The Homebrewed Christianity Guide to Being Human

Becoming the Best Bag of Bones You Can Be

Donna Bowman, Tripp Fuller

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781506405650
• eBook ISBN:
  9781506405667
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

This Homebrewed Christianity Guide explores how Christian theology can address our rapidly changing paradigms of human existence. Donna Bowman argues that theology can contribute to our knowledge of the human self as gained through the sciences, that a theological perspective on humanity is useful in contemporary pluralistic and global settings, and that there’s theological significance to work and play. She also tackles issues of gender, sexuality, creativity, and human expression--with jokes!

It’s no longer possible to assign definitive meaning to categories like man and woman, self and society, freedom and determinism, reason and feeling, soul and body by reference to systems of narrative (including biblical narrative) and interpretation in which those ideas are taken for granted. The theology of human personhood begins with irreducible experiences both universal and particular and searches for functional understandings from the whole range of Christian and non-Christian ways of knowing. Plus, jokes!

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I Didn’t Ask to Be Born

If you have a teenager, you may have heard it shouted through a recently slammed door. If you have been a teenager, the voice shouting was probably your own. Even if you didn’t say it out loud, you thought it.

“I didn’t ask to be born!”

It’s the cry of a human being asked to shoulder responsibility. The feeling that you missed the sign-up sheet going around, but somebody added your name anyway. This is America, man! What about freedom of choice? How can I be made to do something just because I happen to exist?

Quite the wail of teenage angst. Easy to laugh at if you’re childless (or have tucked away embarrassing memories of your own angsty past deep in an underground salt cave of your psyche). Easy to roll your eyes at, if you live in the same house with one of those creatures (or haven’t sanded your self-awareness down to a nubbin).

Guilty as charged. I have yelled it at my parents, BUT I am glad God didn’t take me seriously and undo my arrival.

But it’s actually a really good observation. None of us asked for the life we were handed. Sometimes we feel lucky with what’s been bestowed upon us. Sometimes it’s a burden. For almost all the conditions that shaped us, though—era, location, family, race, class, gender, sexual orientation, social circles and communities—we didn’t choose. All of it was just pitched into this backpack that we can never take off.

#NoteToSelf Use the backpack image in youth group.

We don’t start out with anything close to a blank slate. Before we’re even storing our first long-term memories or learning that Mommy isn’t gone forever because she’s left our line of sight, we are loaded down with baggage. All those experiences are dictated to us—whether we’re spanked or time-outed, Ferberized in the crib or attached to co-sleepers, fed corn syrup in a thousand tasty forms or trained to eat our veggies.

“Free to be you and me” means, in large measure, that the choice we have over who we are is the choice of how to respond to what we didn’t choose. You can lie on your therapist’s couch and rail at your dad who spent too much time at the office, or at your mom who punished you after you wet the bed. But you can’t erase any of that or what it did to you. You can only learn to recognize its effects and deal with it in some relatively healthy, nondestructive way.

I wish I learned that before I became a parent. It’s a truly freeing insight.

And that goes double for all the givens of your life that you don’t experience directly, but that lie hidden in the structure of the neighborhoods and institutions and economies you navigate as a native. The way the world deals with you in light of those givens, and the choices available to you because of them, grant you level-ups in some stats but nerf other parts of your profile—sometimes permanently.

As a Southern white woman whose parents were well-off enough to give me a prep-school education in the seventies and eighties, I’ve arrived at a place where I get to write books about theology! But I’d like to see me try it from a starting point in the 1930s. Or in an inner-city public school. Or with black or Hispanic people in my family tree. Sure, none of that absolutely dictates what I do with my life. But it greases some hinges and deadbolts some gates. My life path will look far different based on what paved roads and what barbed-wire fences I encounter. Some will invite me, some will reroute me, and some, maybe, I’ll laboriously work around—just to get to where someone else already has been welcomed, based on the circumstances of a birth she, too, didn’t ask for.

In other words, I don’t get to construct my life from scratch. I build with preexisting materials, some sturdy, some crumbling and unreliable, and some downright unusable, like pieces of a different jigsaw puzzle that got mixed into my box. Would I have a shot at a better self if I got a cosmic request form that allowed the stork to take my preferences into account? Maybe not; my judgment about what’s good for me is built on top of those prefab components, after all. It’s as suspect as my favorite ice cream flavor (boring and predictable) or my adolescent taste in romantic partners (predictable in an oncoming-trainwreck kind of way, but certainly not boring).

But God isn’t so constrained. When we say that God isn’t limited like us mortals, one of the things we mean is that God is free in ways that we are not. We can’t save ourselves because of those constraints on our freedom. A God with the power to save us is free in precisely the places where we find ourselves helpless to help ourselves.

Beautiful!

To be honest, the Bible isn’t exactly clear on this point. You’ve got the early material in the Pentateuch where God appears to be reacting to the world with some surprise, rather than, ya know, exercising sovereignty over it. Yes, hymns to God’s freedom and power to enact the divine will are plentiful in biblical poetry. But some of the folks who tried to make sense of their times in terms of what God was up to—like the Gospel and Epistle writers of the Christian Bible—come close to saying that God, too, has to deal with the world the way God finds it, or at least with some rules that God can’t circumvent.

So the early Christians wrestled to understand God’s freedom in the light of human lack thereof. And what came out was the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo—“creation out of nothing.”

Ex Nihilo: Why Does It Matter?

It’s Advent season as I’m writing this. I’ve always been a choir nerd, and I love Christmas carols. Put those together and you’ve got one happy woman in the pews belting out the little-known third and fourth verses of some familiar holiday tunes. Buried in those lines is always some interesting theology—another bonus for me. I sometimes think about the unwitting folks who showed up for midnight Christmas Eve services, and how just singing a carol involves them in these ancient conversations about what we can and can’t say about God.

In “The First Noel,” for instance, verse 6 concludes the carol’s descriptions of folks paying tribute to the baby Jesus by urging us to praise the risen Lord in heaven. It deftly connects creation, Christmas, and Easter in 147 characters. Abbreviate the two “withs” and replace “one” with the numeral, and you can almost tweet it:

Then let us all with one accord
Sing praises to our heavenly Lord,
That hath made heaven and earth of naught,
And with his blood mankind has bought.

Choir nerds unite!

I looked up the hymn on one of those internet lyrics sites to make sure I was quoting it correctly, and I noticed there was an annotation on this verse, inviting me to click for an explanation of the last line; maybe for the commenter who provided the atonement theory in the annotation, that’s the phrase that preaches. But if I were an alien from Mars scouring this hymn for clues about this whole Christmas thing, I might also ask about the line just above it. “Made heaven and earth of naught”? Why the heck is that specified?

Well, because creation ex nihilo, making everything “of naught,” was thought by those early Christians to be (1) an expression referring to God’s ultimate power, and (2) a guarantee of God’s absolute freedom.

I knew not naught.

The first part, I think, is pretty well understood by most Christians who learned the orthodox doctrine of creation in Sunday school. Humans can make things, but we have to use existing materials. To have ultimate creative power, you would need the ability to bring matter/energy itself into existence. If we say God is all-powerful, then that has to be the type of power we mean. Anything less means we could imagine a being more powerful than God, and (according to this guy Anselm who thought he had a knock-down philosophical argument for God’s existence) that would mean that the God we’re talking about isn’t the ultimate God, but some lesser ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Series Introduction
• The Homebrewed Posse
• Humanity: Achievement Unlocked
• Are We Good or Bad?
• I Didn’t Ask to Be Born
• Jesus’ Brand of Human
• Horrible, Horrible Freedom
• Male and Female Created He Them
• Who Is This Versus?
• Why Are We Fighting? What For?
• Do You Matter?