Tending the flame

what we can and can't expect

As I noted in my last post, Lindbeck’s Nature of Doctrine provided me a framework to think through a nagging question- what is the church, and how might we think about the work it does?

After I wrote this piece in 2023, I realized that I didn’t actually have an answer. The piece ends where it should have begun- with the risen Christ among his people, inviting them to eat with him. That is the most minimalist but also the richest definition of the church as the people of God. It is descriptive only in a glancing way, however. It also is a tad romantic for my taste. If we were to diagram the argument, it progresses from what church is not, to some queries about why it is not this and conversations about interlocutors who get it wrong, to an engagement with the risen Jesus. As long-time readers know, this is how my thinking often proceeds- and this is not always to its benefit. Yes, you may have a right-headed instinct about something that is wrong, and you may gesture to an answer through a Christian concept. But the whole thing lacks particulars. (Ironic, considering the title of this substack). What is it, actually, that I am calling for?

With Lindbeck I have been able to make a bit of progress in answering this question. Lindbeck analyzes three ways that religious communities work. It is probably clear by now that I am trying to move us from the first two ways- thinking of religion as a cognitive enterprise, or as a primarily emotional engagement- to a third way, which entails thinking of religion as a language, or even like baseball. This transition is quite hard for many to get on board with- not because they necessarily disagree with it, but because they cannot imagine it.

And this is why I’ve come to suspect that the main obstacle with embracing a cultural-linguistic model of religion has to do with our technological imaginary. In short, our experience of the world has become so dominated by the digital and virtual worlds that we imagine that we belong to them. Our concept of what it means to be a “person” bears deep impressions from our tech-saturated realities.

Our anthropology always borrows from our environment. This is a biblical principle that scholars often draw on, pointing out how Psalm 1 in describing the righteous man “like a tree” would have been pointing out Israel’s proximity to the natural world. Similarly, the book of Job’s long excursus on wild animals draws on another fact from the natural environment- some animals were domesticated (oxen and cattle) and others were wild (the ostrich, the mountain goat). By referring to these animals, the writer was saying something about the natural world that provided a spiritual referent, too. The mountain goat is “wild”, which they knew to mean that it had no owner and no harness; this “wildness” told Israel something about God’s ways with the world.

So, too, when Israel is told to provide for the poor among them, they were to do so by “gleaning” (Lev 19:9-10), or gathering from the edges of their fields. This was a direct command that still only makes sense in the context of their agrarian identity. Because so much of the yield of the fields was dependent on God’s benevolence- it was the Lord giving Israel “the land” (Lev 23: 10-11) and so a return to the Giver of the gift has a logical relation. Giver grants the gift, a gift is returned to the Giver. Being an agrarian people allowed Old Testament Israel to see that their fruitfulness already was ordered to God who had made the world of fruit. Their anthropology in this way already included a sense of indebtedness to God who had made the world in such a way that fruit was a “natural”, though given, artifact.

Now, imagine that your chief entry into the world is not a vineyard or a field of grain, but a digital interface. Imagine if the place you turn for information is usually an internet search bar, and the time between asking a question and receiving an answer is 2 seconds. Imagine that your world of “work” is largely adults sitting on one side of a computer screen. Imagine that the most successful individuals you know have made their money in the world of the non-physical, largely immaterial space.

Think what happens if your primary referent when you hear about a dangerous “virus” refers to a computer glitch, or if you largely relate not to stubborn animals who may or may not yield, but machines who respond automatically to commands. Animals have temperaments and off-days, they get sick and get distracted and training them is a lot more intermittent than regular. They get spooked by loud noises and unusual smells and have to be tended more like a garden than like a machine. The world of regular inputs and outputs and consistent responses is not the world of animal husbandry, and so plowing a field would have been similar- slow, plodding, with irregular results depending on the furrows of the ground or the weather or the oxen having a stomach ache. “Work” depended on so many variables, as did “yield”, that the whole thing could not be predicted.

Now. Imagine for a moment that your experience of “discipleship” or “formation” is formed by your work as a farmer. You are going to expect the work to be intermittent and uneven. You will work intuitively, planning to put in 12 hour days when the weather is good and expecting to do hidden work repairing machinery and oiling tools when it rained. The rain would come, after all, unpredictably- when it came, sometimes for weeks at a time, your plans would get ruined. You’d have to adjust. You’d have a list of tasks that could be done during bad weather, and you’d have to develop the emotional maturity to accept that there might not be a harvest that year.

You’d have to leave behind all but the most modest conceptions of “productivity”. You would expect only intermittent results, and you would realize the dangers that come between you and receiving them. Any harvest that you receive would be only loosely related to your work.

I’m not much of a gardener, but I grow dahlias, and I am somewhat devoted to them. I collect varieties and put them in the ground at least two months before I expect blooms (this year it was three!) I fertilize and prune and cut back and do all sorts of things as I encourage and anticipate the blooms. I’m not quite a fanatic about these flowers, but I’m at least halfway there. Because of a poorly timed hot spell, I’m still waiting on a few varieties to bloom this year. Our first frost will most likely arrive within two weeks, and I’ve accepted that I may not see them bloom. It’s quite sad. I selected these varieties and have fed and watered them since May, and in November I will dig them out of the ground and store them for the winter. If I’m lucky and they survive the winter, they may bloom next year.

One thing I’ve learned about discipleship is that it is more like my dahlias. Things take the time they take, and sometimes they don’t bloom at all. You still have to feed and water because you have no way of knowing which one will respond, but none of it is about you. The husbandry entailed is largely being a tend-er, or a keeper. I am out at least three times a day checking my plants for bugs and viruses and just looking at them. It’s time intensive but not really all that skilled; I just know what to look for.

Based on responses to my writing, it has become clear to me that we are thinking about people as if they are machines. The most common question I receive is "how to do” what it is I’m calling for. People want a program and a handbook to follow. They want to know which inputs will result in which outputs, and which strategy will provide results. The most common complaint regarding my writing is that “it won’t work”. The insight here is that discipleship and “Church” are programs with promised results. If you do them right, you will yield the results you desire.

Discipleship is not like that. None of this will “work”, if you want a direct relationship between inputs and results. If my own work yields anything at all, it will result in people who are formed to keep time. They will have learned that things take the time they take, and that nothing can be scaled or predicted. I’ve seen radical transformations in people occur quickly; there are others I expect to tend for years. But if any of my work bears fruit, it will yield a people who know how to tend the flame. I think the best thing church-people can do is learn to be human. This will take more time than is expected, and will almost certainly be disruptive.

It’s not an accident, I think, that the two most primal symbols of life- water and fire- are both things that destroy machines. The most primal life-forces are deeply incompatible with the built environments that regulate most of our daily lives. This critique has become quite current as it relates to the third primal symbol- fertility- and the artificial contraception that is seen to threaten it. Here, again, I think we might take a slightly different tack; what is the “natural” that contraception is thought to disrupt? The whole thing, I suspect, is more off-kilter than the conversation about fertility and “family planning” often reveal. For now, I am happy to say that husbandry or tending, more than control or even submission, offer a more human lens to the conversation.

Perhaps there will be a follow up to this, particularly if you have follow up questions. For now, start here- if life is a garden, and your call as a Christian is to wonder and delight, what sort of tasks would this encourage, and which would it prohibit?