Ubuntu, but not the Linux

I've been thinking a lot about how faith inspires action lately, how faith and action seem synonymous when that faith is in Jesus and his commands. Jared N. Miller lays it out wonderfully here. And peruse the rest of his blog while you're at it. It's worth it.

The Mixing Pan

Random train of thought this morning on my way to catch a bus to Gulu: According to a new billboard the PAM Awards are back in Kampala soon. They are annual music awards, and this is the second round since I've been in Uganda. It's strange that annual events here are no longer new.

The PAM in PAM Awards stands for Pan-African Music. I was wondering if that meant all-African so I thought about other words with the prefix 'pan.' The first that came to mind was pantheism. The belief that God is everything, or everything is God. So, yes, 'pan' means all, and well done Uganda on hosting such broad music awards.

Then back to pantheism, and its close relation panentheism - the belief that God is in everything. Then I wondered at the distinction, what it actually meant. If God is in everything then isn't everything, in a sense, God? And if God is everything, then isn't God de facto in everything? And so I wondered if the distinction held any relevance in the actual beliefs of people. Hindus might say that God, or Brahman, is in everything, as might Buddhists. But they might also say that everything is Brahman, everything is a working out of God, and everything will eventually settle into its eternal state as Brahman. It seems that Hinduism and and the Buddhism that it spawned are mixtures or overlaps of the theoretical distinctions of pan- and panentheism.

And then I wondered about monotheism, the belief that God is unique and separate, and perhaps even personal. Could there possibly be overlap with the broad, transcendent God of Hinduism? I think there may be some, especially when Christians speak of being created in the image of God. If you listen to Christians talk about that heritage, you'll often find that it holds deeper meaning to many than just a family resemblance. You'll find that it imparts value, significance, unalienable rights, even glory. It's almost as if they believe that there's a little bit of God inside them, like the Buddhists.

So then I thought about all the theoretical distinctions that we make to order our existence, to make sense of the ceaseless variety of our experiences, thoughts, beliefs and wonderings, and I wondered whether many of those might mix and overlap as well. I thought they probably did.

Then on the bus, waiting for it to leave the hot, noisy Kampala bus park, I was reading Barack Obama's book The Audacity of Hope. He wrote in the first chapter about how the distinctions between Republican and Democrat are often more blurred than not in the minds of individual voters. Like the Christian mother who pays for her teen daughter's abortion, or the midwestern factory worker who favors tax cuts for the rich, because that's what he plans to be someday. My politics are similar. I haven't been able to work out which party most closely aligns with my own ideas, mostly because their polarized rhetoric doesn't seem to apply to daily decision making. There is no room in their politics for overlap.

As I write I'm reminded of Christian denominations - theoretical constructs with thin differences to which adherents align their beliefs. But I would guess that the actual (as opposed to rhetorical) faith of individual believers across denominations blurs as much as not, and is more similar than different.

I bet it's like that with a lot of beliefs - evolutionists who pray, Christians who sit cross-legged and meditate, republicans who don't mind same sex marriage, individuals whose ideas are more nuanced than the labels that they're stuck with.

Faith Alone

The faith of James – not me, but the one who wrote part of the New Testament – was a faith of praxis. It was a faith of action. It was a faith of doing what Jesus said, changing everything in the ways Jesus extolled. Because Jesus’ message was a message of action. It was a description of the right way to live. Right then. And right now.

Faith without works is dead. Because if someone says you have to jump, and you don't jump, you don't believe him.