Reporting on my little life

Reporting on my little life:

This fourth week of October 2014

Written by Dan McDonald

 

        I woke up this morning realizing that one of the curses of my life has been my willingness to hide behind ideas. I am in many ways an ideas man that holds others at a distance. I am that even though in my ideals that is not what I think anyone should be. I decided it was time to put a little of myself instead of my ideas into my writing. This week, from my perspective has been interesting.

            I work at an oil refinery. We are readying for what is known as a turnaround. Most of the time around a refinery, everything just keeps running with momentary corrections and repairs, but there are times when maintenance is done to entire units and this is what happens during a turnaround. I grew up on a farm and the closest thing I can think of to a turnaround is planting season. Spring is when we planted corn and soybeans on the farm, and getting the soil ready by plowing and planting and then cultivating the soil in those weeks surrounding planting was a time of long hours, meals on the go, and nights short of sleep. That is something like what happens in a turnaround. The units come down, every piece of machinery is stripped down, its working innards repaired and brought up to optimum working condition and everyone puts in long hours, few days off, tempers get short while stories get long.

            I have been working on a blog series on the commons. It is a theme that I have been trying to grapple with. I have especially learned of this from following Nathan Schneider and Elizabeth Bruenig on Twitter. The theme of the commons comes from Acts, specifically from the early Jerusalem church’s experience of having all things in common so that there were none in need within the church community. I have begun to see the Jerusalem experiment not so much as a pattern to be copied and reproduced but an experiment in applying an essential principle of the Christian faith. I have been trying to express these thoughts using varied pictures from the Scriptures. We live our lives not only as separated individuals or independent persons but also as human beings living shared lives of co-dependence and interconnectedness. I am beginning to believe that such should be expressed in the way we hold property. Perhaps some property should be held privately but perhaps some should also be held in trust shared with others to express the interconnectedness of our humanity. Perhaps property shared in common with a whole community helps us to realize that life is communal as well as individual and/or personal. I do not think the Jerusalem experiment is one necessarily needing copied, but it is one which necessarily needs to challenge and transform how we view property.

            I exchanged thoughts, on Twitter, with a young woman regarding one of these articles. Sarabeth Caplin is a Christian from a Jewish family. Her story itself is intriguing. She admits to self-conflict in her journey. She has a Jewish family and Christian friends and sometimes finds herself not fitting fully in either world. She readily admits that her life is a work in progress. Her situation, different but perhaps similar in its way to my own illustrates to me the sort of lives we most all live in our modern world. Our communities, that we identify ourselves as part of, are ghettoes in the sense of being self-contained neighborhoods and subcultures existing as oases separated from and yet  interconnected to the world of humanity just beyond the imagined boundaries of our hoods. Our communities are composed of some people living lives focused on embodying the ideals of our communities while others live with conflicted struggles at the fringes of our communities where communities and neighborhoods intersect with other communities and neighborhoods. I imagine a more perfect world would not abolish the ghettoes and hoods, but rather would affirm both the one living out the focused ideals of the community and the one on the fringes between interconnected communities. For each of our communities so needs both the one who lives to embody our ideals and the one who struggles where our communities intersect with others. In modern life almost all of us have a place where we struggle in the intersection between subcultures, and only some of us have really found our homes in a life of sojourn and pilgrimage towards a city built without hands.

            Maybe that is enough for now. I want to tell you of two or maybe three movies I recently rented and viewed from Netflix. There was “Express” the story of Ernie Davis, the first African-American to win the Heisman Trophy. There was also a French movie made shortly after World War II entitled “Leon Morin, priest” which was different from any movie I have ever seen, but was excellent. Finally there was a German movie “As Far as my Feet will carry me”. It is about a German Lieutenant in the Second World War, who was captured by the Soviets and placed in a Siberian work camp. The movie is based on a true story of a man who escapes the work camp and makes his way across Siberia to freedom. I will tell you about these movies another day, perhaps soon.

The Commons II - Trinity, Imago Dei, and the Commons

The Commons

Part Two: Created in the Image

Trinity, Imago Dei, and the Commons

Written by Dan McDonald

 

{Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” – Genesis 1:26-27}

 

Michelangelo’s “Creation” – Sistine Chapel

 

            A few years ago I passed through a time of crisis in my Christianity. I discovered that my belief in the Trinity was too close to being checklist orthodoxy. That is, I knew it was historically considered an essential Christian doctrine to believe, but it did not seem important to how I lived my everyday life. I then discovered through reading Yaroslav Pelikan’s history of dogma in the early centuries how in the ancient church the whole understanding of the Christian faith revolved around the understanding of God as Trinity and the understanding of Christ as fully God and fully man. My problem, these days, is to dialogue with those for whom the Trinity remains a statement essential to be checked off in the “I believe” department but then their expression of Christianity has almost no connection with their belief in the Holy Trinity.

            I am presently writing on the subject of the commons. The theological subject of the commons is built around the early Church in Jerusalem’s practice of having all things in common. (Acts 2:44-45; 4:34-35) I believe that St. Luke thought this phenomenon was important to mention even if the exact practice of holding all things in common did not seem to be copied as a universal method of communal living in other churches in the New Testament. That suggests to my thinking that the exact practice while not being universal is based on something of a universal principle important to be recognized and applied in various ways in varied Christian settings.

            I believe that we can see a basis for a Christian understanding of having things in common in our understanding of creation. Christians are reluctant to use Genesis chapter one as a proof of the Holy Trinity, partly because we recognize that those with a Jewish faith have other ways of understanding the first chapter of Genesis. Nevertheless the apostles and the early church saw the first chapter of Genesis expressing in embryo form the Christian understanding of the Deity of Christ and the Holy Trinity. God creates the world through his word by his spirit.

            The creation of man described in Genesis 1:26-27 then takes on this interesting expression of mixed numbers. God is referred to singularly as God, who then speaks in a plural form saying “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” Then God creates man (a singular construction) as “male and female he created them.” The Jewish explanation of this is that God speaks of himself in a special construction, the “Majestic Plural.” In all fairness, I believe Jewish and Christian believers can agree that we are attempting to understand a mystery any time we try to understand either God or creation. A wholly literalistic understanding seems to be stretching the revelation God has given us in this passage. God’s existence is greater than our linguistic categories of person, number, and gender. The Bible refers to God in most instances as “He” but this in no way can be used to describe only male human beings as created in God’s image. The woman God created is also equally imago Dei (in the image of God) as the man. They are created in God’s image.

A non-European artist’s conception of Adam and Eve

 

            The point I wish to draw from this passage teaching about God’s creation of man in God’s image is that singularity and plurality and unity of both God and then of man seem important in this creation account. St. Paul seeks to make us aware of this. None of us are wholly independent human individuals. In the second chapter of Genesis it becomes clear that for our first parents the unity of the man and the woman was as much a demonstration of man created in God’s image, as each of the persons who were created are likewise expressions of the image of God. As we broaden our understanding of humanity we begin to realize that if the Trinitarian representation of God is a true representation of the glory of God then our humanity is capable of imaging God both as singular persons and as collective humanity. This is an important foundation for understanding why this principle of holding things in common is so essential to the Christian understanding of human life.

            A Christian understanding of salvation recognizes how both individuality and the unity of a collective body are dealt with in both God’s creation of humanity and the work of redemption in Christ. Interconnectedness and unity of humanity is expressed in creation, in our fall into sin, and in the work of redemption. Christ did not bypass our human interconnectedness to bring us to a wholly individualistic salvation. Rather, he entered the world fully God and fully man, the offspring of Mary and descendant of Adam, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and David. He became man and died for our sins, according to the Scriptures. He represented us in a collective sense as well as for our individual beings. The work of salvation then was committed through his disciples to be represented to humanity through the human collective. Christ became the new leaven through which the whole lump of humanity was to be renewed. He entered our humanity and human beings, members of the human collective were given the message through which Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit would be expressed to all of humanity.

            Once we understand this we begin to understand the mystery of both salvation and judgment, and how these are things in which we are guided by the teaching of Scriptures to understand only in part. We have a sense that each of us are individual but that also each of us are conditioned and shaped by matters of culture, genetics, etc. It isn’t so simple that we can imagine ourselves wholly individuals capable of acting wholly apart from those things that have shaped us. This much is implied by Jesus’ own teaching regarding how it would be better for those born in Sodom and Gomorrah in Lot’s days, than those born in Capernaum and Bethsaida in Jesus’ day. In the end we realize there is mystery regarding the Day of Judgment that only God the all wise is capable of sorting out.

Pieter Bruegel’s The Way to Calvary (in the midst of humanity)

 

            The church in Jerusalem understood something else about the interconnectedness of humanity and the redemptive work of Christ. It meant with Christ’s bringing us into redemption that our redemption and our salvation was a shared salvation in which as we came before God in Christ, we were one with our brother and sister in Christ. For the church at Jerusalem it meant that some sold what they possessed in abundance to ensure that those in poverty had every need met. In the middle ages, that meant that European communities established “common lands” where the poor could forage, pick berries, gather fruit, hunt mushrooms, collect herbs and provide for themselves. What does it mean for us today? Does it mean the setting aside of a portion of our income for the poor and needy? Does it mean that life is meant to be as much a shared exploration of the abundant life in Christ as it is a personal or individual search? The reality of having things in common is surely in part built upon the reality that we have been created to image the glory of God who is one God in the unity of three persons, according to our understanding of the Christian faith.