Robert Hunt: Chickens talking to ducks (Part II)

Today's post is by guest blogger Dr. Robert A. Hunt, Director of Global Theological Education, Professor of Christian Mission and Interreligious Relations, and Director of the Center for Evangelism and Missional Church Studies at Perkins School of Theology at SMU.  This post is the second of four by Dr. Hunt over the month of September.  You can read the first part of his post "Chickens talking to ducks" here.

In contrast to the West, much of the rest of the world possesses what Taylor calls "the porous self." This self, when it hears a voice, or feels a swelling of joy or sorrow, or loses control (physically and emotionally) understands itself reflexively as being interpenetrated with hidden spiritual realities. It knows itself possessed by a spirit; whether the Spirit of God or otherwise. The linguistic framework within which the person expresses that experience will be determined by culturally based-assumptions. Moreover, exactly which spirit is at play may be a matter for reflection. But whatever reflection there is will be based on the unquestioned assumption of the unity of self and body interpenetrated with the invisible forces of the spirit world.

This porous self understands that it is caught up in purposes and conflicts beyond the human or natural realm. The self is, in a sense, a victim of these invisible conflicts and wishes to be liberated from them - a reason that many turn to Christ. But it does not locate the origin or end of the experience entirely in immanence, but in a relationship with God and God's transcendent purposes. 

In this world of porous selves humans certainly wish to flourish in their persons, family, and society. But this is secondary to and dependent upon a close relationship with God whose Spirit works against and displaces all the other spirits that interpenetrate the self. Thus people value highly the time of being swept up by God's spirit in worship for itself, and not merely as an instrument for motivating and guiding mission.

Perhaps a personal story will make the distinction and problem clearer. When I was teaching in the theological school in Malaysia, our students began to have repeated and unsettling experiences. They were troubled by terrible dreams. We had instances of poisonous snakes entering the dormitories. Things went missing. The students interpreted these experiences as direct manifestations of evil spirits, and attributed them to a curse put on the school by a Hindu woman. She had previously overseen a variety of shrines under a banyan tree on the seminary grounds. When she and the shrines were evicted (exorcised really) she cursed the school. Now it was assumed that the variety of malevolent spirits she invoked were manifesting themselves. 

Thus we did what needed to be done. With the support of local clergy and bishops we had a day long ritual to purify the school of demonic spirits. Students uncomfortable with the ritual itself (some came from anti-liturgical backgrounds) prayed all day in the chapel. Everyone else circumambulated the school grounds, pausing to pray and sprinkle holy water on the building. Special attention was given to the banyan tree. 

Now as we did this, a group of officials from the General Board of Global Ministries arrived unexpectedly for a visit. And at the end of the day they made it clear to me that they were shocked and appalled that a school which they funded and a missionary (myself) that they sent would participate in such unadulterated superstitious nonsense. "Christ sets us free from this kind of thing." 

In this they missed the point. The very concept of "superstition" depends on understanding one's self as a "buffered self" that rises above the immediacy of human experience to reflect on its meaning - AND assumes that meaning is found entirely within the immanent world of material and psychological interrelationships. 

The mission board officials could only interpret what they saw in their own terms. In those modern Western terms it was a fallback into pre-modern foolishness and a waste of time better spent studying theology. Yet for the students and faculty, Christ was concretely setting us free - by evicting the evil spirits that inhabited our school. A day spent removing the impediments to a fuller relationship to God was certainly a day well spent.

From the perspective of our guests what occurred (and here Taylor's work is illuminating) could only represent a more primitive and thus lesser human self-understanding. The moral superiority of modernity was completely assumed. What the Malaysians saw on the other hand was a reality to which the mission board officials seemed strangely blind and therefore incapable of confronting. 

One might hope that some 40 years later Americans engaged in cross-cultural inter-relationships are more cognizant of the way their minds have been colonized by modernity, and can at least recognize that others have a fundamentally different understanding of the self that cannot be dismissed as "primitive" or "undeveloped" or "naive." But even that recognition is a far cry from actually seeking to find a shared theological language for expressing what it means to be a self, or community, in relation to God. 

And this brings us back to the global church. Finding a shared theology of "holy conferencing" across the fundamentally different concepts of self found in the West and the rest of the world is an important part of developing a uniting ecclesiology. Yet thus far United Methodists, in our rush to incorporate the growing churches of the global south, appear focused entirely on political and economic issues. We do not appear to have considered the more fundamental problem of how to do theological reflection across different ways of seeing the self in the world in all its dimensions. 

The danger is thus that our unity will all be on the surface, with essentially Western institutions and western modes of theological reflection laid over non-Western cultures with little consideration as to what they mean from within. We will be global like Apple and Toyota, united in the immanent matters of economic and political relationships and not even cognizant that our languages of self and spirit are different, and thus our supposed unity is an illusion. We will sing "we are one in the Spirit" without recognizing that the meanings we attach to "we" and "one" and "Spirit" are quite different. 

The Malays have an expression for the cacophony of the barnyard, "ayam cakap itik," "chickens talking to ducks." Alas, that may be the true character of our emerging United Methodist global church.

Robert Hunt: Chickens Talking to Ducks (Part I)

Today's post is by guest blogger Dr. Robert A. Hunt, Director of Global Theological Education, Professor of Christian Mission and Interreligious Relations, and Director of the Center for Evangelism and Missional Church Studies at Perkins School of Theology at SMU.  This post will be the first of four by Dr. Hunt over the month of September. 

The United Methodist Church increasingly wishes to imagine itself as a global church. I'm not sure we understand the depth of that challenge theologically.

Christian unity has always been understood as essentially unity in God's Spirit, the Spirit of Christ. And therein is the problem. Globally, we have fundamentally different ways of understanding how that Spirit is experienced in human lives and societies. And it is the experience of the Spirit in the life of the church that makes visible unity possible. 

For the Catholic and Orthodox churches there is an understanding of a clear, uniting charism or outpouring of the Spirit that apportions itself among the bishops and thus unites them and their clergy and churches in Christ. Related to this is a clear theology of the Spirit's presence in the sacraments, making them universal.

Could we use this ecclesial model or sacramental model to ground our structural unity? It seems doubtful. Our bishops are, by design, general superintendents set apart from the clergy only by a temporary job assignment and united only by possession of a common task carried out in different geographical regions. They possess no special charism. They are not "bishops" in the Catholic and Orthodox sense. Nor do we have an actual theological unity around the meaning of the Spirit's presence in the Sacraments. Although we at least arguably have a starting point in the Anglican theology of Wesley's day, my experience with Methodists outside the United States is of a variety of sacramental theologies. 

We might also begin a process of global theological reflection on how our unity in the Spirit is experienced through the concept of "Holy Conferencing," which for now is more a slogan than an ecclesiology. But even then we still face a problem, one articulated most clearly by Charles Taylor in his book "A Secular Age." 

On Taylor's analysis, there exist in our world at least two different understandings of what it means to be a human being in relationship to transcendent reality. It is this difference, sometimes attributed to specific cultures but actually running much deeper, that we have yet to confront in our discussions of how to be a global church. 

Taylor makes three critical points. 

1. Personhood in the West is characterized by what he calls "the buffered self." For those of us in the West, there is always a buffer between the self and the world of the spirit. The primary form of this buffer is the intellectual reflection that we place between the immediacy of our experiences and our interpretations of them. We don't naively attribute an upwelling of emotion, or a loss of self-control, or even consciousness to a spiritual presence. Even if we reach that conclusion it is a conclusion based on a process of reflection. It is characteristic of the West that we place our thoughts between ourselves and not only the world, but our own bodily experiences. We assume that the self exists independently of the body and can thus judge (and even control) what is happening to it. 

2. Taylor points out that in the West we reflexively locate the meaning of our experiences in the immanent world. When we reflect on what our experiences mean we discover both their origin and their end in the human and natural world. Thus a horrifying dream is more likely to be interpreted as a reaction to bad food or a troubling conscious experience than a message from God. And even if we attribute the origin of our experiences to God, typically their end is in the immanent world of human society and action. 

3. This presupposition relates to the consensus emerging in the 19th century that the primary and possibly only purpose of religious life is human flourishing, which is assumed to be God's sole desire for humanity. At the extreme, worship in this mode of thought isn't undertaken because what God desires most for us is to live in relationship with the divine.  It is undertaken in order to therapeutically heal our psychological deficiencies and motivate us to engage in the mission of making the world a better place. 

(For an example of worship in an immanent frame versus that oriented toward transcendence, compare two hymns adjacent to each other in the Methodist hymnal, numbers 660 and 661. Fred Pratt Green writes, "here the servants of the Servant seek in worship to explore what it means in daily living to believe and to adore." A.T. Olajide Olude of Nigeria writes, "Jesus, we want to meet on this thy holy day. We gather round thy throne on this thy holy day. Thou are our heavenly friend; hear our prayers as they ascend; look into our hearts and minds today, on this thy holy day.")

One can see the how this consensus affects religious self-understanding by looking at the difference between the present purpose statement of United Methodism and its predecessor statements from 300 years ago: Currently the UM church defines its purpose as "Making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world." Compare this to the definition of the first Methodist societies: "a company of men having the form and seeking the power of godliness, united in order to pray together, to receive the word of exhortation, and to watch over one another in love, that they may help each other to work out their salvation." 

Even when contemporary American Methodist worship moves beyond preparing people to be good so that they can do good in the world, it does so primarily through aesthetics: seeking to be "uplifting" through grand music, ritual, and oratory. And that aesthetic appeal will be through a consciously mediated experience of transcendence based on a personal "appreciation" of Western art prepared for presentation by highly trained liturgists, musicians, and preachers. (This idea of uplift can, of course, move "down market" to popular music forms and motivational speaking, but the conscious mediation - generally through expertise in marketing rather than high art - is still key.)

This blog post will be continued in another installment next week.