Rev. Will Campbell flustered political mandates

Another thoughtful column from Ray Waddle of The Tennessean, eulogizing one of my heroes, Rev. Will Campbell, who passed away earlier this month:

For centuries it has puzzled people that Jesus never left an owner’s manual for running a congregation or changing society. The history of the church has been an improvised competition, a juggernaut of believers trying their best and living with doubts while projecting confidence that their way is the true way.

Will Campbell, who died in Nashville June 3 at age 88, figured Jesus had his reasons for leaving no blueprint for building Christendom. Campbell concentrated instead on what Jesus did say: “Come, follow me.”

That simple directive gave him his marching orders — his ministry, a word he disliked — for more than 60 years. It showed him the risks of Christian discipleship and the value of religious freedom. It furnished him with a stripped-down credo: respect each person, practice reconciliation, refuse power.

Those are hard things. Probably the hardest is rejecting power, since all well-intended solutions (and egos) depend on accumulations of political influence and institutional muscle. But Campbell warned:

“True soul freedom can never be found in any institution. If they will pay you, let them. I did it, too. But never trust them. Never bow the knee to them. They are all after your soul. All of them. Jesus was a radical! And his grace abounds.”

For him, the Jesus movement revealed a path that cut across all political mandates. Visit prisoners. Be a friend to the forgotten. Be also a friend to racists. Put no faith in any ideology. Be the incarnation of Jesus in this world.

That message guaranteed his marginalization. Living near Nashville, a conscientious city of steeples and professional religion, Campbell had occasion every day to count the cost of his nonconformity.

Early on he had tried “institutional flings” — church jobs — but none worked out. His particular Christian faith was a bit too indigestible. He was molecularly suspicious of systematic doctrines. They divide people. They fuel an unwarranted human confidence in pronouncements of truth.

The God of the Bible is too enigmatic for well-rounded theological statements. Will Campbell relied on his own wits and the subversions of grace, summarizing a biblical command: “We must obey God rather than man. He is our only sovereign. He is our God. Him will we serve.”

The paradoxes of this writer-farmer-agitator were fascinating to admirers and catnip to journalists. The dossier provides a familiar litany: He was a white Mississippi Baptist in the vanguard of race relations, a Southern yeoman with an Ivy League degree, a literary man detached from the establishment circuit, an embodiment of gruff and empathetic, barbed and tender, inspirational and unknowable.

Out of these smoldering human contradictions, people saw a gospel witness they hadn’t encountered before. Campbell kept a laser focus on the meaning of the Kingdom of God — the reconciliation of all. He took seriously Jesus’ outlandish announcement that this Kingdom is at hand, and it’s our difficult task to be midwife in its delivery. Campbell’s outlook was as discomfiting in 2013 as it was in 1952 when he was starting out, or in 1852 or in year 52.

“Given a hearing, Will can describe a Christianity that is scandalous and objectionable, shockingly exhilarating and frighteningly attractive,” writes Richard Goode, a history professor at Lipscomb University who edited an indispensable volume called Writings on Reconciliation and Resistance (Cascade Books, 2010), a collection of Campbell essays and speeches.

“Precisely because we are reconciled, professing disciples must live an irrepressible conflict against the principalities and powers — the idols — that divide and dehumanize.”

I was privileged to count Will as a friend. It might now be tempting to establish a Church of the Will of Will or a Free Will political party. To that he’d scoff. A better homage would be to look homeless people in the eye, scorn pompous sanctimony, resist warmongering and read Scripture with courage.

Speaking to a group of Baptist brethren in 1995 he said: “As the sands of time run out on me, I do not consider that I have had a ministry at all, except in the sense that all believers are priests. I have had a life. As to how well I have conducted it I am willing to leave to the One so mysterious, so elusive and evasive, so hidden as to say to Moses from the burning bush, I AM WHO I AM, to be the sole judge. I can only exult that grace abounds …”

Despite Technology, life takes its own sweet time

Nashville Tennessean columnist Ray Waddle sums it up well...

Shortly before his death in 2007, novelist Norman Mailer ventured into theology, speculating that the modern world has become a bloody battle between two unpredictable forces — God and Satan. And a third rival is rising fast to match those two — human free will.

The world-bending effects of our tech revolutions tempt us now to think we can stand on our own, claiming more power than the devil and no need of God. For Mailer it was frightening to think of a future of synthetic humans, robotics and other giddy products of human ingenuity.

“If I have been ready to question God’s judgment on many a matter, I am wholly reluctant to put faith in our judgment,” he said in On God: An Uncommon Conversation. “We are far from equipped to deal with the cosmos.”

Mailer would be consoled to learn that our hurtle into the techno-utopian future has already hit a bump: We’re having trouble managing today’s information glut even at this early stage in the futuristic blueprint.

In his new book, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, author Douglas Rushkoff talks about the way we experience data and media these days — as a steady-stream dictatorship of continuous email, tweets, Facebook updates and news aggregators so relentless that we never catch a breath, pull back to get perspective, or respect the linear nature of human life.

“We have a completely new relationship to time,” he says at rushkoff.com. “We live in an always-on ‘now,’ where the priorities of this moment seem to be everything.

“Wall Street traders no longer invest in a future; they expect profits off their algorithmic trades themselves, in the ultra-fast moment. Voters want immediate results from their politicians, having lost all sense of the historic timescale on which government functions. Kids text during parties to find out if there’s something better happening in the moment, somewhere else.”

Flowing from this screaming whirlwind of what he calls “presentism” are various unintended consequences. One is a renewed itch for conspiracy theories. When there’s no time to organize data overload into a larger narrative or ongoing storyline, then the only way to make sense of it is to find real-time connections and patterns so everything connects to everything else right now, no matter how implausible.

A second consequence, Rushkoff notes, is a yearning for apocalypse, a final silencing of the incessant data torrent. The urge might be post-Christian or secular, but the impulse harkens to ancient religious instincts about the end of time.

All this will be an embarrassing (or momentary) setback to can-do utopians. But to those of us who never believed human nature would change even though the technology does, it’s no big surprise. It’s a quaint piece of hubris to think we could ever collapse time, master the “now,” pull the essence from it, elude the prison house of interpretation or defy the very physics of the 24-hour day, the need for sleep and food and other people.

What comes to mind is an endearingly analog insight that still offers sanity in a culture chasing the new algorithmic deities. Writer I.B. Singer once said: “God is a writer, and we are both the heroes and the readers.” The idea implies a cosmic plot line, an “Author’s” story unfolding through the sinews of linear time, a tale requiring our patience and courage. For whatever reason, the bones of the universe include the stubborn persistence of minutes, hours and eons as well as beginnings, middles and ends (more or less in that order). “The universe is made of stories, not of atoms,” poet Muriel Rukeyser once said.

Books take time (as the author of Present Shock wryly acknowledges). So do friendships, marriages, civilizations, religions, children, memories, the confirmation of facts, the triumph of wisdom — a step at a time, moment to moment, bordered by blessed intervals of silence.

The enemies of these things always lurk around: arrogant impatience and fantasies of purity and human perfectibility. Technological visions of a frictionless future scrubbed clean of raggedy human limitation lead to totalitarianism, cruelty and madness. The story of the world has always said so.

Thoughts?