by Ben Howard
As a writer who occasionally has opinions about Christianity I am required by divine fiat to have a definitive position on the issue of the afterlife. A footnote to this rule hastily added in recent years forces me to write about this topic at least once a year to stay in good standing with the (possibly imaginary) powers that be.
Now, before I dive into my very well thought-out, possibly genius, and definitely correct opinion, let me make one quick note: Almost all discussions about the afterlife are stupid, or at least whatever synonym of that word I need to use to both not insult the participants of the conversation and make it clear that I do not see the value in their thoughts on hell, heaven, or divine realms of puppies/ice cream/Backstreet Boys montages.
Clear? Good.
With that out of the way, I'd like to tell you my useless (but remember, totally correct) opinion. I believe in annihilationism.
If you're unfamiliar with annihilationism, be assured that you're not alone. While it was one of the beliefs about the nature of salvation and eternity that some of the Church Fathers subscribed to, it has been a minority view throughout history. At its essence, it bridges the gap between traditional beliefs in hell and universalism. There is no eternal conscious torment in annihilationism, but neither is eternal life granted to all. Instead of hell, those who are not saved are “annihilated,” which sounds a bit violent until you realize that it essentially means they die (like everybody else) and then stay dead instead of being resurrected.
To explain how I came to hold this position, let me discuss two things I hold as universal givens: sin and death. When I use the word sin, I don't mean sin as an individual’s actions or even habits and inclinations. Instead I use the word sin in a metaphysical sense, as the force that un-creates God's good creation. To my mind, this is the central crisis of the Christian story, creation vs. un-creation, existence vs. non-existence, with sin as the force which pushes us closer and closer towards the non-existent, un-created side of the equation. This act of un-creation ultimately results in death, not just the death of an individual, but the death of all existence, everything and everyone.
And while this may seem bleak, here's the kicker, in this telling of the story Christ's sacrifice doesn't save us from our sin. Instead he overcomes the consequences of our sin by resurrection and new creation. Resurrection and immortality are graciously bestowed on a grateful people rather than prizes earned by good behavior or gifts given to all without their desire or consent. Also, it eliminates the unjust punishment present in spending an eternity in hell for a finite number of crimes. We aren't punished for sin; we simply receive the natural consequences of our existence. We live and we die, just like everyone; there just isn't an infinity-length encore.
This belief is simply logical to me, it's clean and direct. It's a system wherein, if you believe in an afterlife, chances are you're right. If you don't believe in an afterlife, chances are you're right too. It treats everyone equally and we all experience the same fate for our actions. It's clear, it's to the point, and it's just.
It makes so much sense.
Which is why I'm also convinced it's completely wrong.
Think about your favorite book, or your favorite movie, or whatever fictional story happens to resonate with you. Think about how the story progresses, how it moves from point A to point B to point C, always laying down more narrative track following the route the author has laid out in advance. The author may even get a bit creative and jump around, perhaps it starts at point C and works backward, maybe it starts in the middle, exploring backstory as it goes, but it always tells an ordered story. If it's a good story you'll get little bits and pieces that explain the motivation of the characters, quick asides about their pasts, small scenes that further illuminate their personality, all of it building incrementally to the final climactic moments. All of it makes perfect sense.
But that's what fiction does; it makes sense.
In contrast, our own lives, our own stories, present us with a far less cohesive narrative structure. Of course order still holds sway over most areas of our lives, causes have their effects, questions have their answers, and crises have their resolutions, but there also exists something else: chaos. And chaos is what ushers in the unpredictability, it's what keeps things from being neatly arranged, ordered, tidy.
And it's the reason why, despite answering all the questions I may have about death and the afterlife, my own closely held beliefs are just too clean and orderly. They are fiction, not reality.
Yet I don't know what an accurate theory about the afterlife would look like with it's chaos-inflected jagged lines and logic-averse inner constructs. My mind recoils at the complexity such a theory would require, like trying to explain quantum mechanics to a child who has just mastered the ability to count to three. Reality exists to boggle the mind.
But we must believe something, and in the end I believe what I believe, all the while uncertain and almost entirely convinced that what I believe is wholly incorrect. And with this uncertainty come the seeds of humility, not fully developed, but growing, slowly. The ability to listen to others, who I'm convinced are just as wrong as I, and respond with a modicum of grace.
Universalism? No, but maybe.
Hell? No, but maybe.
Aliens? No...but maybe?
Ben
Howard is an accidental iconoclast and generally curious individual
living in Nashville, Tennessee. He is also the editor-in-chief of On Pop
Theology and an avid fan of waving at strangers for no reason. You can
follow him on Twitter @BenHowardOPT.
You can follow On Pop Theology on Twitter @OnPopTheology or like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/OnPopTheology. If you'd like to support what we do here, you can donate via the button on the right of the screen.
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by Ben Howard
The first post I wrote for this website is a mess. The writing is stilted and repetitive. The thesis is obvious and uninteresting, and even if it wasn’t, I don’t explain the premise enough for anyone who isn’t reading my mind to understand what’s going on.
But I hit publish anyway, because that’s what you do, even if you’re naïve about what you’re sending out into the world. And then I hit publish the next day, and the next, and again a few days after that. And then a friend wrote a post for me, and then another, and another. And I’d like to think the writing got a little better, the ideas a little sharper, the jokes a little tighter, and the whole thing a good bit more intriguing.
Today is our 500th post at On Pop Theology and it also happens to be our 2nd birthday. In the two years since the site launched, we’ve published somewhere around 280,000 words (that’s about five books’ worth of writing), and recorded around 30 hours worth of podcasts. I’m really proud of the work we’ve done and excited about the trajectory we’re traveling, and really just kind of exhausted when I look back at it all.
I can’t say enough about the amazing friends I’ve met so far; the brilliant, thoughtful, hilarious, and creative people that have worked with us over the last two years. You inspire me.
I can’t say thank you enough to our readers and listeners. I hope you stick around and I hope we keep being worth your time.
Finally, I can confidently say this site would have stopped long ago if it wasn’t for the continued support and diligence of my friend and editor Sebastian Faust. Almost every word you read on this site has gone through his hands at least once, and he’s kept me from going insane at least a half-dozen times.
The core idea at the center of OPT has always been creativity and experimentation. We want to create a space where you can take an idea out and play with it, bounce it around, joke about it, poke holes in it, have fun with it. It has always been about ideas at play, embracing your weirdness, and in the process coming to a better understanding of who we are.
We have a lot of dreams for OPT in the future. Some of them will come to fruition, some won’t, and I have a hunch that we haven’t even dreamed our very best yet. We’re excited to keep experimenting, keep creating, keep joking, and we want to keep having fun. We hope you’re ready to dive into the theological deep end. ;)
Ben
Howard is an accidental iconoclast and generally curious individual
living in Nashville, Tennessee. He is also the editor-in-chief of On Pop
Theology and an avid fan of waving at strangers for no reason. You can
follow him on Twitter @BenHoward87.
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by Ben Howard
I know I’ve been good at hiding it, but I must confess that I’ve been in mourning this week. I lost something that was very close to me, something that brought me joy and laughter, something that I regarded it as a friend for the last five years.
NBC cancelled Community.
You’ve probably heard about this already because you probably have that one friend who loved Community to an annoying degree and would never shut up about it and it kind of ticked you off. Or maybe you heard about it because you’re reading this on the internet, which is apparently the only place in the universe that Community was popular at all. #sixseasonsandamovie
But this is also the week for a lot of other news about the future of your TV consumption. This week came with announcements about future seasons of Nashville and Hannibal, the pick-up of new shows like The Flash, Gotham, and Agent Carter, and the end of several shows you never knew the names of (which is why they’re now cancelled). All of these announcements, including the cancellation of Community, are part of network Upfronts.
If you’ve never heard of Upfronts before, here’s a quick primer. Every year around this time, the major broadcast networks (NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, and, curiously, The CW) unveil their new fall TV schedule in a series of elaborate press conferences designed to convince advertisers to purchase commercial time during all their new and returning shows. (And if you were born after 1990, a “commercial” is a short-film that used to show up all the time during moments of dramatic tension where someone would try to convince you to buy something.)
This year, something particularly interesting happened at Upfronts. Fox broke the mold for the way broadcast networks usually make TV shows. Fox stopped making pilots. Or at least, they stopped making a lot of them.
The process of getting a TV show to air is a rather long and arduous one. Networks pick from maybe 100 or 200 concept pitches and order pilot scripts for the shows they think sound promising. Any given network might order 50 or more scripts from which they’ll choose a few dozen to cast and shoot an actual episode. From this group of 20 to 25 pilots, they’ll select 5 or 6 new shows to air every year.
As you can probably imagine, producing all of these scripts and all of these pilots, is a rather expensive, not to mention inefficient, proposition. TV history is littered with highly-anticipated, expensive, star-studded pilots that never made it to air. Just in the last three years, there were pilots shot for Wonder Woman starring Adrianne Palicki (Tyra from Friday Night Lights), Beverly Hills Cop with Eddie Murphy, and just this year, a How I Met Your Mother spin-off called How I Met Your Dad headlined by indie darling Greta Gerwig. None of these shows made it to air.
But this year, Fox has adopted the cable model of making TV shows. You find a concept you really, really love. You give the creators a ton of time and money and a room full of writers and you let them hone their script and characters and vision for a show, a process of refining the material again and again until it’s finally ready to shoot. This is the process that produced Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and Game of Thrones among others.
And it’s a better process. It allows for focus and precision and dedication. It allows for depth, vision, and the opportunity for something like transcendence. That’s a lot harder to come by when you’re working in bulk, churning out dozens of rough drafts, and just hoping that something sticks.
This is the place where I would usually spin this into a metaphor for the church, for how we interact with each other in daily life, how dedication and focus on relationships matter. And while I do indeed find it to be an apt metaphor, I think you’ve probably already made those connections on your own without needing me to spell it out.
Instead, I want to point out something else entirely. Even though this is a definitively better process, it does not guarantee success. Even a good show with a lot of resources behind it can fall flat in the ratings like Terriers did a few years back on FX. Nor, for that matter, does this process guarantee quality. Smart, talented people can still put out a bad show like AMC did with Low Winter Sun. A better process, even the best process, is not a guarantee; there is no silver bullet.
But we want there to be. We prefer the logic that the perfect process will yield the perfect result (we have entire industries built on that premise), and we’re conditioned to assume that if we can just get the process right, the rest will fall into place. But that conditioning tricks us; if we expect success to flow systematically from process, we see failures as indictments of the whole system. We link them so closely that they sink or swim together. We base our assessment of the whole enterprise on the narrative of results.
Except results are prone to all sorts of uncontrollable circumstances, they are dependent on the relative nature of time and space and chance, things we couldn’t control even if we wanted to. And that’s why it’s so crucial to focus on a good process, the kind that allows for commitment and thoughtfulness. The kind we can believe in that makes room for new ideas, better ideas, and allows us to follow their call and see where they lead.
It doesn’t guarantee us success (whatever success might mean) and it doesn’t guarantee us quality, but it does give us a better shot. It allows us to be focused and dedicated. It allows us to have depth and vision. And maybe, just maybe, the opportunity for something like transcendence.
Ben
Howard is an accidental iconoclast and generally curious individual
living in Nashville, Tennessee. He is also the editor-in-chief of On Pop
Theology and an avid fan of waving at strangers for no reason. You can
follow him on Twitter @BenHoward87.
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by Ben Howard
Time is, in a very real sense, a trap.
Contrary to constant proclamations and reminders about the need to stay “in the moment” or to “live in the present,” reality stubbornly presents us with no real alternative.
We are always here. We are always in the now and for good or ill there is no escape from this context.
In his book Eating the Dinosaur Chuck Klosterman includes an essay about time travel. As part of his exploration into this narrative conceit he discusses his own metaphor for the way time operates. He describes time as a train with one person hanging off the front and another hanging off the back. The person hanging off the front is constantly laying down the piece of track to be used in the next moment, while the person hanging off the back is picking up the track that's just been used.
Both past and future exist only as mental constructs. Presents gone and presents still to come.
And that constant movement, that constant shift from moment to moment, from now to now, it pulls a trick on us all.
If you ever want an object lesson on why predicting the future is a stupid endeavor just listen to political podcasts from two years ago. Or a year ago. Or even six months ago.
There is no hilarity like a full-throated and certain prediction of an impending Mitt Romney presidency. Nor is there anything as cringe-worthy as a haughty assurance that Congress would never force a government shutdown or hearing it described as almost inevitable that President Obama will pass gun control legislation, or at the very least, immigration reform.
Of course it's not the fault of the pundits. They are working on a deadline and they get neither the aid of hindsight or enough time for reflection before they're asked to explain what all this “means” and tell a waiting public how everything will work out. It is their job to know the future before it happens. And it's a job that's beyond us all.
It's not fair to judge the words of the past in the reality of the present. Time is a trap.
Last week World Vision USA announced it would hire employees in same-sex marriages. Support flooded the internet, but outrage flooded it even more. Eventually money spoke and the decision was reversed. The narrative has been repeated ad nauseum.
Many people have written about the reasons for these decisions and what symbolic meaning we can take both from the policy change and its subsequent reversal. You should read them, they are interesting and instructive. This essay is not about those decisions or that symbolic meaning.
This essay is about why you will forget it.
They say time heals all wounds. This is true. This is true, sort of.
As time moves on, our memories blur. Hurts become less painful and joys become less pleasurable. And while we can say that time is healing these hurts, these cuts and bumps and bruises, it's not entirely accurate. It's rather that we assimilate them. They become a part of us and change us ever so slightly. The jagged edge of immediacy is smoothed out and we are left with a new configuration of ourselves, but one we have already become familiarized with during the slow healing process. We change, but we do not realize we are changing.
In one month, two months, six months, a year, no one will recall the World Vision controversy into which we've invested so much over the last two weeks. It will be little more than an anecdote, a footnote to the debate over gay marriage and the culture war raging within Christianity.
It will have entirely lost its symbolic place as either the death knell of evangelicalism (or its resurgence depending on your perspective). I invite you to revisit these blogs and tweets and Facebook posts a year from now; they will seem myopic and over-blown. It will feel like they exist in a different world.
This is not to say that it meant nothing. The fights were real and so was the hurt. The betrayal was true. But in time the wounds will no longer be as fresh, they may even “heal,” but they will leave slightly different people in their wake.
And this is the real trauma. It's not the death of a movement or the mass exodus of millennials. It's only slightly about gay marriage and equal rights.
The real trauma is that this will exist as one more jagged little paper cut. One more scarred-over battle-wound leaving us increasingly desensitized, increasingly prepared for combat, increasingly on the lookout for enemies from without and within.
In time, this will be yet another moment that affects us and changes us ever so slightly. So slightly that we don't even realize it as we become hard and cynical, as we begin once again to view “other” as synonymous with “enemy.”
Look out, it's a trap.
Ben
Howard is an accidental iconoclast and generally curious individual
living in Nashville, Tennessee. He is also the editor-in-chief of On Pop
Theology and an avid fan of waving at strangers for no reason. You can
follow him on Twitter @BenHoward87.
You might also like:
by Ben Howard
This week on the show Ben, Sebastian and Jesse tackle the topic of
villains. What makes a villain? Why do we create villains? Do we need
villains to be able to understand ourselves? They'll talk about the
villainy of Fred Phelps, Stalin and Hitler, as well as whether Batman
would be a villain if he existed in real life. Also, Ben and Sebastian
will share about the Mark Driscoll sermon they watched and the whole
crew will share historically mundane moments in villainy.
You can download the podcast by clicking here.
Or you can subscribe to the podcast by searching "On Pop Theology" in
the iTunes music store. If you like the show, please rate and
review us on iTunes. It's the first step in our secret mission to take over the world.
Finally, if you'd like to stream the podcast, you can do that here:
Peace,
Ben
You can follow On Pop Theology on Twitter @OnPopTheology or like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/OnPopTheology. If you'd like to support what we do, you can donate via the button on the right of the screen.
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by Ben Howard and Sebastian Faust
There's
a lot of misinformation in the world today. Some argue that's simply
the nature of the internet and the democratization of information
itself. A lot of websites exist to fight the good fight in an attempt to
right these factual wrongs and a well-informed public is thankful for
them.
But we're not one of those websites. So with the fundamental ethos of the
internet in mind, we bring you A Series of Outright Lies About Millennials.
1) The mascot of the millennial generation is an ocelot named Baby Joshua who spends his days half drunk on artisinal whiskey. He lives on a front porch on what used to be the bad side of town and he marches in the annual Arbor Day parade.
2) The Tea Party rise to power is actually attributable to the votes of millennials who thought they were “just kidding around.”
3) All children of the millennial generation are robots sent from the future by Skynet. After the failure of the Terminators, Skynet decided that force was unnecessary and that society could be more efficiently destroyed by ennui and lowered expectations.
4) This list is completely organic and was raised on a free-range list farm.
5) Millennials ironically love Pauly Shore so much that it has been known to raise his core body temperature as much as two degrees.
6) If you're a millennial, you read this list before it ever existed in my mind and have therefore destroyed the fabric of space and time and pose a danger to us all. Please stop reading.
7) Why are you still reading this? Your reckless disregard for humanity has doomed us all to non-existence.
8) You prick.
9) A majority of millennials are cynical about the potential future of the world. When asked about this cynicism, the generation responded that they were both fully aware of the problems and felt like they were capable of solutions, but they were just really tired and had been meaning to catch up on Orange Is The New Black.
10) The real reason that millennials have been leaving the church is because empty churches are just, like, you know, cooler.
11) While this list was raised in an upper middle class environment, it speaks on behalf of the entire generation. It is capable of this feat because it once took a women's studies class and has watched The Wire at least three times.
12) Many researchers have speculated that if Zack Galifianakis were to ever achieve full self-awareness he would unlock the understanding of the entire generation. May the day come quickly. Namaste.
13) In the two minutes you've spent reading this list, 144 craft beers have been invented and that one smug friend of yours has tasted all of them.
14) In a unique moment of cultural appropriation, the demographic group known as the Nones have decided to don habits and live in convents. There is no word on whether or not they have begun to hit each other with rulers.
Ben
Howard is an accidental iconoclast and generally curious individual
living in Nashville, Tennessee. He is also the editor-in-chief of On Pop
Theology and an avid fan of waving at strangers for no reason. You can
follow him on Twitter @BenHoward87.
Sebastian Faust is an avowed heretic, armchair theologian, and
a self-styled canary in the coal mine of pop culture. He takes life by
the reins, bulls by the horns, and tigers by the tail, all while living
in Nashville. You can't follow Sebastian on Twitter because he doesn't
understand technology.
You can follow On Pop Theology on Twitter @OnPopTheology or like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/OnPopTheology. If you'd like to support what we do, you can donate via the button on the right of the screen.
Image Credit to Mark and Andrea Busse
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by Ben Howard
This week on the show Ben talks to Hannah Ettinger and Connor Park about
the new magazine and online art gallery The Swan Children. The Swan
Children was released last week and features the creative works of
artists who grew up in the homeschool, Quiverfull, and conservative
Christian communities. First, we talked to Hannah about the the idea
behind the magazine and the projects genesis. We also discussed her
hopes for The Swan Children and the ideas the magazine is trying to
foster. Then we talked to Connor about his role as Editor-In-Chief and
some background information on the homeschool movement.
You can find The
Swan Children online at swanchildrenmag.com and on Twitter @swanchildren.
You can download the podcast by clicking here.
Or you can subscribe to the podcast by searching "On Pop Theology" in
the iTunes music store. If you like the show, please rate and
review us on iTunes. It's the first step in our secret mission to take over the world.
Finally, if you'd like to stream the podcast, you can do that here:
Peace,
Ben
You can follow On Pop Theology on Twitter @OnPopTheology or like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/OnPopTheology. If you'd like to support what we do, you can donate via the button on the right of the screen.
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by Ben Howard
Come as you are/As you were/As I want you to be
It’s meant to be inviting.
And I’m sure it’s well-intentioned. For all their sins, churches are certainly well-intentioned when they invite strangers to come and join them. It’s a kindness. They’ve found something that gives them comfort, and hope, and peace. It’s downright neighborly that they’d invite you to come in and find the same. And they don’t want you to feel uncomfortable, they want to be accepting and hospitable, they just want you to feel welcome. They just want you to come as you are.
It’s an innocuous phrase really. It’s one of those phrases that just rolls off the tongue, the kind of phrase that was already a catchphrase before anyone ever coined it. It’s the kind of phrase that means well.
But then you dig deeper; you start to think about it a bit more. You start to fill out a conversation that might include the words, “Come as you are.” And that phrase becomes a bit more menacing, a bit more passive-aggressive:
Come as you are…because we can handle it.
Come as you are…before it’s too late.
Even you can come as you are.
Come doused in mud/Soaked in bleach/As I want you to be
It’s not easy to walk into a church for the first time. There are the unfamiliar surroundings and the unfamiliar people. Depending on the situation, there are unfamiliar songs and unfamiliar rituals. You're in a rather powerless situation.
And there are expectations; expectations about who you are and why you’re there, especially when you “come as you are.”
I remember the stereotype with which, when I was growing up, I subconsciously tagged each new person in church: They must be broken. They must have realized how broken they are. They must want something better.
They must want what we have.
It didn’t matter if they were wearing a nice suit, or a t-shirt. It didn’t matter if they came alone or with their smiling family, didn’t matter if they lived in a dingy apartment or a McMansion on the nice side of town. They all need what we had.
We had the good stuff, and they wanted in.
And that's a problem. That kind of invitational stance, that nod towards hospitality, is not only superior, but it comes laden with expectations. By telling the people of the church, the people who are supposed to be expressing love and acceptance, that the people they meet are both fragile and aspirational, it convinces the church that this is the moment to mold them and shape them and change them. It says that they’ve disposed of the old and that they want to embrace new life; your version of new life, to be precise.
And I swear that I don’t have a gun/No I don’t have a gun/No I don’t have a gun
A church should always strive to be welcoming. There is no doubt that hospitality is a wonderful thing and that it’s an essential virtue for a community to foster. But like humility it’s a soft and subtle virtue. It’s not an attribute you can claim. Instead, someone gifts you with their acknowledgement, they tell you if you’re being welcoming, you don’t tell them.
Of course, this makes it very difficult to authentically market yourself as a welcoming community.
When hospitality meets marketing it reads as smarm, and it comes across like the community in question has something to hide, something that would make the unbiased observer think they weren’t welcoming.
Perhaps the biggest hurdle for the “Come as you are” church, even more than the implied superiority and unstated expectations, is that it protests too much.
“Come as you are” makes me immediately wonder why someone would feel the need to reassure me. Is it dangerous that I should simply be myself when I cross the threshold of the church doors? Why are you telling me that it’s okay to be myself?
I don’t think there’s any true malice behind those words. If there was, I don’t think it would have become as universalized as it has. But it’s important to unpack the loaded nature of the seemingly innocuous things that we say. It’s vital to understand the implications and expectations we build into our simple, billboard worthy turns of phrase.
Even when it’s the kind of phrase that means well.
Ben
Howard is an accidental iconoclast and generally curious individual
living in Nashville, Tennessee. He is also the editor-in-chief of On Pop
Theology and an avid fan of waving at strangers for no reason. You can
follow him on Twitter @BenHoward87.
You might also like:
by Ben Howard
Sebastian and Ben settle in for a discussion about the Winter Olympics
in Sochi. They'll discuss some serious topics about whether the Olympics
are a form of embodied theology, as well as the political and economic
realities of hosting the Olympic Games and whether bake sales are the solution. They'll also broach far less serious ideas such as what sports
they'd like to see in the next Winter Olympics and why Sebastian thought
Cool Runnings wasn't real. Also, look out for the introduction of
Jeremy St. Madrigal, our resident Prophet of the End Times.
You can download the podcast by clicking here.
Or you can subscribe to the podcast by searching "On Pop Theology" in
the iTunes music store. If you like the show, please rate and
review us on iTunes. It's the first step in our secret mission to take over the world.
Finally, if you'd like to stream the podcast, you can do that here:
Peace,
Ben
You can follow On Pop Theology on Twitter @OnPopTheology or like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/OnPopTheology. If you'd like to support what we do, you can donate via the button on the right of the screen.
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