I was raised in a well-meaning, but defensive Christian home.  Whether it was among the ranks of rural Baptists or Christian-Church-Christians-of-Christ-of-the-Bible[1] , we thought of ourselves as the faithful hold-outs in an increasingly secular age. Since my early 20s, [2] I left such movements, opting for a more generous orthodoxy.[3]

I take it as a mark of godliness that we are able to follow God’s command to be stewards of this Earth and we are beginning to be conscious of and find ways to evangelize without resorting to making asses out of ourselves and our Lord. Heck, we even value and are beginning to practice the redemption of all things, not just the soul and the dirt. And we live these things while not merely inverting the fundamentalist/reformed paradigms. We still value just as much the seeking of Christ and faith in him for the acceptance of the forgiveness of sin. We still see the Bible as the only God-Stamped revelation.

I pride ourselves on these things and mourn the fact that they were not present in my life earlier.

But there is one thing of which we and those with which we affiliate are still guilty. We still cannot seem to motivate ourselves by any other means than blanket or individual condemnation and the subsequent application or insinuation of guilt.

When I started teaching at Parkade and had some influence in other areas, such as the BSU, I vowed to myself to stay away from guilt as a method.

We are alive in Christ, new creations, forgiven, enabled, cohabited by the very Spirit of the living God.

We do not look back at our failures, but we are spurred on by Christ, living inspired by his example. This philosophy sat upon the goodness of God’s creation and the realness of our redemption by means of Christ’s victory. It was a willful rebellion of a view of humankind that saw us as constant wretches, worth only of God’s wrath. I wanted to stand within the knowledge that we humans are of tremendous worth, such worth that the Lord of Creation willingly died for our redemption.

When we speak a myth of failure and worthlessness, we find ourselves living up to that myth; when we speak a myth of worth and redemption, we do as well.

And for a while I was successful… well, I was successful at teaching and living and speaking from that view. I was immensely frustrated as my compatriots would make wonderful moves toward a full theological life, but still use the paradigm of guilt and failure to ground and motivate. As the years wore on, I myself began to shift.

The myth of failure has such allure…

the myth of guilt has such… power.

Guilt and failure, when spoken over the Bible and read onto people grants the reader and speaker tremendous power over the student and the layperson. Their personhood in a sense is rendered moot; their voice silenced. You, the prophet, speaks and is important.

Under the myth of guilt, talk becomes rehearsed, and community is but a fabergé egg.[4]

But back to the story. As time wore on, I gradually began adopting those same rhetorical strategies against which I initially rebelled. I began taking the easy way out, I began to insinuate, to ask the rhetorical question that damned by students into shamefully accepting my arguments.

I was reminded of this last week while reading some Rorty and some Alioto,reminding me of the power of redescription and to pay attention to the methods of redesciption. Rorty reminded me of the humiliation of the Other that is a byproduct when you redescribe them. Later on Rorty notes that

Interesting philosophy is rarely an examination of the pros and cons of a thesis. Usually, it is, implicitly or explicitly, a contest between an entrenched vocabulary which has become a nuisance and a half-formed new vocabulary which vaguely promises great things.

[…]

The method is to redescribe lots and lots of things in new ways, until you have created a pattern of linguistic behavior which will tempt the rising generation to adopt it, thereby causing them to look for appropriate new forms of nonlinguistic behavior.

This sort of philosophy does not work piece by piece, analyzing concept after concept… . Rather, it works holistically and pragmatically. It says things like “try thinking of it this way” – or more specifically, “try to ignore futile traditional questions by substituting new and possibly interesting questions.”[5]

An amazing quote, no?  It can stand in for the conversion and post-conversion process as well.

The above has reminded and inspired me to return to my earlier convictions, to not take the easy way out, and to struggle to find ways to holistically speak the vocabulary of the redeemed, to empower these new creations of Christ, to tempt them to adopt the vocabulary of the redeemed, to foster the adoption of new behaviors, new identities and to re-abandon the myth of failure and the motivation of guilt.

Please help and join me.

1. By this, I mean instrumental Church of Christ, North American Convention. We were Campbellites, meaning we followed in the tradition of Alexander Campbell and Barton Stone. We say we have no denomination, but we have our own conventions and educational networks [↩]
2. I had a severe crisis of faith that shook me to my core and I do mean “core.” For a stretch there, I had no faith save for a commitment that Jesus was the son of God and I was committed to him [↩]
3. My community lives within a larger and more excluding community, but we also share many affiliations with other groups which are more like ourselves. [↩]
4. Beautiful and ornate on the outside, but hollow on the inside. Hell, we become them ourselves when we live the myth of guilt which rolls of our tongues. [↩]
5. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 42-43 of 620 (ebook). [↩]