HOLY FIRE BLOG

You’ve heard of magic lanterns, and missional communities have been a hot topic for quite awhile. But what does one have to do with the other?

Not much, unless someone makes a deliberate connection.

Or unless Joe and Melissa Johnson of Watching Theology, found on Steve Brown, Etc., reminds us quite unintentionally that they might have quite a bit in common; and in reminding us, offer a graphic lesson in how to do church for the church that really wants to be Jesus’ church—which is, by the way, a missional community.

However, such lessons were not the intent, as far as I can tell, of Watching Theology in their review of Winter Light, a film by the noted Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007), who made a career of convinving us God was gone—away on business, as Tom Waits sings. The review was just the first thoughtful piece in an ongoing "Silence of God" series that film, theology, and philosophy buffs should check out. Even so, if you make a ripple in the pond you have to accept disturbing a leaf floating by as a consequence. And if that leaf floats a little sideways anyway…

Well, they made the ripple; this leaf has been disturbed and hopes to disturb you, the reader of this post, in turn. Indeed, I hope to disturb you with the connection between magic lanterns and missional communities.

Ingmar Bergman’s film career began with the former because it may have been missing the latter. And I am willing to bet Bergman is not the first nor the last whose career trajectory, indeed whose life path has been shaped—for good or bad—by what was not there at the beginning.

A vacuum attracts debris indiscriminately. Our mission as the church of Jesus is to be there in the place of the vacuum to deflect the debris, when possible, while always filling space-time with what really makes things go…

I am talking about God’s love. Let me explain.

Bergman had a "paraffin-lamp projector that was his favorite childhood toy;" this is what a magic lantern is, by the way, and would be so magical to Bergman as to become his respite from near everything else. Bergman clung to it desperately even as he was sucked into the vacuum that was the rest of his life: "however acutely his art reflected his sense of life," a reviewer notes, "it was much more important to him as a refuge from life. It was the place where he could at least briefly impose order on life's terrible confusions, find for himself a sustaining moment of peace and grace."

And this even though he once lived, theoretically, in the midst of peace and grace. He started life and found his film career, his life’s work, as a boy in church. But he would find peace and grace, such as they would be for him, mostly in the magic lantern.

You will find the earliest prototype of paraffin lamp projectors with someone standing by a fire casting shadows on a wall. This, we suppose, led to someone placing a burning candle in a reflecting device that concentrated the candlelight, thus sharpening the image cast. Out of this came the original lanterna magica, the "magic lantern."

Popular in the 19th Century, the Magic Lantern cast images from slides illuminated by a paraffin (kerosene) based flame. Mineral oil, according to one source, could cast a brighter, purer light, and improved the experience. The experience was improved further still when creative folk found that by manipulating combinations of slides they could produce animation. The magic grew.

In time, of course, electricity replaced the flame and the lantern morphed into the modern movie projector. The flickering flame disappeared into a fog of nostalgia, storage bins, and dusty museums. But the magic had been enhanced many times over.

The magic resided in the manipulated image that when projected made something seem like what it was not right before your eyes, and therein lays the fascination. At 24 frames per second, the frame rate for 35mm movie film, the magic, and our fascination with it, have been enhanced exponentially. 172 million people attended the movies in the U.S. in 2007, purchasing nearly 1.5 billion tickets: real movie goers go more than once.

So if the paraffin flame was yesterday’s technology; the magic is very much today’s, and no doubt tomorrow’s, too. But has the magic lived, in fact, so splendidly without the fire?

Well, no; at least not completely.

The most common light source for the modern movie theater projector is the Xenon arc lamp producing sufficient heat to burn the film should it pause for more than a fraction of a second. For this reason, the modern projector mechanism includes a ’douser,‘ an asbestos plate used to shield the film from the heat.

Thus, with the advance of the magic the fire has in fact intensified even if the flame has morphed from a flicker to an intense dance of electrons in ionized gas.

It seems that you just cannot have the magic of today and tomorrow without something of yesterday tagging along. This encapsulates a critical aspect of Bergman’s life and career.

Born in Uppsala Sweden to a Lutheran minister father who served as chaplain to the court of Sweden, and to a “a proud, strong-willed” mother, Bergman describes in his autobiography, The Magic Lantern, strict discipline and "mutually destructive" relations between parents. The shadowy innards of the parish church were his playground, its paintings, alcoves, and arches his imaginary world. He turned the wardrobe closet where he was sent for discipline into a production studio and theater with a magic lantern he secured in a trade for tin soldiers. Creating a cast from puppets to which he then gave life, he plunged into the magic of a world he thought he could control, nay, in fact, create in his own image. Enraptured with this world, he never really left it: he merely in time traded the flame of the magic lantern and a cast of puppets, first for the limelight of theater, then for the arc light of 35mm, but in both cases for real live actors.

One way of assessing Bergman, if we believe his work and what he writes about himself, is that he tried to abandon the fire of his past as symbolized in that flame casting a flickering light of magic in the recesses of a wardrobe closet; that it was hidden deep somewhere in the manse of a cold, dour, lifeless church where he witnessed liturgy without the warmth of love tells why he wanted to flee: the magic was his escape from the harsh brutality of life too cruel, yet the flame casting the magic was immersed deeply in, and held by, all he hated. Torn, he abandons the flame of the past buried in the recesses of a cold church. Desperately, he clings to the magic by ripping it violently away from the church where the magic had been hidden away in a closet like all else he felt the church repressed, human sexuality especially. Fleeing that, he stumbles into the uncertain freedoms of a church-less today thinking he would gain tomorrow, too; but did he?

Bergman offers little evidence that he found magic he sought in either today or tomorrow. In fact, in the end he drops a hint he may have been looking to the past and wishing for the flickering flame again. In a so-called ‘final film,’ Saraband, shot as a digital video rather than on film, Bergman resurrects an old plot (Scenes from a Marriage, 1973) and casts Liv Ullman, a shadow from his past, in a leading role. A reviewer comments that in this video, "Hate seems as much a mystery to Bergman as love…As so often in the past, Bergman brings us to the edge of existential despondency, then mocks it with a human—all-too-human smile." In this 2003 work, Bergman then in his 80s still has not settled the issue. Shall we or shall we not despair? Indeed, the past comes tagging along in this film just because Bergman will not let go of the magic of hope—or love, or God—?

"No form of art," Bergman wrote, "goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to your emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul… At the editing table, when I run the trip of film through, frame by frame, I still feel that dizzy sense of magic of my childhood: in the darkness of the wardrobe…" (from, The Magical Lantern, 1987, Bergman’s autobiography).

Thus, no matter the valiant attempt, Bergman remained linked to his church-soaked past. In fact, Bergman had merely swapped the pulpit of the church filled by his father, for the stage and the big screen where he preached his own, not godless, but God-gone-missing sort of religion, as if the gospel of human autonomy was being forced upon him; but he never quite settled into agnosticism in a friendly way. He was always returning to "the magic of my childhood: in the darkness of the wardrobe…" He seemed to be, says one reviewer, "one almost overcome by his daily struggles with anxiety, self-doubt, and existential angst."

More than a little ego is involved in "existential angst;" such ontological dread reflects an ego made fragile because one has not made peace with the past because one can feel the need to run from even a supposed silent God. Thus, in the present there is a deep need to persuade, oneself perhaps more than others, that creative genius tightly controlled is certainly god-like.

So intensely involved was Bergman with a need to persuade himself of this that when he thought he wasn’t persuasive enough he fled like a little boy back into the closet, any closet. Reading from his biography, an observer describes Bergman’s arrest in 1975 on tax evasion charges (which were soon dropped): "Suddenly policemen appear in his theater to arrest him on charges of tax evasion. His bowels weaken and he must make a lengthy, humiliating trip to the water closet, with a cop posted outside the door, before going to confront his accusers."

A nervous breakdown followed and Bergman abandoned his homeland for Munich, Germany. He remained in self-imposed exile for several years.

One wishes that the past that seemed always to tag along would have caught up with Bergman in ways other than nostalgia or retreats into the wardrobe in the guise of a nervous breakdown; that some vestigial remnant linked with some eternal reality apart from dour churches and difficult parents would have overwhelmed him.

In any case, it is not for us to second-guess God; and that Bergman’s life could have been different is not the point; in fact his filmmaking can serve as God-given grist for dour, church-bound people looking for a better way to share the gospel than erecting monuments to God. Certainly, Bergman tells us clearly what doubt looks and sounds like in a soul sensitive to issues that matter to all of us.

But sadly, the point at which this doubt can be heard most clearly so as to be sensitively answered by others escaped Bergman completely. The weakness of the magic lantern was that it never answered back; its magic being in what you made of it. The warmth of the lantern’s flame froze like ice when its light reflected back from the screen the very coldness in Bergman’s own soul. It could only be that for a lifetime he conversed with himself, affirming, reaffirming, and fearing his own angst; his very success being a curse, his drive for god-like control of stage and film production that which isolated him from God. The strict disciplines of cold religion were no answer, yet in fleeing the church Bergman deliberately took all that cold with him as the foil against which he could forever deny on stage and in film that God was speaking.

Not so strangely, then, he could only hint at the warmth of love in a twisted way by juxtaposing what he so longed for with the existential reality of his near overwhelming anxiety and doubt. This made Bergman’s work tough to swallow; but it shows that the missional community is made to order for Bergman’s heirs, anyway. Unlike the cold dour loveless church of his father, and unlike the fleeting magic of love’s warmth only hinted at on a screen, the missional community revels in God’s love allowing it to overflow in the power of the Holy Spirit without saying a word—yet of course, it has much to say. But unlike Bergman’s theatrical take on films that depended heavily on verbose dialogue to express his anxious doubts, the church in mission has been sent by Jesus as God sent him (John 20:21) and does what Jesus did expressing faith, hope, and love in action. As Jesus was in his flesh to the Father—if you have seen me you have seen him—the missional community is to Jesus, and can say to the world, "If you have seen us, you have seen him." Words attend action, of course, but serve to explain what is seen by what is not seen. Thus, Bergman’s silence of God can be filled with thunderous, yet succinctly apropos proclamation.

This is no illusion projected on a screen. In the missional community the magic in the lantern meets its match as the warmth of the flame flows beyond the screen into life becoming a living story that can be touched, interacted with, and entered into. One can only wonder what might have happened if…?

(See here for more on the church as a missional community)

Posted by paul at 08:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As a kid, having been weaned on a literalist Pentecostal hermeneutic applied to the KJV, I used to marvel at how people could remain unbelievers in spite of how literally, clearly, and tangibly biblical prophecy was being fulfilled before our very eyes.

Nahum, for example—Mom used to insist—prophesied the automobile; and now here were millions of them running around: "The chariots shall rage in the streets, they shall justle one against another in the broad ways: they shall seem like torches, they shall run like the lightnings" (Nahum 2:4). Mom quoted that verse more than one time turning chariots into Chevrolets, torches into headlights, and lightning into beams of light streaming from them; all to charge up a kid’s commitment to Jesus by reminding me that we were "in the end times."

Moses, too, got into the act. There was his warning against women wearing men’s clothing; and now here they are doing it, Grandma used to lament, scowling at women in slacks or jeans. "God foresaw it would come to this—a sign of the end for sure," she preached, quoting Deuteronomy 22:5 straight from the King James: "The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the LORD thy God."

She would then declare stoutly that we were so far into the end times that she would still be alive for the Rapture—she was near 70 at the time—and would meet "Daddy" (her pet name for Grandpa who had died years before) in the air along with Jesus, and so we would not have to worry about a funeral for her.

And I knew for sure she was right because even if Leave it to Beaver’s Mrs. Clever wore a dress with heels to cook and clean, I knew our neighbor lady wore Levis not just to cook and clean but out in public watering flowers and going to grocery store, for heaven’s sake!

It happened, however, that even before Grandma died and we had a funeral in spite of end time prophecies, there came the time when I noticed a chink in my literalist armor. It was not what the Bible said but what it was silent about that made the dent. Dad rolled his own smokes and was roundly condemned in the literalist circle where we fellowshipped yet I could find nary a word in Scripture prophesying this scourge of tobacco that had come upon the earth. How could God have overlooked an item of such import to the literalists and yet made these other matters so clear?

Thinking thusly, when someone pointed out later that in the Revelation John prophesied the coming of satellites (Revelation 8:13; 14:6-9), I nodded and with a throat-clearing, "Ahem," excused my self from the conversation.

In fact, by the time Sputnik came along I was marveling at literalist prophecy in a different sort of way...

I was wondering at at how a supposed strictly literal hermeneutic could be so conflated with outlandish spiritualizing of the text to get to such supposed literal fulfillments.

It had to be the case, I thought one Sunday afternoon, literally, of a conclusion being read back into the text. This epiphany came with such clarity it left me in wonderment for days after and has continued to affect me in various ways since, one very recently, for example.

When pirates came along in the Gulf of Aden and snipers popped three of them in a boat from a ship all on a rolling, tossing sea, I was tempted only briefly to say, "There! I told you so! Prophecy fulfilled! Luke said it, King James and all, 22:25: ‘There shall be…upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring…’ Bang! Bang! Bang! Three bangs merged into one great big bang as the snipers fired together. What a roar! A trinity of a roar! Do you not know three is a sacred number? With all of that sacred roaring on the waves of the sea it has to be that…?"

I immediately nodded to myself, and with a throat-clearing, "Ahem," excused myself from the conversation with myself.

We would like to think in times of felt insecurity that the prophetic calendar has marked out all this worrisome stuff so clearly that we are totally safe because these are the end times, after all, and literally, we are about to be out’a here! Does not the Bible say, "And when these things begin to come to pass, look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh" (Luke 22:28 KJV)?

Rick Warren remarked recently, "Three things go up in recessions: church attendance, bar attendance, and movie attendance. Why those three things? They represent the three things people are looking for: meaning, connection, and relief."

Rick, recessions aside, these things go up during anytime of worrisome, bothersome stress, as they did immediately following 9/11 (2001), the Cuban missile crisis way back in ’62, the overblown Y2K threat (1999), or just anytime uncertainty clouds the horizon of our immediate vision. As you said, but in other words, we want (1.) an explanation, (2.) to know others are in the boat with us, and (3.) a way out—an escape hatch.

There is still no bigger hatch, even in this third millennium of Christianity one and three quarter centuries after Darby slipped the stuff into prophecy conferences and Scofield into a KJV Bible, than literalist biblical prophecy that assures us the Rapture is right around the corner—why worry about poverty or AIDS? The next paycheck is immediate enough that I might get it cashed and spent before Jesus comes.

For all your passion to involve the church in the battle against HIV/AIDS and global poverty, Big Guy, your biggest obstacle to success is that evangelicals always have both hands on the escape hatch latch—while holding on to that, it is just hard to get one’s head around anything else, let alone actually do much else! Why get involved when we’re going away? Literalist prophecy with its ironclad escape clause is the biggest hindrance to involvement in kingdom concerns right now, re, this side of glory. Even for those—which is probably most—who do not really believe God is getting up a load to go today, fantasing with LaHaye and Lindsey that he is, is enough to excuse inactivity and detour effective social involvement.

Indeed, until people like Warren resolve this primary issue with evangelicals they are spitting in the wind. The Somali pirates are perhaps just one graphic illustration of this.

Rather than wait for initiatives such as Bono’s Live AID, or Warren’s activism to kick in with a maybe-someday-solution for their poverty, the pirates cut through the red tape to resolve the problem in their own way. They just slice the pie as they find it, take their own far-bigger-than-Bono-or-Warren-intend share, and relieve others of the problem.

Their solution is very entrepreneurial, practical, and prophetic.

Yes, I said prophetic. Escape hatch and all.

It goes like this: "And the merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn over her; for no man buyeth their merchandise any more…And every shipmaster, and all the company in ships, and sailors, and as many as trade by sea, stood afar off,…And they cast dust on their heads, and cried, weeping and wailing, saying, Alas, alas that great city, wherein were made rich all that had ships in the sea…" (Revelation 18:11-18).

No matter the city meant here, these "made rich" ships in the sea are obviously pirate ships, over against ships belonging to the merchants "and as many as trade by sea," all of whom cry a whole lot over spilt milk, spilled into the sea at the behest of the pirates, of course. The pirates lap it up and whisk it off to the nearest Somali port. How could any prophecy be clearer?

Fine exegesis, I know; kudos not required; make a contribution to Warren’s HIV/Aids/poverty campaign. However, you will note I was very careful to conflate the literal hermeneutic with the spiritualized text, the fulfillment at hand with the prophecy that fits well enough to get just the interpretation needed.

The escape hatch?

O yes: not to worry; you find that in the very next scene in the Revelation (19:6-9). The text urges, "Let us be glad and rejoice, and give honour to him: for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and his wife hath made herself ready" by holding onto the escape hatch just long enough. Whoosh! We’re out’a here! This certainly is a prophecy of the Rapture, and pirates are surely a sign pointing to it.

As for the pirates, sign, and all, leave them behind to contract AIDS and other stuff in the Tribulation. That’ll teach ’em to mess with the good ol' U.S. of A!

Up, up, and away! We’re gone!

Posted by paul at 11:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"Prophets live loud but not long," someone observed, perhaps remembering what Jesus said about people who "build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous."

"You testify against yourselves," Jesus declared acerbically, "that you are the descendents of those who murdered the prophets" (Mathew 23:29-31).

In a day of popularized religion it is hard to get one’s mind around a prophet, let alone a prophet who was "stoned…sawed in two…[or] put to death by the sword" (Hebrews 11:17). It requires even greater mental morphing to grasp that popularized religion did them in.

We mean by "popularized religion," the true faith of God made market-ready for the masses, replacing a call to conversion with an invitation to be comfortable, conviction with compatibility. We mean the religion, for example, of the biblical King Jeroboam (see 1 Kings 12 and13), sold to the people as the easy way to get to God.

"It is too much for you to go up to Jerusalem," Jeroboam suggested skillfully, stroking a natural bent for ease. "So here are your gods," he offered, pioneering seeker-friendly religion by replacing Israel’s Jehovah with gods so much closer, convenient, affirming, and inclusive.

He even authenticated these new gods: "These are the gods who brought you up out of Egypt," he assured everyone, thereby laying the dubious cornerstone for all seeker-friendly religion to come (see 1 Kings 12:28).

The point is, people won’t settle for being snookered, no matter the ease and convenience: genuine makes the sale, as every guy selling Rolex watches and Cartier jewelry out of the back seat of his car knows. Perception is performance—people will buy if you can just convince them it is real; that it actually came from China matters not a wit if they can just feel it is real and that they got it for a song.

Who has time to run down pedigrees anyway? Authenticating the thing should be as easy as getting it, wearing it, and sharing it. And what better way is there to authenticate anything than having a popular, super-star hero say, "Yep! This is the real deal!" "So Jeroboam said so, and a great many people believed him. After all; he was the guy who had listened to the people when Judah’s King Rehoboam would not; he was the guy who took the complaints, wants and wishes of the people to heart when Rehoboam had not; so he was the guy near and dear to everyone’s heart, whom everyone loved: "Hail, fellow, well met!" the people shouted in acclaim, as it were; the idiom translates into "We trust you because you are that swell fellow with the great big smile who never met anyone who wasn’t a friend!"

If we can believe anyone, we can…

Believe Jeroboam? Why not? Probably he didn’t know the meaning of a lie; which means he had no solid concept of truth; he could be so sincere as to pass a lie detector test as he charmed the tech into spasms of euphoria. He was the politician’s politician in clerical garb; the preacher’s preacher in good pragmatic form: if it worked, it was true.

Understand that Jeroboam had not set out to challenge one concept of truth with another; he was not against supposed "true" religion at all; neither was he for false religion; it was just that to him truth was irrelevant. Keeping the people happy and coming back for more was for him the critical issue.

Now, he being the king this would have been the end of the story, perhaps, had it not been that in the ultimate scheme of things truth matters dearly. It matters to God. And to make this clear, God roused into action a pesky prophet.

The prophet cut to the chase with Jeroboam by striking at the core of all popularized religion—he challenged its authenticity; he exposed the supposed cornerstone of "This is as real as it gets folk," as, in fact, the Achilles heel of the seeker-friendly crowd.

"People, you’ve been snookered," the prophet declared, shattering the cornerstone with a prophecy of the ultimate destruction of their false religion followed by a literal, vivid, interruption of their convenience by turning their central worship site into a pile of rubble (1 Kings 13:3-5). The prophet included a graphic visual confirming what he had said. There was no fire from the sky wiping out the crowd; but a conscience-jolting message confirmed by a mind-blowing interjection clear enough that anyone with half a brain could figure out that their religious Rolex was not even a good Timex.

In just such a way pesky prophets are bound to get in the way of popularized religion sooner or later. It is not that they have anything against popular religion. But they get annoyed with religion made popular by being politically correct; that is, by avoiding anything making religion other than comfortable, convenient, affirming, and inclusive. In a prophet’s mind, being any of this as a matter of course is wonderful; being so to be politically correct so as to be seeker-friendly so as to be popular is disaster because it is to be false.

Prophets stand for truth which is anything but politically correct. Too often, truth is not all that popular. Think of it: if the guy purporting to know your Cartier necklace is a knockoff would have just kept quiet then even you wouldn’t know. Truth can be anything but likeable, or convenient; it can be downright annoying; it can make you mad. Like the fellow said, prophets may live loud but not long.

For this reason, when the prophet himself is popular, watch out! American conservative Christianity went through a phase where it was difficult to separate the supposed prophets from the politicians. We went to war against a so-called secularized culture by getting so close to a political party as to anoint it with oil from heaven. Preachers made names for themselves by assuming prophetic roles decrying cultural crimes committed by the uncivilized, non-sanitized liberal hordes. Masses of conservative Christians naively bought into the war, abandoning the church’s truly critical prophetic role, compromising the gospel as just another politician’s speech with religious overtones. Millions marched lockstep in stride with the all too-popular "propheticians." But stripped bare in the public square, its political allies turned out of office, and the cultural war crumbling as now a fourth state legitimizes gay marriage, and the District of Columbia (D.C.) moves to recognize gay marriage performed in any state, the movement turns out to be just another form of seeker-friendly religion without godly authenticity—wildly popular for awhile with a broad-base of conservative believers, it turns out to be a toothless tiger with little power to change the culture. If the "propheticians" garnered followers with a strange negative bad news affirming phobias with the false promise of a culture cleansed of all those we might hate, they fit right in with the preachers of a strange positive psycho-babble affirming phobias with the false promise of your best life now.

In fact, far from popular, the biblical model of a true prophet reveals an often isolated lonely profession filled with uncertainty; it comes many times with insecurity its only absolute, its only retirement plan being, literally, out of this world. So who wants to be one? No one; prophets are called not made. Responding to a calling is vastly different from making a career choice. As a result; prophets are, as a friend once said, as scarce as hen’s teeth or hair on a bowling ball; try to find one; you cannot.

Yet they will find you.

They appear suddenly in days of popularized, seeker-friendly religion passing itself off as the real deal; they appear because the authenticity of true religion as revealed by God is at stake which means the honor of God is at stake and upholding God’s honor is their highest calling. They appear in times of political turmoil and national upheaval because God intends to clearly guide his people, who in such times discover popularized, seeker-friendly religion to be what it is: a "Hail, fellow, well met" social gathering on the stern of the Titanic as the bow slips beneath the waves.

So where are the prophets now? We are in such times.

In the theocracy of Jeroboam’s day the prophet’s role was clear because it was as much cultural as religious because culture and religion were entwined; everyone knew who the prophet was even if he seldom spoke. In the democracy of our day culture is supposedly secular yet so smeared with religion that no role is clear. Anyone can be a prophet by commanding a microphone, camera, or computer and making a claim.

Yet, a true prophet’s voice rings clear by connecting with the past so as to encompass the present and thereby assess the future. In the light of God’s word, the prophet makes sense of the present by reminding us of the past so as to anticipate the future confidently, faithfully, and thus fruitfully. Fantastic visions are not the stuff of prophets; clear proclamations making known the direction of the flow of God’s work in history are. Prophets can tell you where we are going because they know where we are because they know where we have been.

Popularized religion, on the other hand, like politics, does not have a clue. Both must deal with the immediacy of popularity; with the precious fleeting seconds of seeker-friendliness; because their life span is no more than the fickle favor of fads, the vagaries of the current election cycle; they feed upon poll data, to know whether the crowd will applaud this or hiss at that; they must continually adjust their message because they are slaves to their own popularity as measured by the applause of the crowd. So rather than offer certain direction to the crowd, popularized religion like politics must take its own uncertain direction from crowd. It reminds one ever so much of the tail wagging the dog.

In fact, Jesus coined an idiom for it: the blind leading the blind. It does not take a prophet to predict the outcome.

So it turns out that like the rest of us, popularized religion and politics desperately need a prophet. Will anyone step up to the plate?

Be reminded that in doing so you risk the venom of rattlesnakes combined with the spell of cobras rolled into the coils of pythons; if it is a welcome you seek bow out. If the glory of God is your passion, however, the risk is well worth it.

Posted by paul at 10:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Prologue: At the G-20 Summit just concluded, the AP reports "Obama has acknowledged that U.S. regulatory failures contributed to the crisis in the financial system, but urged a focus on solutions, saying ‘we can only meet this challenge together.’" What might this mean? In part that "‘We will begin to crack down on cowboys in global markets,’ said Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd."

The George w. Bush team (2001-2009) rightfully landed a second term because we trusted Mr. Bush on the international front with the war on terrorism even if his domestic policies with regard to the finance sector came up way short. Ironically, it turns out that, as his tenure showed, domestic policies with regard to regulating the cowboys on Wall Street are so entwined with international policy that the old capitalist mantra of mere self-interest as pushed to the limit by Bush suddenly appears poor beyond recovery

"Whoopee Ti Yi Yo," the cowboy’s days are numbered—again.

Let me explain

Just days ago the Los Angeles Times profiled "a fourth-generation cowboy working in a region where being a cowboy no longer makes sense," the paper says. The cowboys in San Diego County, California, are riding off into the sunset.

In fact, there remains a mere handful of working cowboys in the entire U.S. Workers in "animal production support roles" number about 9000 all told." These include farm hands, stockyard workers, more than 3200 rodeo workers, and all working cowboys. Do the math—real working cowboys are a rare, disappearing breed.

So too, Kevin Rudd promises, the cowboys on Wall Street just might be parting with lassos, bullwhips, and spurs to take up with green eyeshades, quill pens, and double-entry accounting ledgers. They will be trading rodeo-like rollicking for detailed accountability. It may be that the cowboy economy, first labeled such by economist Kenneth Boulding back in the 1960s (See "Why Santa Took Off the Cowboy Boots," this blog), like cowboys in San Diego, just no longer makes sense.

Not all agree. For example, "Adam Smith must be rolling over in his grave," lamented Lawrence Eagleburger, a noted global free market advocate from the days of the elder George H.W. Bush. Smith is stirring, Eagleburger thinks because we are "walking very far away from capitalism."

Or, at least the sort of capitalism envisioned by Eagleburger.

Yet, Eagleburger’s one time boss, then President George H. W. Bush declared in a speech to Congress on September 11, 1990, exactly 11 years before the infamous 9/11 destruction of New York’s Trade Towers, "The crisis in the Persian Gulf, as grave as it is, also offers a rare opportunity to move toward an historic period of cooperation…. Out of these troubled times a New World Order can emerge…."

For a short time back then Eagleburger was Secretary of State. But apparently he did not apprentice well under Bush I; his unbridled, unregulated free market vision just doesn’t mesh with "historic…cooperation" of the type meant by Bush.

Eagleburger contends that the "regulators…don’t want freer markets," meaning by regulators specifically France and Germany; further, that in attempting to form some sort of agreement with these "regulators," President Obama "has done us a great deal of damage." By this Eagleburger explains that the President has pushed the U.S. "left of center, in the ditch over there" because "he’s a regulator himself."

Hmm.

It may be that in Eagleburger’s mind, Obama just does not have the gall it takes to maintain U.S. presence in a world of Eagleburger-anointed, Adam Smith-oriented, free-market capitalism; Eagleburger may think that, in fact, Obama is a European-type socialist in disguise intent on leading America into socialism. Eagleburger did refer to Obama as a "charlatan." When asked to define this, Eagleburger could only mention Obama’s fund raising methods, very weak evidence to support such a charge. In fact, Obama’s fund raising seemed very free-market oriented, highly capitalistic.

So there has to be more going on here.

The real rub more likely comes from Eagleburger thinking Obama is a real throwback to the elder Bush and a New World Order. The elder Bush’s international vision certainly included France and Germany, and could not be imagined apart from some sort of regulation. What sort of "left of center" push Republican Bush had in mind is not clear; if not socialist-oriented, it would have placed American sovereignty at risk.

In stark contrast to this, Eagleburger was one of the first to verbalize the doctrine of the sovereign unilateral preemptive strike employed by the second Bush in the invasion of Iraq. In a CNN interview on 9/11/2001, Eagleburger stated plainly that striking back at terrorists "…does not necessarily mean that you have to strike back only at those that you know were the perpetrators of this thing. We know terrorists around the world and we know a lot of governments that have financed and supported terrorism."

Iraq, it was thought after 9/11, was one of these.

And with the invasion of Iraq it was, "Bye, bye, New World Order." The cowboys ride again. Charge! Gall and all to the gates of Baghdad and beyond!

Of course, we soon found out this could be sustained only for awhile. Gall can only take you so far and then you have to govern. Bush the Elder knew this and had no desire to make Baghdad a suburb of DC. He refused to take the Gulf War—Iraq War I—to Baghdad’s gates.

As it turns out, then, Eagleburger is much more in tune with younger Texan cowboy Bush that the elder Kennebunkport, Maine, aristocratic Bush. Now if Mr. Obama’s international vision seems even somewhat akin to Bush I, well Eagleburger’s ire aimed Obama’s way makes sense. He is a charlatan Eagleburger thinks because he does not take America’s self-interests serious enough. Like Bush I, Obama would never have mistaken Baghdad for Baltimore or camels for cows and preemptively ordered a roundup.

The cowboy or the charlatan—this is the choice we face in Eagleburger’s world. In the 2008 campaign Eagleburger’s instincts yearned for one last ride, roundup, and jaw-boning session back at the bunkhouse with the boys. Whoopee Ti Yi Yo! Get along little doggie! Eagleburger thought he would get that one last ride on the McCain wagon train, endorsing McCain early on. Now with Obama’s election, his presence on the world stage, and talk of international regulation, it has to turn out that Obama really is a charlatan; or Eagleburger and folk like him are just plain wrong.

So how will it turn out? Are we headed for socialism and one world government under Obama? Are the days of greed and gall gone forever? Do the cowboys stand a chance?

Not to worry; pray yes, but worry no; rhetoric on the world stage is one thing; regulations to reign in the cowboys in the global markets another; a new world order something else still; and the actual outcomes of any or all of this probably not even close to anyone’s most studious or panicked prediction.

Man proposes, it has been observed, but God disposes.

The One we all ought to pay mind to is the One who has the final say.

He reminds us that greed is not good; money is never enough; and a focus on profits is not the bottom line. Government or governments that do not reign in greed will fail. To Babylon, the prototype of greed run amok, the prophet shouts, "You praised the gods of silver and gold; of bronze, iron, wood, and stone, which cannot see or hear or understand. But you did not honor the God who holds in his hand your life and all your ways…you have been weighed on the scales and found wanting" (see, Daniel 5:23-27).

It follows that gall—brazen boldness coupled with impudent assurance and insolence, says Webster—falls under the same condemnation; it is nothing more than the narcissistic moral blindness that assumes entitlement and thereby drives unrestrained greed which is a good description of the cowboys on Wall Street.

So while we are not equating them with working cowboys, the bunch that ran amok at AIG certainly fall into a category of Wild Bunch cowboys like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

With this clarification we draw a conclusion: to the extent he gathers a posse to pursue the New Wild Bunch and requires regulations to do so, even global regulations if agreed to legitimately—meaning, for U.S. citizens, within the framework of our Constitution,—we say, “Go for it!”

On the one hand, none of this repudiates the younger President George W. Bush’s foreign policy. We believe history will tell a different story of the Iraq war than the liberals tell now, as compared to the Middle East, especially Israel; and the war on terrorism has kept us safe on the domestic front in the U.S. for nearly eight years. On the other hand, greed and gall has run amok. Increasingly unregulated, unbridled, old fashioned King George-type elitism marauding as capitalism has enabled a chosen few at the top to create their own type of one world government with themselves as kings and the people as peasants; this top-weighted, one-sided system has enriched a handful of international hedge fund managers while abusing millions of innocent people on the domestic front. To call such crime a "free market" does not excuse the fraud and make it right.

But the self-serving ideology of Eagleburger aside (he sets on the board of Halliburton and has every reason to root for global capitalism dominated by a handful of corporate gurus such as himself), and the rhetoric of the Elder Bush seen for what it was (an appeal to Europe and Russia in terms only they would applaud; American politics resisting even a polite nod of agreement), our course for the future seems clear enough. The enormous proven risk of Eagleburger’s cowboy capitalism blazoned indelibly in the conscience of the American public via AIG expunges the fear of possible, not even close to probable smearing at the fringes of American sovereignty by a nebulous new world order of Barack Obama. This frees up Obama to do what is right, not merely as measured by capitalism’s mantra of corporate America’s self-interest, but in the best interests of people wherever they are.

Can he follow though? Depends in part, at least, on how convincing he can be with the American public which will require clear enunciation of transparent regulations that actually accomplish in the next couple of years what he tells us they will. It remains that his team has its own day of accounting coming round, too, in 2010 and 2012.

In fact, U.S. self-interest has never stopped at the border; it has been shaped always in one way or another by international interests. But those international interests have been shaped always by conservative or liberal ideology, depending on who was in charge domestically (which can be seen most clearly perhaps in comparing Jimmie Carter’s presidency with Ronald Reagan’s). The question now is whether Barack Obama’s presidency will go down in history as having transcended ideology well enough to take to heart the interests of all people for whom Christ died, not just the capitalist or socialist elites—even if Mr. Obama does not have an evangelical bone in his body (you tell me). Greed, gall, and government just cannot escape the judgment of God.

Mr. Obama, we are praying for you.

Posted by paul at 11:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Prologue: Obama has sought to distance himself from the Bush-era regulatory policy. He will take to the G20 an array of proposals to bring new oversight to hedge funds and other players and to give the U.S. government greater powers to deal with troubled financial firms deemed "too big to fail."

"Greed is good...?" You’ve heard that, right? Gordon Gekko‘s (Michael Douglas) stated that famously in the 1987 movie Wall Street.

But we’ve also heard it more recently, from a much more credible source. "…we have too much fear and too little greed," former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers explained, assessing the current state of the U.S. economy. Greed seems to be the driving force behind a capitalist economy—we need it to keep it going, says Summers. Apparently, many people agree—that is, until things fall apart and then suddenly it’s politically correct to say, "Greed got us into this!"

"The only real difference between Bernie Madoff and the management of AIG is that when Bernie Madoff got caught, he pleaded guilty. When AIG got caught, it asked the government for $170 billion," the Boston Herald, poignantly stated beneath the headline, "Bailout ensures AIG’s greed, gall".

Who would have thought?

So in fact it took more than greed to get us where we are. Greed just is not enough—if it takes gall, too.

I thought about replacing gall with another word, but it seemed chauvinistic, given that it starts with "b" and has nothing to do with ladies’ lingerie. And if you cannot figure that out, you just don’t need to know.

But speaking of gall, it took a lot of it to get us into the economic mess we are in right now, a la AIG, GM, Chrysler, etc. Now, by gall I do mean big brass b— ah, lots of gall that assumes self-entitlement. No one without a huge reservoir of gall equating with a gigantic ego would ever taken the stupid risks (AIG), or have ignored obvious prudent steps (GM, Chrysler), and thereby put us in the economic mess we—all of us— now own as a nation.

In short it took great big brass ones to put the entire economy of a nation in the hole by putting other people’s money at risk, all to enhance one’s already ostentatious profits; or as in the case of GM, to assume that any corporation is such an icon of the economy, such a cherished institution that one can dawdle about keeping up with the competition because, well, because we’re GM.

"We want to continue the vital role we've played for Americans for the past 100 years," GM CEO Rick Waggoner stated to Congress months back as he held his hand out for a bailout after he had tooled into DC in a $55 million dollar corporate jet. If AIG is too big to fail, we are too vital. We are GM, doggone it!

Of course, the other side of this economic mess is that some people think God set this whole thing in motion as the original capitalist....

Ask Rush Limbaugh. If he never actually accuses God of being the Big Guy Capitalist directly, certainly Limbaugh declares clearly that his brilliance on the subject of capitalism is "talent on loan from God"—which gets God smack into the middle of the capitalist mix as the cause of it all as filtered through Limbaugh.

Laugh if you will; in fact, Limbaugh seems really to believe it; as do others, Christian conservatives especially.

This is not to disparage Rush Limbaugh; I own that I listen in from time to time and find he makes some sense. But then—well, he misses a great big point. Man, not God, invented capitalism; Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations is not a revised edition of the King James Bible nor was Smith a prophet of God; he was a Deist at best, an atheist perhaps, and his positing "self-interest" as the basis for a moral philosophy of economics, society, and government is clearly anti-Christian (Smith argued that state and personal efforts to promote social good are ineffectual compared to unbridled market forces.).

Limbaugh appears to some to be in the process of revising Smith’s reputation for all conservatives who like their economics dished up with God. Limbaugh speaks with the finality of God; many people believe exactly what he says as well as what they read between the lines and thinks he says.

For example, you come away thinking that

• God is a Republican, way over on the religious right;
• God is for sure a capitalist, hates big government, despises all regulation of the markets, and expects all of us to suck it up and just take it in stride when really big capitalists with lots of greed and gall turn Wall Street into their own private casino.

Of course, if the above is so, it follows that true believers should accept the ruin of retirement portfolios like a man with big brass ones. On the pure capitalist position, the market will correct itself even if you have to move in with relatives and die before it does.

What a God, this Capitalist Theocrat! Adam Smith apparently knew him well…

But where is God in all of this, really?

Well, "In the last days the mountain of the LORD's temple will be established as chief among the mountains; it will be raised above the hills, and peoples will stream to it. Many nations will come and say, ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob. He will teach us his ways, so that we may walk in his paths.’"

As a result, "Every man will sit under his own vine and under his own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid…Rise and thresh, O Daughter of Zion…you will break to pieces many nations. You will devote their ill-gotten gains to the LORD, their wealth to the Lord of all the earth." (Micah 4:1,4,13).

I leave the timing of the fulfillment of the foregoing Bible prophecy to you; what matters here is what it reveals about how God views micro and macro economics. When "many nations…walk in his paths," the result is "every man…under his own vine…and fig tree" with the Daughter of Zion—whoever she may be; it matters not here—taking "ill-gotten gains" of the nations, "their wealth" to devote all to the Lord.

So much for Smith’s wealth of nations accumulated by the invisible hand of self-interest. It ends up in God’s pocket, confiscated like ill-gotten proceeds from a busted drug cartel!

With only minimal theological application you see God’s pleasure with micro-self sufficiency: every man under his own vine and fig tree, living in peace and relative prosperity, the vine and fig being primary wealth producers for ancient Israel. In contrast, you see "the nations" symbolized in ancient Babylon (Micah 4:10) with "ill-gotten gains…their wealth" accumulated historically through greed, lots of gall—gigantic egos—and as corollaries, deceit, oppression, and, yes, market manipulation on a macro scale. The strategy of ancient conquest was simply to corner the market on everything, every true capitalist’s dream, and the result was certainly wealth, but judged by God as ill-gotten gain.

The problem with the unbridled forces of macro-capitalism, then, is greed and gall and its attendant inability to account for micro-enterprise solutions except as a very minor trickle-down effect left over from stuffing the pockets of the super-wealthy with more cash. This is not anything close to the economics prophesied by Micah and approved by God.

At the same time we note carefully that communism, while not in view by Micah, is inherent in the concept of ill-gotten gains. It, too, when examined in the light of history is based on greed and gall. The difference is that capitalism competes to see who has the biggest set of greed and gall. Communism kills the competition, it being assumed the last man standing has the biggest. In either scenario greed and gall are the driving force. In either scenario the end is oppression of the weaker by the more powerful, and the death of Micah’s micro-enterprise solutions.

The point we make here is that the God of the Daughter of Zion delights in the wealth of micro enterprise and intends that the ill-gotten gains and the wealth of nations be devoted to him.

Micah said that not me.

Whatever spin you put upon this requires that you, like me, reassess capitalism not in terms of an alternative system as if there were one; there isn’t. The issue is not capitalism versus socialism or communism; these are straw men made into boogey men by ideologues to preserve their capitalist corner on things. Human nature, driving all human systems, is the same in capitalism or communism: whether capitalist or communist we remain greed and gall to the core(apart from true conversion); it’s just that some have more than others and take advantage of those with less in both systems.

Rather than pursuing an alternative system, then, we need to assess greed and gall on God’s terms and put a restraint on both.

How? In the community of the converted by grace, faith, and God’s word through an ongoing encounter with God and one another, and we still get it wrong; beyond this, say, like on Wall Street, like it or not government plays a critical role designed by God.

"Governing authorities," Paul writes, "have been established by God [as] God’s servant to do you good. But…an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer." (see Romans 13:1-7). God intends government to place a restraint on greed and gall.

Now this is far different than saying God intends government to redistribute wealth. He does not, and for good reason but that is another story. The point here is Wall Street excesses cry out for some kind of restraint; too big to fail is just another way of saying too much greed and gall, which at its core is the automakers’ failure, too, in its own way.

Perhaps the biggest run up of greed and gall in world economic history began with the introduction of Reagan’s supply-side economics in the 1980s, exacerbated by Clinton’s aggressive deregulation of the financial sector in the 1990s.

Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, the go-to guy who built AIG into a global powerhouse, established AIG FP, the division that essentially brought AIG to its knees, way back in 1987. On his decades-long watch AIG was "…driven by a thirst for greater profits." As a result, AIG FP "racked up guarantees on CDS worth a total of about $450 billion."

The source above notes, "AIG jumped into the high-beta world of credit default swaps when there was a low default environment…But when the market goes bad it all goes bad, and with the kind of exposure that AIG wrote, it is just rancid."

But AIG—with many others— had caught the fever, being spread hither and yon by greed and gall. Suddenly the American ideal of micro-enterprise—family farms, home ownership, small businesses, intellectual property, and so on—as the generators of wealth for the nation morphed into blips on a computer screen reflecting a world where one could be rich overnight on a bet—Wall Street ceased to be a somewhat honest reflection of the valuation of wealth inherent in America’s business, micro-enterprises and big business, too, and became instead a roll of the dice on imaginary financial instruments with little relation to the real world. It is telling that the Barry Madoff scam, like AIG’s venture into credit default swaps, began in the 1980s, took off in the 1990s, and crashed only when the whole imaginary world of money—a literal house of cards—of which it was a part came tumbling down.

In all of this—and this is the point—size of government grew, under both Republican and Democratic administrations; but quality of government diminished horribly. Government failed miserably to do its job.

So what does God think of this?

If we believe what he says, he calls governments to account.

How ironic that the Iraq war did not bring the Republican house tumbling down in 2008, but the lack of stewardship of the micro-enterprise economy did. Failure to rein in the excesses of Wall Street allowed short sellers to line their pockets with cash by betting against the small business sector, driving down the value of small businesses while enriching themselves. (The concept of shorting involves not just betting against a stock, but betting that short sellers can get the investors who initially bet that the stock would increase to change their position. This negative volume creates an imbalance in the market and forces the price of the stock down.) All the while AIG was taking bets from short sellers who were betting against the housing market that had been pumped up by speculators who were betting against the people living in the houses. They turned a man’s home from a castle into a commodity to be swapped like pork bellies or pecans, creating the illusion that houses magically increased in value forever. Between AIG betting for the illusion and short sellers betting against it, anyone in charge with half a brain should have seen the thing for what it was, a shell game for sure, not even a good dog and pony show, which at least delivers entertainment. Blind to the state of the vine and the fig tree the Bush administration watched over the run up of ill-gotten gains as never before seen in human history. The nation was defrauded not only by AIG, but by a government blinded by the ideology of blind faith in the markets as if greed and gall were going to govern greed and gall; they do not; they only show in the end who has the most greed and gall: in this case, the short sellers in gigantic hedge funds who needed the whole thing to come tumbling down in order to collect on their bets. So you can bet the Republicans were turned out of office in 2008 because they deserved to be. They simply were called to account and came up short. The irony is that the guys who invented the deregulation game back in the 1980s were again in charge when the game went south. Coincidence? You tell me.

Next post: where do we go from here?

Posted by paul at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)