Follow Up: Models Quiz

If you took the quiz in my previous post and are wondering what your results mean, go here to get a brief sketch of the 5 models of church described by Dulles. I wrote about a couple of them in my last post, but haven't gotten around to describing all of them.

Models of Church & Quiz

What is your model of Church? Here's a quiz that is based on the categories of church in Avery Dulles' book Models of Church.

You opinion of church, and your expectations, assumptions and levels of satisfaction (or not), may depend on the model of church you are operating under. If you see the church in judicial terms--as an authoritarian parent--you may either be easily disgusted or hold fast to absolute rules & regulations in response. According to Dulles, this would be in line with an "institutional" model. Whether you accept or reject the church on these terms, you are operating under the same model.

If you have a "mystical communion" model (which is how I tested), you may see church in more loose terms as a rag-tag, wayward bunch of people thrown together by the spirit of Christ, in all forms and with all sorts of baggage.

Its like how Bruce Springsteen described his E Street Band in the recent eulogy of organist Danny Federici:

"If we didn't play together, the E Street Band at this point would probably not know one another. We wouldn't be in this room together. But we do... We do play together. And every night at 8 p.m., we walk out on stage together and that, my friends, is a place where miracles occur...old and new miracles. And those you are with, in the presence of miracles, you never forget. Life does not separate you. Death does not separate you. Those you are with who create miracles for you, like Danny did for me every night, you are honored to be amongst."

To me, that is church. People who wouldn't otherwise be together, but yet for some strange reason, we are on this ship together, perhaps lost at sea, yet united under a purpose. You've got your businessman, your teenybopper. You got the married couple and the captain, and the skipper. You got people who want to be there, people who are just along for the ride, some there to pick up women or with ulterior motives, and others who don't know what they are doing. Yet, we're all simply . . . there. We belong and we participate because somehow, someway, we are on a mission together. Whether this group makes rules and regulations or develops a hierarchy of leadership doesn't matter as much as the fact that our togetherness is the most critical element defining our existence as a group--and the "force" that has brought us together.

By some strange, mystical reason, we are in communion with each other--hence "mystical communion." Agreeing with the leadership or following the rules isn't as strong in this model as in the institutional model. The grace of God putting us together and in which we live and work is the driving force in this model. In the institutional model, following rules and making professions of faith are absolute requirements for membership itself.

A lot of Catholics see Church as "family"--we were born into it, we belong, like it or not. That's a model I'd add to the conversation. Dulles has three other models of church that he explores in his book, besides the two above.

So far, this has been an outstanding book, and I'm only a chapter-and-a-half into it.

Church Authority

It is very easy to get upset by a church that declares it has authority to know theological matters or to be the judge of this or that. It just doesn't sit well with the modern, western mind, and often for good reason.

What right does a church have to claim authority in anything, especially since theological understandings of God are quite obviously mystery to everyone?

Avery Dulles makes some good points about this in his book Models of Church (I draw heavily on his ideas in his first chapter in this post). The very fact that theological and spiritual matters are mystery is actually key, in his view. Mysteries are a form of knowledge that cannot be empirically determined. You can't reproduce an experiment to yield a conclusive answer. Neither is a single person going to sit in their private bunker and "figure it all out". However, somehow the collective understandings of a body of people in a church are able to come to a somewhat reliable (but flexible) understanding.

"Family"

The way I see it, it is like trying to come up with a definition of the word "family." You can do it, but no definition is ever really going to cover all the bases. "Family" is something that has to be experienced, and in a way, no outsider can truly be the best judge. How can you walk into my life and say that my friendships with this person or that meet the criteria for family or not? You 'have to be there' to hope to make a reliable judgment.

We all have an inner understanding of what family is. For some, it may be as simple as a blood line. That's it. cut and dried, black and white. For others, "family" has more to do with the spirit of the brotherhood. From this perspective, bloodline or not, you have to act, feel and behave like family in order to merit the title. Thus, if a certain spirit is there, we can say that "family" is there.

But where do you draw the line? When do you say that one group of people is a family, but another group isn't? You can't write up a formula about it that measures every possible condition. But if you have a large enough group of people, they can probably come to an understanding that is somewhat reliable for making a pronouncement on a given situation.

In a sense, this is what church authority is--the collective understanding about things that are not easily defined, but sort of instinctively known. The individual is not always the best judge acting by themselves, but an individual can and must weigh in. It is not a collective decision if individuals are not participating. But an individual should not think that they are going to run the show, either. The combined wisdom of countless people through countless generations forms a picture that has a certain amount of authority to it.

Conflicts Between the Individual and the Church

So then what does an individual do when their views clash with the established group understanding?

Obviously theologies change over time, even in large churches with long histories (perhaps especially so). A church cannot change unless someone comes out and proposes something that is in conflict with current ideas. Reform is thus a natural and healthy part of the process. So the contributions of individuals can and do affect this change.

The process whereby change happens is a delicate one. You cannot expect a church to bend to your will. But it would be wrong for a church body to be completely inflexible to individual contributions and overall developments and evolutions. The proposed reforms have got to resonate with the people in order to be valid. They've got to peculate deep into the community, and then brew back out. It can be a long and frustrating process.

It is hard to know what to do when as a private person you have insights that differ from the church you belong to. What do you do with that? You can submit to church authority. You can rebel and leave the church. You can ignore the items you disagree with. You can play along.

You can act "as if" this church knows best, even if you are not yet able to understand why. This is sometimes an important thing to do (key word: "sometimes"). It is easy in our modern world to assume that past theological insights of the church are ridiculous given the non-scientific nature of people in Biblical times or early Christianity. But spiritual insight is not linear, so it differs considerably from scientific knowledge. You can't simply say that people from the past were not advanced enough to know best. The fact that we can continually draw from the wisdom of the ancients through the Bible and other texts is a pure "testament" to this fact. Some things needed to evolve, but the capacity for wisdom back then is unquestioned, even in light of many social considerations that we would simply not have room for today (slavery, genocide, etc).

So therefore it is always important to defer at least to some degree to the collective wisdom that has come down the pipe. It is shows a spiritual immaturity to think that a 33 year old living in Columbus, OH, with my varied but hopelessly limited experience just somehow "gets it" more than the millions of people who came before me in countless cultures and generations of history. I have often felt that many parts of the church were stupid only to be deeply impressed when I actually did a sophisticated study. But yet, there have been reforms, breakaway movements, some of it unfairly suppressed, so its not like the orthodox church authority is always a clean and clear, open decision. But yet, to think that all these people didn't have a clue but _I_ do is just silly.

But what do you do when the collective wisdom declares itself to have absolute authority? Does that have merit? What do you do when the collective wisdom believes it is important to suppress other ideas? Is that truth talking or fear talking?

Book of Job

I think the Book of Job can lend some insight to this. Like Job, we need to have the integrity to respect our own thoughts. Job sat with his sickness telling him one thing and his religious tradition telling him another. His life experience told him that he was a righteous man, but in the theology of his day, it was believed that he must have been sinful to warrant his physical suffering. And he sat there in tension between these conflicting thoughts.

He did not throw either of them out, entirely. He could not reconcile his experience with what his faith tradition was telling him, and he passionately spoke out. The people around him like his wife and his "friends" were picking sides. Job did not. He hung in there. He did not blindly defer to his church tradition, nor did he completely toss it out in favor of his personal theology. There is a model for faithfulness there, as Job was the one who "spoke rightly" about God and he was the one who was ultimately rewarded with a transformative experience of God.

The Fruit Effect

You may remember that I don't like fruit. It actually surprises me how people dive into a bowl of strawberries or knock down a bunch of bananas in a single sitting. Here I am forcing down a single banana intentionally for my health, and they can't seem to stop.

So I made a conscious choice to eat more fruit--it just doesn't seem right to avoid an entire food group, even if my body doesn't seem to want it. And the change has been rather successful. I probably eat 4-6 servings of whole fruit each week. That may not seem like much to you people who can enjoy a whole case of strawberries in a single sitting, but this has been a substantial change for a person who could previously go a year without eating fruit and never notice the absence.

So what has been the net effect?

I must clarify--I used to gorge myself on fruit juices. Even though I ate no solid fruits, I would drink ridiculous amounts of 100% fruit juice. I stocked the larder to capacity with bottles and bottles of it. Orange, apple and cranberry were favorites, but so were others. When I started eating whole fruit, I stopped drinking so much juice. I still make sure to have a tall glass of OJ in the morning and often re-hydrate in the hot summer with juice, but the amount has significantly gone down. You could say I gained some fruit in my diet and lost some. However, it was probably a net gain since I am now eating all the fiber and pulp. So it wasn't entirely accurate to say that I ate no fruit--just no whole fruit.

I also noticed that my vegetable consumption has gone down with my increase in fruit. I absolutely love vegetables, especially cooked. Stir fries, soup, stews, you name it, bring on the veggies and then bring more. But lately I just don't eat as much of it.

I gravitate toward a diet that has pretty equal servings between meats, starches and fruit/vegetables. There is a natural equilibrium that I can't seem to shake, and maybe I shouldn't.

Let's say that for lunch I eat a sandwich. It has meat, bread and a number of vegetable fixin's (lettuce, tomato, etc). My awareness of the ingredients in this sandwich will be largely dependent on what I ate in the previous meal. If I had two eggs for breakfast (as a high protein, "meat" meal), I'll be very much tuned in to the bread and veggies in my lunch sandwich. If I ate a starchy oatmeal breakfast, then I'll be looking forward to the meat in the lunch sandwich more than the bread--I'll think about it before the meal and taste it more while eating it. Over the course of the day, amounts will balance out.

So has there really been a net effect of forcing myself to eat more fruit? I think so. I'm eating just as much fruits and veggies, but I'm getting more of them in whole form and less through juice. I'm eating more raw foods. My veggies have gone, but I end up with a more diverse diet than before. I'd say diversity is better than anything when it comes to fruits and vegetables.

Jesus Died For You (now go eat lunch)

"Jesus Died For You"

I always hated this line about Jesus, and its derivatives such as:

"Jesus paid the price"

I always have a difficult time making any sense of out it. The best I can come up with is this: So we're inherently sinful just because we're born, which is a debt to be paid, and God sends Jesus to pay this debt for all people, and if we just believe in that and allow Jesus to be that debt-payer for us, then we are debt-free and no longer pay the price for sin, which is death.

Just always seemed like a way to wash our hands of it. "Thank you Jesus for doing this for us, so I don't have to do shit."

I think its really hard to reconcile the call to "take up your cross and follow" with such a confessional statement.

The worst part of this confessional statement is just its call to passivity. You don't have to actually do anything. There's not much transformation there. There is just belief--making a statement. Saying some words. It can be a pathway to greater spiritual development, I don't doubt that. But all too often, people use it as a way to distance themselves from the passion. Here's a guy hanging on the cross, and in fine bourgeois fashion you pat-pat him on the head, thank him for his troubles and go eat your dinner.

Joining yourself to the Resurrection means joining yourself to the Passion, too.

Organic Prices

Its hard to consider the prices of organic foods. Its about $7-10 for a pound of organic, fair-trade coffee, around here. That's tragic when you consider you can get the "other stuff" for no more than $3-6, and often lower. Organics are sometimes 2-3 times more expensive.

You know the benefits of organics--less pesticides and hormones into your body and into the environment (due to the farming practices) and better treatment of workers, just to start things off. But how do you afford it?

Well, in the case of coffee, you are looking at about a $3-6 difference for a full pound of coffee. Sit back and think what you could have done with all that extra cash.

Folks, that's one trip to Starbucks! Maybe two, depending on your tastes. Lately, I've been tearing through coffee, but it still takes me about a month to go through a pound of coffee. Cutting out an extra trip to the coffee shop or taking that extra 5 minutes to brew my own cup instead of stopping on the way to work is all the difference in the world.

Someone who brews their own organic coffee regularly can actually have a much cheaper coffee budget than someone who drinks non-organic but mismanages their time and is always running to the local gas station or Starbucks!

I'm all for coffee shops as a social gathering place or to taste some new flavors. I got through my course in Eschatology on gallons of Panera coffee. But if you really want to go organic but are wondering where you are going to find the money, you may have more available than you otherwise thought. Its money you are already spending on coffee, just a sacrifice of "a cup a month" at a coffee shop can actually make up for all the price difference!

B-12 and Protein for Vegetarians

When people become a vegetarian, the talk is almost always centered around protein. People ask: How are you going to get your protein? Let's not forget that meat is also the source of vitamins, minerals, essential oils and all sorts of good things and not just protein, but I digress.

Most foods have some amino acids in them, which the body combines to form "complete protein." Most non-meat items fall short of containing complete protein, though. As a result, a vegetarian has to eat certain foods in combination to get it.

The formula is:

2 parts grain + 1 part legume (beans, nuts, soy, etc) = complete protein

It is interesting how many traditional foods follow this model rather well--beans & rice, peanut butter between 2 slices of bread, oatmeal & walnuts, hummus & pita bread, tofu & rice. The grains should be whole grains to get the best impact.

In the past, it was considered essential to eat the grains and legumes during the same meal. Recently, the rules about protein have relaxed considerably. For example, you can have grains for breakfast and beans for lunch. As long as they are eaten within the same day, there should not be a problem forming complete protein out of it.

Furthermore, it has been discovered that virtually all foods have some amount of complete protein in them. The reason they are not classified as such is because they do not have enough quantity of certain amino acids. For example, you can get all your protein needs even from something as nutritionally deficient as white bread, you just have to eat an awful lot of it--more than you could ever eat in a day. But there bottom line is that protein is everywhere.

The end result is that as long as you eat a balanced diet, no vegetarian is going to have a problem getting enough good quality protein. Just make sure you regularly get whole grains, some beans and nuts, and a lot of variety of everything else, you'll be fine. The problem only comes in for those who eat nothing but french fries or white bread.

However, there is still a real danger to western vegetarian diets. It is Vitamin B-12. B-12 is only available in animal foods. It is formed as the by-product of bacterial activity in an animal's body, often in the colon. The human body makes all the B-12 it would ever need, but it is formed in your lower intestine and your body cannot re-absorb any nutrition there. Meat eaters have an abundance of B-12, and your body can store it for long periods (a testament to the fact that our ancestors probably went long periods without meat).

The fact that your body stores B-12 means that you don't notice a deficiency for quite some time. Many people initially feel ecstatic when they become a vegetarian. The feel all sorts of health benefits as their body does not have to struggle with digesting meat, not to mention all of the unhealthy fats, hormones and chemicals found in factory-raised meats. However, there is a time bomb ticking. It can be months or even years before a B-12 deficiency starts to show, because your body can use and re-use what it has.

Truth is, most vegetarians are running a B-12 deficiency, and nearly all vegans.

B-12 is a funny vitamin. You don't need much of it. But when it is lacking, it can cause all sorts of catastrophic nerve damage and other problems. Even worse, once you run a deficiency, it can be hard to rebound without significantly changing one's diet back to meat or seeking medical treatment.

There have been some studies of vegan groups in India (the article is about a third of the way down the linked page) where the population did not show any signs of a B-12 deficiency. However, as time went on, they found that they fertilized their crops with human feces (rich in B-12) and that their storehouses of rice and beans were infested with insects. Insect excrement, insect bodies and eggs were mixed into their daily fare of rice & beans, providing all the B-12 they needed. They may also have gotten a share from drinking water that was partially contaminated with fecal waste. As you can see, the conditions for getting B-12 in this culture would not work in America.

There are options for vegetarians and vegans, though. There are B-12 supplements. There are excellent B-12 shots, which are often important for someone who is running a serious deficiency to get them back on track. I have even seen B-12 patches. Some foods are fortified with B-12, but the vitamin is very unstable when exposed to sunlight. Fortified nutritional yeast is a common dietary supplement for vegetarians. However, if it sits in bulk bins at the grocery store, the B-12 content may have been drastically reduced or eliminated just from exposure to sun. (Keep in mind that not all nutritional yeast is fortified with B-12, so check the label.)

Even worse, eggs are typically considered a great source of B-12 for vegans, except for the fact that it is in a form that is difficult for for humans to access. You may not be getting the B-12 from eggs that the label says. For most vegetarians, milk is then the only natural source of B-12, and it usually do not contain enough to give you your recommended daily allowance. There is some B-12 in plant foods, but humans are not thought to be able to access it.

I used to argue that B-12 is the smoking gun that shows that humans never had a vegan ancestry. Our bodies are evolved to take in B-12 from animal sources. However, we may have gotten enough environmental exposure to compensate, such as the villages in India mentioned above. There are some mostly-vegetarian communities of hunters & gatherers and farmers in the world, but virtually none that are purely vegan. (I have often wondered how much nutrition our ancestors got simply from environmental sources--bare feet walking in the dirt, swimming in rivers and ponds, hands touching wood, grass and dirt all the time.)

The #1 priority for all vegetarian and vegans should be to find stable and reliable sources of Vitamin B-12. I would recommend getting it from a couple of different sources. Some people do not absorb the vitamin from supplements very well, but may take it in from other sources. If you are a partial-vegetarian who only eats meat occasionally, it might not hurt to target meats that are high in B-12. This would include beef and seafood. Poultry is typically low in B-12.

Protein and B-12 are not the only issues in vegetarianism. Some people do not process Vitamin-A properly from plant sources. Adequate Vitamin D intake can also be a problem. People who can trace their ancestry to northern cultures such as Scandinavian, Irish, Inuit, etc., (where meat would surely have been a large portion of the diet) are also theorized to have lost the ability to convert some plant sources into proper nutrition (see this link, the same one cited above and go about a third down the page). For other issues and a counter-point of vegetarianism in general, see here. If you tried to be a vegetarian and are struggling, there may be some real obstacles for you based on your ancestry, lifestyle or other health issues.