Ecclesial Dreamer…

On The Commons posted a great article by David Bollier correcting some info on a recent Wired magazine article by Kevin Kelly on The New Socialism. Bollier points out that many people still confuse the gift culture of open source and current social networking with “socialism” and “communism.”

Kelly’‘s point is true enough. The trouble is, he falls back on a tired, wholly inaccurate paradigm – socialism – to describe how these social networking communities work. What they really embody, of course, is the commons. For a magazine that coins new jargon at the least provocation, it’s a mystery why Wired could find no better term than “socialism” to describe online sharing.

Later he continues:

Internet-based innovations hold enormous promise for structuring our social relations and economy in more open, egalitarian and meritocratic ways. They help us see the enormous creative role of sharing and collaboration, especially as opposed to traditional markets and proprietary control. But so long as people as smart as Kelly insist upon using archaic and inapt categories like socialism and communism to name the distinctive dynamics of online social media, they confuse and muddy the real story rather than illuminate it.

I think something similar could be said in the context of ecclesial dreaming. Until we move away from archaic and inapt categories to articulate an ecclesiological/theological commons and replace the paradigms built to last on a corrupted nature of rule with something more open, it will be difficult to explain an alternative way of being a faithful community. I am tempted to just pull out Lessig’s truism that “if we are still explaining we are losing” but I also know that we need a way to construct the alternative way using language as well. I just thought Bollier points out part of the problem is that the dominant voice is still stating things in ways that are extremely unhelpful.

One of my favorite ecclesial dreamers recently linked to several interesting threads out on the web were I found this gem about Open Source Theology.

Drew Tatusko writes a thoughtful critique of the idea of Open Source Theology. Then Jim Marks and Landon jump into the comments and produce one of the best conversations of Open Source Theologies I have read in a long time.

I tend to agree more with Landon and Jim Marks than I do Drew here. It seems to me that both Landon and Jim Marks address Drew’s main concerns (that Open Source Theologies are not normative enough to change the political/social world) very well and I highly suggest reading the whole thread.

I particularly like Landon’s observations when he says:

My point is that you have now (essentially) elevated academic(ish) theology to a place of prominence. That’s like saying that Ubuntu is better than Debian (forms of Linux, for those who don’t know). True, it might be, but I know a lot of people that really love Debian. Who am I to say that they need to see their OS of choice as limited? (This has been one of the critiques of the liberation theologians - mujeristas, specifically.)

and

If “code” is not doctrine but “The Word of God” then that means that no special training is need in order for, say, African slaves to access the code and develop a system (albeit, non-codified) of doctrine. Most of them could not string a sentence together, but their doctrinal development was top-notch (as Cone eventually demonstrated in a academically “acceptable” way).

Landon seems spot on here. Later Jim Marks will add some important points as well.

The best I think we can say, is that proprietary theology certainly helps shore up class barriers. It is certainly doing nothing to tear them down. Open source theology may not be able to tear down all, or even most of them, but at least it won’t be part of the problem of perpetuating them.

and

The political by-product of the attempt to solve the power by ownership problem is just that, a by-product. And one that is of no particular interest to the open source model. The goal is not political change, the goal is a better product — either better software, or better theology.

Great stuff.

I had a very brief conversation with a pastor friend along these lines not too long ago. I was trying to articulate a view of Open Source Theology by comparing it to Open Source Operating Systems. My friend commented that most people will not use Linux because they don’t know how to do all the command line stuff etc. He argued that people today don’t even know how to program a dvr or set up their voice mail box on their new cell phones so they sure won’t want to struggle with the complexities of a computer operating system. My push back was that, as a pastor, there are many people who don’t know what it means to live faithfully as followers of the way of Jesus Christ. But if we, again as pastors, allow them to stay in that condition because we don’t think they will “get it” or have the aptitude to understand it we are failing as pastors.

IMHO, most evangelical churches respond to this problem by providing a narrow, user friendly end product that does not require the person on the consumer end to do anything more than show up once a week to a weekly gathering and occasionally throw some money in the plate. When we continue to give people a “one-size-fits-all-user-friendly-proprietary” gospel, and still call ourselves “teaching pastors” we are discrediting both teachers and pastors.

Part of the argument against open source theology/ecclesiology comes from the fact that current theological institutions (specifically academic and ecclesiological) have become significant economic institutions. These institutions are just as concerned with making money as they are with advancing theological education. To imagine an alternative way of providing theological education or pastoral stewardship goes so much against the grain that the amount of resistance from the established paradigm is enough to stop most emerging Open Source alternatives to a point where they are difficult to sustain.

It seems to me that too often we still believe that theology is a top down endeavor. Those with the skills, knowledge, credentials, and authority (that was granted to them by playing within the boundaries of the proprietary system to begin with) are supposed to articulate theologies that will change the world. But the work of these people very rarely reaches down to the congregational level because it is tied to the proprietary academic world. That is why most church goers know about the Rick Warren and Beth Moore but few know of Yoder, Volf, or Brueggemann. For contemporary, proprietary theological institutions, theologians who have played within the system are the spring from which all blessings flow. And if we dam the spring and limit the flow to the rest of the world we are OK with that.

Open source works in the opposite direction. The “upstream” content creators are often times the least skilled trying to solve one specific problem. They give their work away freely to the stream, having faith that the community downstream will improve and correct it. The flow from Fedora to Red Hat is a lot like the flow of the African slaves to Cone, as Landon points out above.

But this flow threatens the livelihood of those who earn their living by controlling the code. If we equip saints to do the work of ministry, who will pay us to deliver the proprietary goods every Sunday? We can’t have bakers, bankers, computer programmers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, homemakers, journalist, construction workers — regular people– thinking that they can be content creators in the world of theology!!! That would just be to difficult.

I must confess that I am not surprised that those who earn their living in vocational ministry resist the pull of Open Source to value the contributions of those who’s vocation is not clergy. It seems to me that in may ways, vocational ministry and open source are opposed to each other. This is one of the reasons that I believe we need to find new ways to fund ecclesial communities. If we want common “lay” people to live faithful, theologically reflective lives, we need to allow those same people to access theology right were they are. And we need to recognize them not just as subjects to be “worked with” and “reflected on” but valued as creators in their own right.

There is a lot I could say about this but Drew, Landon, and Jim Marks do a much better job and you will get a more rounded discussion by checking out the conversation at Drew’s blog. Go check it out.

NOTE - In the interest of full disclosure, this post was created on a laptop running Fedora, the Firefox webbrowser, and Wordpress.