension of disgust, the psychic fusion of selves.

Beck, pp. 86, 88.

See the jesus febrezus cartoon in the previous post.

[lady gaga, jesus, and little monsters]

Richard Beck on his blog has an excellent post about Lady Gaga and how she embodies the gospel:

In short, in this song [Bad Kid] Gaga is trying to get on the inside of these "monsters," to speak to their brokenness, sadness, loneliness and alienation. To society these are "bad kids." But Gaga sings to them "You're still good to me."

And I ask you, doesn't that sound a whole lot like Jesus?

Gaga calls out to the little monsters. And Jesus eats with tax collectors, sinners, and prostitutes.

...

This is what I think. I think every Christ-following church should start talking to their youth groups, saying unambiguously: We want you to be a wall of protection for kids like Jamey. Seek out and protect--emotionally and socially--every weird, weak, nerdy, lonely, queer kid at your school. We don't care if they are a goth, or a druggy, or a queer. Doesn't matter. Protect these kids. Churches should train their youth groups to be angels of protection, teaching them to find these kids and say, "Hey, I love you. Jesus loves you. So no one's going to bully you. Not on my watch. Come sit with me at lunch." That's what I think. I think every Christ-following church should start Guardian Angel programs like this, teaching their kids to stick up for kids like Jamey. Not with violence. But with welcome and solidarity. Because it's hard to bully a group. So let's welcome these kids into a halo of protection and friendship.

From The Gospel according to Lady Gaga by Richard Beck. Reading the entire post is recommended!

What a difference it would make for today's youth, if churches encouraged and equipped their young people in this way! What a challenge to be outwardly-focused in a way that is concrete and desperately needed.

[hitler’s sweater]

From Richard Beck's book, unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality. Regarding a study which (put briefly) investigated whether people would be willing to put on a sweater purportedly worn by Hitler:

What studies like this reveal is that people tend to think about evil as it if were a virus, a disease, or a contagion. Evil is an object that can seep out of Hitler, into a sweater, and, by implication, into you if you try the sweater on. Evil is sticky and contagious. So we stay away.

What we see in this example is how disgust psychology regulates how we reason about and experience aspects of the moral universe. Disgust psychology prompts us to think about evil as if it were a virus or polluting object. When we do this the logic of contamination is imported into moral discourse and judgment. For example, as noted earlier, we begin to worry about contact. In the domain of food aversion contact with a polluting object is a legitimate concern. But fears concerning contact might not be appropriate or logical in dealing with moral issues or social groups. Worse, a fear of contact might promote antisocial behavior (e.g., social exclusion) on our part.

The example of Hitler might sound extreme, but consider another study done by Paul Rozin, Maureen Markwith, and Clark McCauley. In this study the researchers observed that many people don’t want to wear sweaters previously owned by homosexual persons, or even lie down in the same hotel bed if a homosexual person was the previous night’s occupant. In short, just about any behavior judged to be sin could active disgust psychology, subsequently importing contamination logic (e.g., contact fears) into the life of the church.

Beck, pp. 25-26.

[psychological non-starters]

From Richard Beck's book, unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality

In sum, the antagonism between mercy and sacrifice is psychological in nature. Our primitive understandings of both love and purity are regulated by psychological dynamics that are often incompatible. Take, for example, a popular recommendation from my childhood years. I was often told that I should “hate the sin, but love the sinner.” Theologically, to my young mind (and, apparently, to the adults who shared it with me), this formulation seemed clear and straight-forward. However, psychologically speaking, this recommendation was extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, to put into practice. As any self-reflective person knows, empathy and moral outrage tend to function at cross-purposes. In fact, some religious communities resist empathy, as any softness toward or solidarity with “sinners” attenuates the moral fury a group can muster. Conversely, it is extraordinarily difficult to “love the sinner” –to respond to people tenderly, empathically, and mercifully—when you are full of moral outrage over their behavior. Consider how many churches react to the homosexual community or to young women considering an abortion. How well do churches manage the balance between outrage and empathy in those cases? In short, theological or spiritual recommendations aimed at reconciling the competing demands of mercy and sacrifice might be psychological non-starters.

Beck, p. 3

After drawing numerous cartoons which comment on the idea of "love the sinner, hate the sin," I found Beck's take on this from a psychological perspective very interesting. And it's pretty obvious that most churches who believe this infamous saying aren't doing a good job of following it.

[unclean: intro]

After reading Exclusion and Embrace by Volf, I heard about Richard Beck’s book unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality. Not only does he refer to Volf frequently, but his book is a fascinating look at the very real psychology which influences exclusion and embrace. A key Bible passage he references is Matthew 9, where Jesus is eating with tax collectors and sinners. The Pharisees confront Jesus’ disciples about his behavior and he replied, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice’” (verse 12).

“I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” Echoing Hosea, Jesus defends his embrace of the “unclean” in the Gospel of Matthew, seeming to privilege the prophetic call to justice over the Levitical pursuit of purity. And yet, as missional faith communities are well aware, the tensions and conflicts between holiness and mercy are not so easily resolved. At every turn, it seems that the psychological pull of purity and holiness tempts the church into practices of social exclusion and a Gnostic flight from “the world” into a “too spiritual” spirituality. In an unprecedented fusion of psychological science and theological scholarship, Richard Beck describes the pernicious (and largely unnoticed) effects of the psychology of purity upon the life and mission of the church.
          (from the back cover). 

I will be posting some quotes from his book that relate the themes on this blog. They will be labeled quotes from beck.

If you are interested in reading the book yourself, here’s the reference:
unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality
Richard Beck (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2011)

Jamie Arpin-Ricci has interviewed Richard about the book. Read the interview at missional.ca