Whining Through the Ages

By David Horn, ThD
Director, The Ockenga Institute

Let me whine for a while. I think I’ve reached that moment similar to when I have played a favorite song one too many times. You know the kind of song I am talking about; the song with the lyric, the melody line, the refrain that perfectly encapsules some part of your life…perfectly. And, you make the fateful, if understandable, mistake of playing it one too many times. Now crushed by the weight of redundancy, the song loses its meaning. When does a cliché become a cliché?

This is what I feel about the current language describing Generation theory. No longer is it enough to call ourselves Christians, human beings for that matter. The current climate has us all corralled into increasingly-smaller holding pens called Gen X, Y, Z, post X, Y, Z, the emerging X, Y, Z.

It is not that Generation theory hasn’t been a helpful paradigm, even truthful to a point. The simple reality that cultural values shift through time from one generation to the next is so self-evident it is hard to conceive that it has only been in recent years that the idea has taken root in our national consciousness.

But, have we not pulled the thin strands that hold this concept together almost beyond the breaking point? How many churches have I observed in recent years being completely re-engineered on the basis of this concept alone? Worship services, small group ministries, evangelism, outreach, teaching: Every aspect of church-life has been filtered through the generational lens. Pastors now look upon their congregations as if they are filled with generational subspecies roaming across the Serengeti. Each subspecies—Gen X, Y, or Z--thinks differently, speaks a different language, and responds to God differently in the most fundamental of ways.

Not long ago, I met with the leadership of a national para-Church organization on behalf of the seminary and I made the fateful mistake of questioning the veracity of Generational theory. The silence around that table of leaders was deafening. For a moment, I thought perhaps I had questioned the Resurrection.

Part of what drives my passion on this issue is personal and results from my own work in my doctoral work on assessing the empirical research on religious conversion. Fifteen years ago, if anyone would have questioned the truthfulness of brainwashing or deprivation theories as singular explanations for how individuals change religious commitments, they would have been laughed off the stage. Not so today. We have moved well beyond these explanations to others. Similarly, the surrounding orthodoxy around Generational theory is equally vulnerable to change. To speak of it as a concept is not so much to diminish its usefulness as to caution us of its limitation. How much now rides on this conceptualization in your church?

I think one of the most dangerous implications of our over-dependence upon Generational theory is that it so causes us to focus upon the differences in individuals within our churches at the expense of what unites us together. My twenty-some-year old son wears his pants a little lower than I do. He uses vocabulary at times that sends me scurrying for further explanation. He enjoys different forms of music. But, when I look deep into his eyes, when we talk about what touches us most intimately, when we speak about God, and our family, and our mutual traditions, we are the same species.

Further, we share the same Gospel. The things that both of us look for in Christian community—authenticity, honesty, winsomeness—are the same. Exactly the same. The similarities far outweigh the differences, and the current focus on what makes us so different prevent us—prevent us as a church—from focusing on the most important things, that which binds us together in Christ. The huge amounts of time spent on fine tuning our churches into parts has become a grand diversion from what really, really matters.

I’m done whining now.

De-centered

By Sean McDonough, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

There is no gravitational pull quite so strong as that exerted by the human imagination.

And I don’t mean that in a good way.

The sun may hold eight planets in its sway (or nine, depending on what they are saying about poor Pluto this week), but my mind can bring the entire cosmos into its orbit. The universe swirl around Me, and each thing in it grows or shrinks in significance depending on how it shapes my town and my job and my family. It’s an absurdity, of course, but it is an absurdity that plays itself out each day of our lives.

I was reminded of this recently when I made my first trip to Hong Kong. The city was a wonder, with buildings stacked upon buildings like the playroom of a Lego-mad millionaire. The biggest building in town, the recently completed International Commerce Center (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Commerce_Centre), stands at the edge of Victoria Harbour and virtually cries out, “Yes, we’re going to build. We’re going to build big buildings, and we’re going to build one after another after another and dare anybody to stop us.” As if the scope and scale were not enough, every night a dozen or so of these skyscrapers on Hong Kong Island light up with a soundtrack booming in the background. You can see it all from the Avenue of the Stars, Hong Kong’s answer to the sidewalk outside Grauman’s Chinese Theater. (I got my picture by Jackie Chan’s handprints, though the Bruce Lee statue is the more popular venue.)

But the buildings weren’t the only impressive thing about the city. The subway was clean and efficient, the streets safe, the opportunities for shopping and eating endless. More surprising was the natural beauty of the place. The crowded and touristy Peak Tram on Hong Kong island quickly gives way to a stunning walk around the Peak for the moderately adventurous, and I had the Sunset Peak trail on Lantau all to myself the last day of my trip. The volcanoes may have stopped spewing fire long ago, but they are still in the business of providing spectacular views.

As I reflected on all this, it struck me how even on my most “selfless” days, I still assume that the world essentially revolves if not around me, at least around eastern Massachusetts where I live…or at least the Eastern Corridor from Boston to DC. Yet a visitor from Hong Kong must find Boston a quaint little city, or maybe even a provincial village – a few good schools, yes; at least one very nice modern building (the Hancock Tower), a pleasant river, with some nice scenery around if you have a car and a few hours to spare. But the Hub of the Universe? Not hardly.

It was a blessing to be de-centered in this way. The practical implications for thinking about the mission of the church in the modern world are obvious: you don’t need Philip Jenkins to tell you the church is no longer a Western cultural phenomenon (if it ever really was one to begin with). A bit of vacation time and a plane ticket can open your eyes soon enough. And the theological implications are equally clear. We are not at the center of things, whatever our addled brains might tell us. The center does not lie in me, or in Boston, or even in splendid Hong Kong. The center is ever and only the throne of God: “Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and on the sea, and all that is in them, singing: ‘To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be praise and honor and glory and power, for ever and ever!’” (Rev. 5:13).

Misty Water-Colored and Other Types of Memories

By Roy Ciampa, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

When I was an infant I swallowed an open safety pin. It slid down my throat and made its way into my stomach. Through surgery the doctor cut into my stomach and removed it. The size of the scar on my stomach when I was an infant was quite small. But over the years that scar has grown larger, so that it is now about six inches long. Emotional scars can grow larger over time as well.

Only recently have I discovered Miroslav Volf’s book, The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2006). I highly recommend this book for anyone involved in pastoral or other kinds of counseling. In the book he explores the intersection between memory and identity – the extent to which our identities are formed by our memories and the extent to which we shape our memories so that they do not consist of raw objective experiential data:

[W]hat exactly is the relationship between memory and identity? Let’s accept for the moment that we are to a significant degree what we and others remember about us. Don’t we remember about ourselves many intensely discordant actions, feelings, and experiences – betrayals and fidelity, pain and delight, hatred and love, cowardice and heroism – as well as thousands of bland moments unworthy of note? The memory that helps make us up is a veritable patchwork quilt stitched together from the ever-growing mountain of discrete, multicolored memories. What will be stitched into the quilt and what will be discarded, or what will feature prominently on that quilt and what will form a background, will depend greatly on how we sew our memories together and how others – from those who are closest to us all the way to our culture as a whole – sew them together for us. We are not just shaped by memories; we ourselves shape the memories that shape us.

And since we do so, the consequences are significant; for because we shape our memories, our identities cannot consist simply in what we remember. The question of how we remember also comes into play. Because we can react to our memories and shape them, we are larger than our memories. If our reactions to our memories were determined simply by the memories themselves, then we would be slaves of the past. But unless we have been severely damaged and are in desperate need of healing, we have a measure of freedom with regard to our memories. To the extent that we are psychologically healthy, our identities will consist largely in our free responses to our memories, not just in the memories themselves. (page 25).

He goes on to explore ways in which our memories become distorted and we may unconsciously shape our memories in ways that tend to vindicate our roles in certain situations and remember the “villains” in our interpreted experiences as worse than they actually are or were. I have since learned that there is a whole interdisciplinary field called “Memory Studies” which brings together historians, ethnographers, sociologists, social psychologists, experts in comparative literature, and others to study the way that personal, social and institutional memories are formed, shaped and distorted and how they impact the ways people act and interact. The University of Warwick has even established a Centre for Memory Studies, which brings together people from various academic fields to study and talk about how memory shapes individuals and communities both for good and for ill. Even more recently l was discussing the subject with someone who has studied and practiced “magic” for many years, and he told me that magicians are fully aware of the inaccuracies of our memories and plant certain interpretations of what they do in their audience’s mind to leave distorted versions of their audience’s memories of their performances. This leads people to tell their friends and neighbors things about the performance that aren’t quite true (“He never touched the deck of cards!”; “We shuffled the deck ourselves!”).

The intentional and unintentional grooming of our memories shapes our understanding of and relationship with God and with others and the world around us. And it helps explain how spiritual and emotional scars can grow larger with time just as the physical scar over my stomach has done the same. It can also help us understand how some of our memories become, as Barbara Streisand has sung, “misty water-colored memories”: like water colored paintings they may have a close relationship with reality but they inevitably reflect interpretation in which some details are left out and others are highlighted. Barbara is right to ask: “Can it be that it was all so simple [or unfair, or perfect, or unjust, or innocent] then? Or has time rewritten every line?”

The Bible has a lot to say about what and how we should remember, as a simple search for various forms of the words for remembering would demonstrate. In his book Volf discusses his own memories of being interrogated and tormented for his personal views while a member of the Yugoslavian army and he later comes back to the subject to apply what he might learn from Israel’s own way of remembering:

To return to my own experience in the Yugoslavian army, I can view myself primarily as a person who was terrorized by powerful people against whom I was helpless and whose intensions I could not discern. Or I can see myself primarily as a person who, after some suffering, has been delivered by God and given a new life, somewhat like the ancient Israelites, who in their sacred writings saw themselves not primarily as those who suffered in Egypt but as those who were delivered by Yahweh. I can be angry about suffering. I can be thankful for deliverance. I can be both. I can also let that year of suffering recede somewhere into a distant background and stretch myself toward the future….” (page 26)

There is much more to be gained from Volf’s book. My prayer is that we may learn to remember rightly – to remember correctly – as we learn to watch for our natural tendency to distort our memories in ways that exonerate (or possibly pile excessive amounts of guilt on) ourselves and that portray our perceived oppressors as greater villains than they actually were, and that God may be glorified as his grace, goodness and mercy loom ever larger in our minds as we fully recognize his role as the one who redeems our lives through our gracious Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.