Towards a non-defensive faith

In a recent conversation with me, Jim Longley contrasted the Anabaptist approach to theology and ethics to what he labelled the "defensive" approach adopted by much of the church.

My experience of Christianity supports that categorisation. The institutional church, especially the Evangelical variety, and many individuals hold a position that is profoundly defensive. It is a position that assumes we have to constantly protect ourselves from the creeping immorality of society, from doctrinal error, from financial risk, from sin and the resulting guilt, from those who are not "one of us".

I am not referring to a kind of defensiveness that contrasts with offensiveness. There are, of course, parts of the church that promote a triumphalism that declares (against what they admit is evidence to the contrary!) that the battle belongs to the Lord and that victory is assured if only we have the courage (the "faith") to attack. That very offensiveness is rooted in a war metaphor that sees the church circling the wagons to separate ourselves and "defend our way of life" against the infidels.

It's not that kind of military defence that I'm picturing, but rather a stance that holds tightly rather than releasing, that is closed rather than open, confined and isolationist rather than expansive, scared rather than embracing, rigid and controlling rather than freeing.

That is not how Jesus lived. In his relationships with others he was open, inviting, accepting. He took risks, exposed himself, dis-empowered himself, allowed himself to be vulnerable, and actively drew violence against himself.

He did those things from a position of inner confidence. Jesus knew that he had all the power of God and that is why he was able to wrap a towel around himself and wash his friends' feet (John 13:3-5). This is in stark contrast to an apologetic Christianity too scared to speak the truth, and in just as stark a contrast to the the right-wing Christian political agenda that attempts to force Christian moral requirememnts on everyone via legislation.

I invite any readers to help me to understand how this has happened. Why does so much of modern Christianity takes this defensive position?

How does that stance undermine our engagement with the world? (There's the defensive assumption again, right there! As though we were this little enclave of people who feel a need to "engage" (like a gear cog?) with the big bad world around us!)

And how would we act differently if we took on the pattern of Jesus? What if the life of Jesus was normative - the exemplar of being truly human? What if I didn't have to protect my reputation? What if I really accepted that all truth is God's truth and that I didn't need to fear or protect myself against the truth wherever it may be found? What if I allowed myself to act rashly and accepted that I will make mistakes? What if I was vulnerable and allowed myself to be hurt? What if I embraced the people around me regardless of their social or perceived moral status?

Subverting the violent interpretation of Revelation

A traditional Evangelical reading of the book of John's Revelation seems to assume that the violent God of the Old Testament, after being temporarily assuaged by Jesus' death, returns with the big guns to teach evil doers who is really the most powerful. I've never really thought about the violence inherent in that framework, and never wondered whether there could be a non-violent understanding of the book's message.

So coming across Paul Nuechterlein's Nonviolence and the Book of Revelation was an eye-opener that will take some time to ponder.

I absolutely love his comments on Revelation 5:4-7: where John looks up expecting to see the Lion of Judah -- "the hoped-for warrior who devours God's enemies" -- but instead sees the Lamb that was slain. The Lion is never mentioned again and the Lamb becomes the dominant actor, subverting the dominant human hope for divine vengeance.

"The terrifying violence that we so often face in this world is decidedly not God’s violence but the violence of empires under the deception of Satan, the dragon. And God’s defeat of that violence is not one of superior firepower, of simply having more of the same kind of violence to subdue that of the empires. No, God’s defeat of violence is to expose it through the love of the Lamb slain whose self-giving love lets itself be slaughtered by the violence, and the Lamb’s resurrection shows its power of life to be victorious. Disciples of the Lamb follow not in a hope that there would be a different kind of victory someday, a victory in which the Lamb became a Lion and devoured all its enemies. But followers of the Lamb believe that his slaughter and resurrection have already won the victory, such that we wait with endurance and hope, following in the Lamb’s loving nonviolence if we must, until the day when Satan’s violence finally becomes its own defeat, collapsing in on itself."

There is still a lot of violent imagery in Revelation that I think will be difficult to reconcile with Nuechterlein's thesis, but seeing the Girardian subversion of violence implied by this verse inspires me greatly.

Sex and Social Justice

I stumbled across an article from 2008 by Bruce Wydick titled "Sex and Social Justice". Although he makes a reasonably good case for the Christian ideal of sex within marriage, a key part of his case simply doesn't match my personal experience.

From his perspective as an economist, Wydick considers the act of sex as a type of exchange.

"Seen in the simplest of terms, women are exchanging sex for commitment, and men are exchanging commitment for sex. Based on a male and female's basic biological needs, for males the price of sex is commitment and for women the price of commitment is sex."

That's a position he leads up to rather than assumes, and he emphasises that he is not implying that women don't enjoy sex or that men do not enjoy commitment. So don't take that quote as his whole case.

Wydick draws conclusions from this position mostly for men -- which is quite appropriate given his own gender. But I can't help thinking that a female perspective on this "exchange" may be significantly different.

Anyway, he does make what I think is a good point that this "exchange" has lead to an issue of justice because the prevailing social norm over-values sex and undervalues commitment. (It strikes me that there could be an equivalent issue of justice if the reverse imbalance occurred as well, but that's perhaps not the injustice we see in modern western culture.) In that case, sex becomes "cheap" and the woman in need of commitment is ripped off.

"When a man receives sex from a woman without paying the price of commitment, he takes something for which he has not paid. Put simply, he is stealing. ... Social justice requires that men fulfill their end of the exchange."

The injustice may still occur when a woman "consents", because a wide variety of social expectations may nevertheless be acting coercively on her to force her consent.

My problem with Wydick's position is that it over-generalises on two fronts. From my personal biography, it over-generalises the gender distinction. What if one party (or both parties) value sex and commitment equally? Like many males I know, I have a deep need for connection, belonging, affirmation and for someone to stand by me for the long haul. Two people's discussions about the appropriateness of sex in their relationship can be just as often about "how can we nourish each other with both pleasure and security" as about "how much of the one must I give you in order for you to give me the other."

It also over-generalises what constitutes consent and consequently diminishes personal empowerment of choice. I agree that there is a transaction inherent in sex and there is a power dynamic in the negotiation between the two parties. That happens both within marriage as much as it does without. In a wholesome relationship there could (should?) be honest discussion about what is being exchanged and a set of shared expectations that meet both parties' needs. The needs are the not same in all cases and the relative value of physical pleasure, long term commitment and numerous other "costs" and "benefits" undermine Wydick's simple model. There may be other value in the exchange for women other than commitment, and I would prefer to fully empower a woman to make a real choice than to remove their choice by applying a generalised rule.

Four steps towards bringing business intelligence to the masses

I've been working on a project with a couple of friends to bring data analysis to a broader audience. There are many Business Intelligence (BI) tools that target large businesses and require a major investment in time, money and internal resources. Surely the power of BI doesn’t need to be limited to that context! There are literally millions of people who have data that they want to summarize and visualize in ways beyond Excel’s ability, but who don’t have the IT skills required by the BI tools we are used to. But how could the functionality of the big BI vendors be made available in an appropriate format for the rest of the world – for the average individual, community organisation, church, sports club, or small business?

1. You’d need to keep it cheap and simple. 
2. Host the system in the cloud so that the users don’t have the hassle of maintaining IT infrastructure or managing software. 
3. Start with what people know. They already know about tables of numbers and graphs – though perhaps with a confused understanding of what chart type to use when. There’s a good chance they already know about the use of color-coding to distinguish between good and bad values. Thanks to Facebook they already know about online conversations. So build the simplest tool that allows them to apply that knowledge to their existing data sets. 
4. Lead people forward over time. Build additional features into that framework so that users can easily learn as they go and gradually take advantage of more advanced types of analysis. 

The initial reaction to the release of OTUS Analytics Dashboards shows that this approach is gaining traction. All sorts of people are trying out the hosted dashboard functionality of OTUS Analytics. They can securely upload data and very quickly layout dashboards to their own design. The dashboards can display any assortment of tables, charts, color-coded performance indicators and explanatory text. It's easy to create scorecards and strategy maps. Groups of users can view the same dashboards and discuss what they see.

Being a hosted system, features can easily be added over time without requiring users to perform any upgrade re-installations. We’ve recently extended the range of chart types, added heat maps, and will soon introduce gauges.

Let me know if you'd like more info.

God's Omniscience

I've just read "Defining Omniscience: a Feminist Perspective", by Daniel Farmer in Faith and Philosophy (Vol. 27 No. 3 July 2010). He draws on Lorraine Code and Jonathan Kvanvig to suggest the inadequacy of the traditional model of omniscience, viz, that God know all true propositions and believes none that are false.

Is propositional knowledge the right paradigm of knowledge, or is that perhaps a Western male philosophical bias?

Psalm 139 says:

You have searched me, LORD, and you know me.
You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.
You discern my going out and my lying down;
you are familiar with all my ways.
Before a word is on my tongue
you, LORD, know it completely.

Farmer suggests that God's omniscience is more fundamentally about people than about propositions. God knows *me*, not just facts about me. Our hope is not in a God who knows every *thing* but in an assurance that when we meet face-to-face "then I will know fully, even as I am fully known" (1 Corinthians 13:12).

I can imagine weaving that into a sermon about Mark 5:21-43 (Luke 8:40-56) -- the healing of Jairus' daughter and the woman with long-term haemorrhaging. Jesus understood that the girl needed privacy, while the woman needed a public display of her cleansing. The traditional philosophical boundaries around "God" are cold, dry and misleading. But to understand, through these acts of Jesus, that God knows each person's needs and cares for each as a beloved individual, radically changes our perception of God and inspires a similar commitment to people over facts in our own motivations.

Performance Appraisals

In Management Today (March 2011), Dr Tim Baker presents a suggestion about how to improve the employee performance appraisal process. He proposes that the following five 10-minute conversations be repeated each six months:

Topic	Content	Key Questions
Climate review	Job satisfaction, morale and communication	How would you rate your current job satisfaction? How would you rate morale? How would you rate communnication?
Training and development	Development over the next 6 months	What are some skills you would like to learn? What courses would you like to undertake?
Innovation and continuous improvement	Ways to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the business	What's one way you could improve your own working efficiencies? What's one way we could improve our department?
Improved performance	Improving performance and standards	What are some opportunities for improved performance? How can I assist you to do that?
Career	Career direction and guidance	What part of your job do you enjoy? What would we need to do to help you develop?

I like the idea of a continuous process rather than a scary once-a-year meeting. This needs to be balanced, however, with a couple of things. First, it is essential that these are conversations - not just the manager asking questions. The questions should lead to agreed goals. And second, the process needs to be augmented with specific times when the manager rates progress and advises about salary increases.

Ecclesiastical g-strings

In the podcast A Love Supreme: Jazz, Justice, Democracy, Otis Moss III builds a model for leadership on aspects of jazz. He makes some interesting connections, albeit extremely American. But I couldn't pass up this gem:

Church is not concerned about the love ethic any more ... but a market-driven ministry ... that turns the preacher into an theological exotic dancer, looking for someone to put a dollar in their ecclesiastical g-string.