I know that there is a real danger in painting in broad stokes and speaking in generalities. I normally steer clear of such dangers but once in a while you find something that allows you to wade out onto the normally thin ice with a certain measure of confidence.

I recently finished a term paper on Alisdair MacIntrye’s opus After Virtue which is his attempt to reclaim the Aristotelian notion of character formation within community (to oversimplify a bit). In preparation for writing the paper I went back over some classics like John Rawls and Michael Sandel (the communitarian) and others.

It just so happens that I have also been reading a lot of post-colonial critique during this year and I have a growing suspicion that I wanted to throw out there:

We have individuals (products of the enlightenment) reading a text that was written in a communal framework (a product of a communal society).  That provides a fundamental discrepancy that will never be resolved. It will always provide a disjointed experience and thought process that lacks continuity.

Let’s not pretend that we can think another way. We are heirs of the enlightenment – this is our operating system. We can download a new program like ‘christianity’ but it is operating within the individualist code. Talking with my friends who are from non-European descent (Native American, Pacific Islands or certain Asian communities)  it is clear that there is no simple conversion that an individual can undergo and simply start thinking in communal terms. We are cultural creatures and this is our culture.

It shows up when we read the Bible. It shows up when we talk of government (democracy) economy (consumerism), status, value, worth, choice, success, identity, rights, laws,leadership and … well nearly every other aspect of Western society.

The famous example of Philippians 2:12 admonishing us to “work out your salvation with fear and trembling” is but a drop in the pond. It’s not just that the English language doesn’t have a plural ‘you’ (unless one counts the ya’all of the Southern US) but it is bigger than that. It is that we think in individual ‘you’s and there is no way around it.

This will always be an issue. So even when somebody talks about character formation, spiritual community, or some ideal of communitarian discipleship (be it Hauerwas, the Radical Orthodox, or any other innovative group) in the end, the church of N.America will always look mostly like it does now. The reason is that this individualism we think in is not all that compatible with the communal thrust of our very scriptures – and that is unreconcilable at some level. It can not be resolved because we can no more stop thinking as individuals than that Bible can stop encouraging community.

As I listened again I was struck with how timely the dialogue was in light of our conversation about Jesus and (s)words last week – as Tripp and I prepare to go into the podcast studio this week to record a TNT about that, as well as leaving the church. 

In his book ‘Violence’ Zizek addresses the idea of emancipatory or redemptive violence embedded in Christianity – a topic that we have discussed at length. But at one point Miles has to correct the philosopher. It concerned that issue of ‘turning the other cheek’. What Miles has to flesh out is that a master would have hit a slave – not by striking him on the right cheek – as he would an equal – but the left with a back hand. The command then is that if someone strikes you in this way (on the left cheek) show to them the right as well and in this way provoke them to a greater of level of violence than they had originally intended – accomplishing two things:

1. exposing their violence
2. positioning your dignity in the face of that violence

I have also been reading Walter Wink’s Jesus and Nonviolence.  He clarifies it this way:

There are three general responses to evil: 1)  passivity 2) violent opposition 3) the third way of militant non-violence articulated by Jesus. … Jesus abhors both passivity and violence as responses to evil.

Wink outlines that third way later in the book with a series of bullet points:

• Seize the moral initiative
• Find the creative alternative to violence
• Assert your own human dignity as a person
• Meet force with ridicule or humor
• Break the cycle of humiliation
• Refuse to submit or to accept the inferior position
• Expose the injustice of  the system
• Take control of the power dynamic
• Shame the oppressor into repentance
• Stand your ground
• Force the Powers to make decisions for which that are not prepared
• Recognize your own power
• Be willing to suffer rather than to retaliate
• Cause the oppressor to see you in a new light
• Deprive the oppressor of a situation where a show of force is effective
• Be willing to undergo the penalty for breaking unjust laws
• Die to fear of the old order and its rules

This type of thinking is as revolutionary as the day it was spoken in that famous sermon by Jesus. The binaries and dualisms that we operate in are just failing us at every turn. The overly simple  either-or options are a trap.

Here is the simple reality: loving your neighbor is a big enough challenge that it has kept many thinkers for many traditions busy trying to figure out who (exactly) is one’s neighbor. and what does love look like. We follow a teacher (in this ‘way’) who goes past that debate and says “Love your enemies”.  Let’s be honest – that doesn’t make any sense! If I love them … they would not long  be to me an enemy

I end with a Wink:  Love of enemies is, in the broadest sense, behaving out of one’s own deepest self-interest; “that you may be sons and daughters of your Father who is in heaven” (Matt. 5:45).

Prof. Paul Capetz & Deacon Stephen Keating join Bo and I in the Homebrewed Christianity HQ in Redondo Beach on a rainy St. Patrick’s Day morning for a podcast.  We had a blast! You will enjoy this podcast…if you are into philosophy, history, political ranting, Tillich’s theology or existentialism hitting the pews then this is the podcast for you.

Paul is an amazing historical theologian, Presbyterian minister, my favorite Calvinist, and dear friend.  He was on the podcast for Calvin’s 500th birthday, joined John Cobb for our special 101st episode, and explained how a Calvinist gets pumped about Process Theology.

AMAZING BOOK for $6.72 on KINDLE!!!

THANK YOU…”Secret Deacon” who had JR Cigars deliver some yummy sticks to me.  That was awesome.  I love it when the Deacons call in and I love it when they donate on PayPal but this ‘secret deacon’ invented a new form of encouragement – mailing me GOOD cigars.  To whomever sent them THANKS A MILLION!

* SUPPORT the podcast by just getting anything on AMAZON through THIS LINK. We really appreciate your assistance in covering all the hosting fees which went up 20 bucks a month due to the growing Deaconate!

Click To Subscribe in iTunes...this SHOW is going SOLO!!!

One Click to the Homebrewed Hotline!

Join Brian McLaren, Doug Pagitt, Bernice Powell Jackson, Myself, & others as we explore the connection of ecology, incarnation and the interconnectedness of all. April 19-20 in St. Petersburg, Florida for the A Sustainable Faith Conference. Join me the day before for a cigar, brew, convo. on Hell, & a discount for the event. Sunday I will be preaching at the Missio Dei.

I am asked about Jesus’ relationship to swords as much as anything I get asked about. Good hearted people are quite baffled by the whole subject.

• Jesus did after all say that he came to bring a sword.
• As the word of God, he is said to be sharper than any two-edged sword.
• He is pictured with a sword coming from his mouth when he ‘returns’.
• and there is this matter of him telling his followers to buy swords

As a former apologist, I have gotten pretty good at helping the baffled work through these passages. I even has a presentation I do called jesuSword that incorporates Jesus, his words, and these passages about swords.

 In order to facilitate a lively give and take, we will take this in 3 quick addresses over the next 24 hours.

 Part 1: Jesus says that he came to bring a sword.

 Matthew 10:34 “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. 35 For I have come to turn “‘a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law—   37 Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. 38 Whoever does not take up their cross and follow me is not worthy of me. 39 Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it.

 Is it possible that Jesus was being ironic and that his sword is actually an un-sword. I say this because Jesus’ sword does the exact opposite thing that normal swords do. His sword divides family. Traditional swords are used their swords to defend their kin and kind.

Jesus was using a play on words.

Jesus was using hyperbole. In his day swords were actually for defending one’s family – for guarding me and mine. In this sense, Jesus’ “sword” is an un-sword… or an anti-sword. It does the opposite of what human swords are used for.  Jesus’ sword is not for defending family but for dividing family. Jesus did not come with a human sword but the opposite!!

John Caputo puts it this way:

The kingdom reigns wherever the least and most undesirable are favored while the best and most powerful are put on the defensive. The powerless power of the kingdom prevails whenever the one is preferred to the ninety-nine, whenever one loves one’s enemies and hates one’s father and mother while the world, which believes in power, counsels us to fend off our enemies and keep the circle of kin and kind, of family and friends, fortified and tightly drawn.”

If Jesus was being ironic or using hyperbole, it would make so much more sense than the way this passage gets used to justify violence and militarism.

_______________

Part 2:  

There are lots of swords in the New Testament.  The Word of God is compared to a double-edged sword and Jesus comes back wielding a sword. Maybe the Bible is more than ‘O.K.’ with swords and sword imagery?

Let me throw out two things:

• In the context of the Roman Empire and its occupation of Jewish lands in the 1st century, swords would have been a common item that drawing imagery out of would have been appropriate.

• A well-known pastor in Seattle, Washington is famously quoted as saying “Jesus is a cage fighter with a tattoo on his thigh and a sword in his hand, determined to make someone bleed”. He said this in reference to the fact that he “could not worship somebody that he could beat up.”

Some people dismiss statements like this and chalk it up to testosterone fueled, overly inflated, pumped up hyper-masculinity.  I worry that there is something much deeper and much more sinister involved. I think that it is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of God and the interpretation of Christian scripture.

 What is noteworthy in Revelation 19, is that the sword is not in Jesus’ hand but it comes out of Jesus’ mouth. That seems important in the poetic/prophetic  nature of Revelation. This sword is not your average sword. It is not in Jesus’ hand and that makes you wonder if the way in which this sword “strike down” the nations is not in bloody violence but in a kind of destruction that would happen as a result of a sword that proceeds from the mouth of God?  Let’s ask ourselves “is there something that comes from the mouth of God that radically impacts or consumes peoples and nations?”  Is there something sharp that comes from the mouth of God … something sharper than any two edged sword?

Oh, here we go: Hebrews 4

12 For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.

So far so good! ‘It’ judges the thoughts and heart… but here comes the twist:

 13 Nothing in all creation is hidden from His sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account.

Hold the phones! … the Word of God (it) is a person? Yes. Guess who?

 14 Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has ascended into heaven, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess.

Jesus is the Word of God?    (I’m being funny but you may want to check out John 1 for clarification).

 In conclusion: the use of sword imagery  in both Revelation and in the book of Hebrews needs to be taken with a poetic grain of salt. Yes, the Bible uses sword imagery. The thing is that if Jesus’ (S)word, from part 1,  is a non-sword or an un-sword and in Revelation is comes from Jesus’ mouth and in Hebrews it is a person … then none of these passages, thus far, can be utilized to justify what so many Christian (s)words are used for. 

I’ve obviously been having fun here, but the bottom line is that just because the Bible uses swords as analogies – it isn’t a wholesale validation of swords nor a justification for using them as the world does.

________

Part 3:  Jesus tells his disciple to buy a sword?

We come to that famous passage in Luke 22 where Jesus tells his disciples to buy a sword.

 35 Then Jesus asked them, “When I sent you without purse, bag or sandals, did you lack anything?”

“Nothing,” they answered.

36 He said to them, “But now if you have a purse, take it, and also a bag; and if you don’t have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one. 37 It is written: ‘And he was numbered with the transgressors’[b]; and I tell you that this must be fulfilled in me. Yes, what is written about me is reaching its fulfillment.”

38 The disciples said, “See, Lord, here are two swords.”

“That’s enough!” he replied.

Here are two readings you may want to consider: 

Earlier this week I engaged a political reading of Moses and the waters of Meribah from Numbers 20. My question was “why, if Moses was going to ultimately speak to the rock, did the Lord even mention the staff?”  The answer was that it was a symbol of power to be carried – yes – but ultimately resisted in favor of a better present option that might be overshadowed by the most obvious option.

It takes strength to turn the other cheek. If you don’t have the ability to retaliate … it is just being a doormat or victim? That is how I have always thought about it.

In that perspective, I have read Jesus’ odd command with Peter in mind. I see that fateful night where Jesus tells him to ‘put away your sword’ and later tells the authorities ‘if my kingdom was of this world my followers would fight.’ The implication is that Jesus’ kingdom is not of this world and so his followers don’t fight.

The sword for the disciple, then, is what the staff was for Moses in Numbers  20: a powerful option to be resisted in favor of a preferable option that is less obvious because it is less forceful.

I used to reconcile ‘buying swords’ as a sort of object lesson or training excersise for the disciples. One lesson (trust and supply) is over – next lesson: You can’t resist temptation is one of the options is not even available.

 Then, in 2007, I discovered that Biblical Scholars have a different way of handling the passage. Here is Ben Witherington: 

Lk. 22.36-38. What is the meaning of this little story, taking into account the larger context of Jesus’ teaching? Vs. 37 is the key where Jesus quotes Is. 53.12—“he was numbered with the transgressors”. Jesus is saying to the disciples—you must fulfill your role as transgressors of what I have taught you!!! They must play the part of those who do exactly the opposite of what Jesus taught them in the Sermon on the Mount. The disciples become transgressors by seeking out weapons and then seeking to use them. This much is perfectly clear from the context for the disciples then go on to say “look Lord here is two swords”. They already have such weapons and Jesus responds in disgust to the fact that they are already transgressing his principles of non-violence by responding “that’s enough” (of this nonsense).

 So either Jesus was saying that two swords was enough for the revolution (not likely) or Witherington has this right.

Conclusion: We have looked at these four famous passages now and it seems clear that although Jesus talked about swords and the writers of scripture utilized sword analogies, none of these passages is a validation of the type of violence these verses are used to justify.

In Numbers chpt 20, Miriam passes away. She had been a prophetess for the people and had challenged Moses’ authority on occasion. Immediately after her passing (this will become important) the people realize that there is no water and press Moses and Aaron for solutions. Moses and Aaron step away from the people to seek God and receive instruction to “take the staff and speak to the rock – it will pour out water before their eyes”.

Moses, as you may remember, doesn’t follow instructions to the ‘T’. He ad libs a little bit.  He does indeed gather the people but then he veers from the plan. He chastises the people and then strikes the rock. Two things happen:

• water does indeed come out
• God is displeased with Moses and will not let him enter the land that is promised.

I have preached this passage many times and have read lots of treatments. I am intrigued by this passage and have always been unsettled by one detail in the story, which I have never been able to resolve:

why does the Lord tell Moses to take the staff if he is just going to speak to the rock? Why even mention the staff?

Here is where Honig and Rosenzweig bring a unique reading. The staff represent something magical like sorcery – or the miraculous for the early 20th century. This is a political theology and what is at stake in the suspension of law in emergency conditions. Can a sovereign power suspend law in the same way that  God suspends the laws of physics in order to preform miracles? Leaders, being empowered by God, the thinking goes, could suspend ‘normal’ activity if they determined an exceptional circumstance.

In Honig and Rosenzweig’s hermeneutic the dispersed empowerment of the people (multitude) is the location for God’s will and is intended to be home to the will/voice of the Lord. But, as we know, this responsibility had been too overwhelming and was resisted by the people in selecting Moses as a king type who would speak to God for/instead of them (Exodus 20:19). This was an abdication by the people of what the Lord had desired for them as a people – to be prophets all.

This resistance is reinforced when the voice of the people rises in the absence of water, and Moses (along with his brother Aaron) turn away from the ‘stiff necked people’ and receive instruction to speak to the rock. Moses then, probably importing the top-down authoritarianism of his Egyptian upbringing, disobeys the command to speak and instead, chastises the people and strikes the rock with his staff in an act of magical sorcery. God, though it produces water, reprimands this act, and Moses is disallowed from entering the promised-land with the people.

This event is placed within the historical context, earlier in the passage, where Miriam passed away and immediately the people realized that they had no water and held a council against Moses and Aaron. Miriam’s name alludes to water and she was the sister who placed Moses in the Nile’s water when he was an infant. She had been the only one to challenge Moses’ authoritarian ways and she provided, as a prophetess, a check to Moses’ power. Without her, this reading states, Moses proved he will give the people … “not authentic prophecy, but sorcery.” In not recognizing the predictive prophecy of the people (and Miriam), Moses loses his leadership of the people.

Honig utilizes Rosenzweig’s two types of prayer – one that spontaneously arises in a situational moment, and another that is used by the community and creates an openness or receptivity – to analyze the judicial deliberation surrounding the Bush v. Gore presidential ruling. By imagining that the people could have risen up in expectation of a serious effort to count valuable democratic votes instead of waiting for a Schmittian top-down rule from the authorities. The sovereign power might have been within the people prepared for and receptive to the sign instead of what came from above it – a rupture from beyond them. This expectation is foreshadowed within the Mosaic tradition that one day all of the people would be prophets (like Miriam).

Honig asks if this metaphorical reading (which it expressly is)  is a good model for democratic politics and a comparison of the  “state of legal exception to the divine rule of god”. The people, she says, when bound together can give to themselves the powers of state and can again decide to suspend them when, as a multitude, they are oriented and receptive (having been prepared) to the consequences of such action and what they point toward as a sign.

This, in the end, is the problem with magical thinking! We abdicate our power as the people – to be receptive to and bring forward the voice and will of God – in favor of looking to magically empowered leaders to suspend the rules that govern due to exceptional (or emergency) circumstances and hand down solution (metaphorically) through sorcery.

It makes sense then why the Lord even mentions the staff if Moses is ultimately to speak to the rock. It is a metaphor (symbol) of concentrated power that is present but to be resisted in lue of the prophetic possibility of speaking. In that speaking, which is to be located in the people (multitude) prepared by prayer, that a sign is revealed that points to a greater reality. We never hear that voice if a receptive people continually abdicate that potential to exceptional leaders who are expected to provide magical results.

Sketching an alternative proposal

What options then may be open to readers who share Clayton’s and Knapp’s concern for a dynamic Christology, but who want to retain a more traditional theological framework?

Here I can of course only offer the briefest of sketches, but you might call my tentative proposal ‘semi-adoptionist’, for want of a better term, drawing on Philip Clayton’s former Doktorvater Wolfhart Pannenberg. What if we retain the pre-incarnate Logos – it is absolutely the Second Person of the Trinity who takes flesh -, but radicalize the kenosis of Philippians 2 by taking seriously the free acceptance by the Logos of subjection to physical and mental developmental processes (from conception to Cross) including all they entails in the light of our limited but real scientific knowledge of human physicality. Jesus as divine Son is united to the Father ontologically throughout his earthly life, but is not necessarily consciously aware of it; the Logos rather ‘starts again from zero’ in accepting the limitations imposed by inherited human DNA, neurological structure, cognitive development, development and obedience to his earthly parents (Luke 2:51-52), having to learn a human religious tradition in its particularity, and the unavoidable reality of spending around one-third of his life snoring (yes, Jesus slept as well as wept!).

In this scenario Jesus is not ‘adopted’ at Baptism or Resurrection in the sense of crossing a threshold between a ‘non-divine’ and a divine nature, but certainly attains to a new intensification of his Sonship in a ‘functional’ sense. He is anointed with the Spirit at Baptism, raised through the Spirit at Easter and exalted as Kyrios  at his Ascension by virtue of having defeated the Powers in his self-emptying death on the Cross.  Appropriating The Predicament’s language of emergence theory, these are real events in Jesus’s life where a new ‘emergent level’ is reached. In this scheme there is therefore authentic becoming without the radical discontinuity suggested by all-out adoptionism. At the same time this ‘becoming’ is not restricted to the humanity of Jesus; as long as we regard Christ as one person and not two and remember that his indwelling by the Spirit, his earthly life is simultaneously the experience of a human being and the life of humanity experienced by God.

To use Irenaeus’s framework of seeing Jesus’s life as a recapitulation of what it is to be a human being, I would like to suggest that the mission of his earthly existence is in some way to become in time, through a life of self-giving love and perfect obedience to the Father, the Son that he is from all eternity.

As to how it is possible to keep the notion of the eternal Son while admitting real development in Jesus’s life, I would suggest that the idea of ‘Sonship’ has two aspects which, while obviously related, are conceptually separable. This was already explored by Pannenberg in Jesus, God and Man when trying make sense of Paul’s affirmation on the one hand of Christ’s pre-existence found in expressions such as ‘God sent his Son’ (Galatians 4:4) and formulations such as Romans 1:3, where Jesus is ‘designated Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead’, which has sometimes been interpreted in adoptionist fashion.  Pannenberg’s position is that while adoptionist language is undoubtedly Biblical, ‘the idea of Jesus’ adoption by God says too little’ and that – quoting Paul Althaus – ‘Jesus was what he is before he knew about it’.

One aspect of the Divine Sonship is filiation, i.e. the Son as the ‘only-begotten’ of John 1:18, a status which obviously cannot be ‘renounced’ kenotically. If we are using the title ‘Son’ in this way, it seems wholly reasonable to assert that Jesus was God’s ‘Son’ even in Mary’s womb. However, once the word ‘Sonship’ is used in its second sense, invested with real content in terms of the outworking of Jesus’s character rather than merely denoting filiation, things look different; if what we talking about is Jesus’s path of self-emptying love, this inevitably requires the trajectory of a life lived. It simply can’t happen by magic.

Being a composer, let me conclude with a musical analogy. Imagine the Son’s eternal Divine nature ‘vertically’ in terms of harmony, as a chord you could strike on a piano or a guitar. Now take those same notes into the world of ‘melody’ where things happen in time, i.e. horizontally, and play them in succession from the bottom up. But don’t dampen the strings of the guitar, and leave the piano pedal down. What happens is that you arrive at the same chord. In our temporally-structured world of earthly existence, it is such a ‘melodic’ unfolding which is the only means of the ‘composing-out’ of Jesus’s Sonship (Auskomponierung in the German technical jargon of which music theorists are just as fond as systematic theologians). Something really happens. But the notes are the same as those of the chord, and the listener’s experience is enriched by the melody. Not only enriched, but hopefully inspired for her own melodic journey through life.

The project represented by The Predicament of Belief  is surely an excellent and important one; Steven Knapp and Philip Clayton deserve our congratulations and gratitude for the considerable service that they have rendered both to the academy and the Church in undertaking it. But I think that I am not misinterpreting the intentions of the authors themselves in saying that their book is best taken as a starting-point and not as a final destination.

To be continued.

Doubly trained in music and systematic/philosophical theology, Peter Bannister is Associate Artistic Director and Composer-in-Association of SOLI DEO GLORIA Inc., a Chicago-based organization devoted to furthering sacred music in the Judeo-Christian tradition. He also co-directs the American Church in Paris’s participation in the John Templeton Foundation’s ‘Scientists in Congregations Ministry Initiative’, and is the author of the Music and Theology blog ‘Da stand das Meer’.

Three interesting conversations have recently merged in my little corner of the interwebs:

• The Republican presidential primaries have brought to the limelight some very complex subjects like race, economics, and religion that are handled with stereotypical banter, generally at increased volume.

Santorum is an uber-Catholic, Romney is Mormon, Newt wants the Evangelical vote and all of this is contrasted to Obama’s social-justice-Jeremiah-Wright past. The religion aspect of this election year is going to be fascinating.

• The release of Tony Jones’ e-book on Atonement [ you can find Bill Walker’s excellent review here and our TNT conversation with Tony here] has again called into question supposed evangelical orthodoxy centered around Penal Substitutionally Atonement.

I point out that in our national militarism mentality and our cultural myth of redemptive violence, that PSA is playing a role in our religious silo that is spilling over in unhelpful and even harmful ways.

• When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God  is a new book from T. M. Luhrmann is a sociological study by a trained anthropologist of two charismatic congregations (one in Chicago & the other in California).

The author calls them evangelical – in contrast to pentecostals who speak in tongues – even though I am not sure that the Vineyard (which both of her congregations are) are wholly representative off all the different camps that come under that tent.

Last week I posted that I was ‘worried about worship’ and one of my concerns dealt with the epistemology behind the band-centered worship expereince. I said

“ Is this situation inflamed by an epistemology employed by evangelical and charismatic churches? I don’t know how else to say it but …. if you think that you are singing to God (vs. about God) and the God is actually listening to you and evaluating what is going on, then are you more critical of both the sour-notes and distracting ‘self’ behavior or overly elaborate performances?”

As I read the review of Luhrmann’s new book in the New Yorker magazine (“Seeing is Believing” by Joan Acocella) I was amazed at the obvious parallels to what I had attempted to address. Unfortunaly, the New Yorker requires that you subscribe to the magazine in order to read the article… so I can’t just link there for you. If, however you get the chance to pick up the magazine or copy it at the library, it is well worth your time.

Without the article to link to I will just offer a couple of related thoughts:

The three step plan to Hearing the Voice of God (the Father) is exactly – 100% – my experience of being raised evangelical. So many people that I talk to who were/are charismatic or evangelical have this exact same experience [she also mentions there lack of social service, lack of political involvement, and lack of theology]. The thing I still find shocking is that so many of those outside those groups do not know that is what it is like inside, and how often those inside don’t know that this is not everyone else’s experience of the christian faith.

David Bebbington in Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (Routledge, 1989) did a masterful job of find some common theme that ran through evangelical history. This was a tough job (not always obvious) and has resulted in much debate about if these can even be called one grouping in any coherent sense. I am leaning more and more toward saying that Evangelicalism is not an official membership but is rather a dynamic relation between experience and expression. These two things are facilitated by an epistemology that is more central than any doctrinal or theological markers. Over the last 400 years what has been defining is not the political involvement (it has changed) or what was believed (it has adapted) but the experiential component (enthusiasm) that manifests is a distinct expression.

I have been out of the worship-band culture (Hillsong, Matt Redman, etc) for 2 years. I recently preached at a church with a worship band. What stood out to me so forcibly was the word “You”. I didn’t know why at first but as the service progressed I was struck by how many (all) the songs were addressed to ‘You’. You are holy, you are famous, I need you, etc. It stands in stark contrast to songs sung to God or about God like: a mighty fortress is our God, Oh God our help is ages past, and even Holy is the Lord God Almighty.

I often get to hear Mainliners talk about the alien experience of stumbling upon a christian music station on the radio. I also get to hear visitors to our pipe-organ-hymns-only church wonder about the lack of intimacy and excitement. I think it has less to do with the music style and more to do with the epistemology of singing songs to a ‘You’ and all the assumptions that would accompany that subtle change.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this – agree or disagree

•  The first was from theologian James K.A. Smith with An Open Letter to Praise Bands
  
•  The second was from Tony Jones guest posting at PoMoMusings on the next 100 years
  
•  The third was from Tara Burke over at Relevant Magazine on A Not-so-joyful Noise 

James has three suggestions for worship bands including the band leaders not praying so much between songs.  Tony thinks that public prayers should be eschewed all together – especially the written prayers of the pastor. Tara, as a musician herself, is trying to find the balance when the band hits an off note and keeping her focus on the actually worship and not on the stage performance.

The reason that I have taken special notice of this conversation is because I am in a bit of a transition. My whole life I have been in churches that utilize contemporary rock-n-roll style worship or contemporary praise for the music at the weekend public services. I was very comfortable lifting my hands, jumping up and down, and singing at the top of my lungs with my head thrown back and my eyes closed.  I now serve in a congregation that sings hymns with a big choir and an even bigger pipe organ. 

WELL – recently a group of us have been commissioned to launch an emergent gathering this fall in West LA. It is coming together so well and everyone seems to be on the same page … in every area except one: music.  You can tell that this is the one area where some fear and trepidation is present. “What will our music be like?  What kind of style will we use?”  Since the  music we traditionally have in the sunday service is so different than what we listen to in our cars … where does that leave us?

Luckily we have gifted musicians who love the Lord and I’m sure that they will navigate this just fine – plus they love Gungor so I am optimistic.

However, after reading these well written and thoughtful blogs I had three thoughts in my head:

1.  How bad is it that both James and Tara have to mention the center-of-attention behavior of the band?  It dawns on me, before I stick up for ‘worship teams’ in general – maybe I have not seen how bad it is out there and that I myself would be put-off (or horrified) at the spectacle they are referencing.
2.  Is this situation inflamed by an epistemology employed by evangelical and charismatic churches? I don’t know how else to say it but …. if you think that you are singing to God (vs. about God) and the God is actually listening to you and evaluating what is going on, then are you more critical of both the sour-notes and distracting ‘self’ behavior or overly elaborate performances?
3. If the band is there to facilitate my /our worship and connecting with God, then keeping the songs simple and somewhat familiar is a better way to facilitate a group to be in unison and not distracted. We are able to ‘enter in’  to a ‘spirit of worship’. But then people circle back and are critical that the songs are simple, repeat too much, and grow stale with constant use.

It seems to me that there is a lot being assumed when we talk about worship music. We all sort of know that worship is an all-week whole-life expression – we just sort of take a short cut in our language and talk about church music as worship.

• how a historian operates with all the evidence, data, & texts (confessional and not) to make claims about Jesus’ historicity and his place in 1st century Judaism
• Ehrman’s compelling and concise account of the historical Jesus as an Apocalyptic Prophet
• the history of the mythicist movement in scholarship print and culture
• the mythicist thesis presented and then deconstructed like it was Harold Camping’s end times chart

Did Jesus Exist? The answer of the academic guild is YES and it takes Ehrman just a couple sentences to let you.  Like Dan Brown’s conspiracy in the Davinci Code or that weird notion that Jesus spent ‘the silent years’ in India studying with gurus, these type of non-academic and sensationalist stories passed off as history rarely get the attention of actual scholars.  The lack of attention is not because of a lack of answers but the sheer incomprehensibility of these ideas themselves and yet as a minister I constantly answer these questions over and over again.  I say Jesus did not go to India, Dan Brown is bad fiction and Non-fiction, and that Jesus most certainly existed.  In these conversations people end up asking how I know these things and where they can get some type of ‘evidence’ or a book I can point them too.  I use to just say “that question is so absurd no one who knows what we as the academic community knows would dignify it with a response.”  That use to be my answer but it isn’t any more and I am glad!

Thank you Bart for writing this book.

So if you were wondering….

  Are there reliable sources for the historical Jesus? The answer is YES.  There are actually more for him than Pilate! Isn’t the Jesus story an appropriation of other dying and rising God stories? The answer is NO.  There isn’t actually evidence of a dying and rising story for the early Christians to appropriate.  How can you be sure Jesus existed? First, if he didn’t his brother James (for whom there is plenty of evidence) would have known.   Secondly, the early church would have had no reason to construct the idea of a cross-dead but risen Messiah which did NOT exist prior to Jesus (who did exist…in history…but didn’t go to India or have a kid with Mary Magdalene).

Check out his personal webpage.

This is part of the blog-book tour.  The other stops are….

Tuesday, March 20th: Shuck and Jive

Monday, March 26th: Broken Teepee

Tuesday, March 27th: Homebrewed Christian

Wednesday, March 28th: Jeff Keuss

Thursday, March 29th: Life is Short. Read Fast. 

Tuesday, April 3rd: Crazy Liberals … and Conservatives

Wednesday, April 4th: The Liberal Spirit

Thursday, April 5th: Greg Laden’s Blog

Friday, April 6th: Butterflies and Wheels

Tuesday, April 10th: Fallen From Grace

Wednesday, April 11th: The Gods Are Bored

TBD: The X Blog

TBD: Richard Carrier Blogs

TBD: Exploring Our Matrix

I say this because, after our services, we have a Fellowship Hour, one in which a member or several members of the congregation more or less provide lunch. All are welcome to eat with us. There is a donation plate, too, but no money is required. We share food with one another freely and without contempt. After dishing up, we sit together, talk, laugh, and enjoy one another’s company, sometimes listening to a speaker but mostly (thankfully) just chatting. We then help clean up and go on our merry way hopefully carrying with us the renewed love obtained.

I will not pretend to be an expert in early church doctrine or ritual practice, and I am not one to say that we need to go back to the way things were at the beginning. That’s never possible, in my humble opinion. Perhaps, however, there is something to be said for the love feasts that were more or less at least part of the early Church’s interpretation of communion. It was not Eucharist as we now celebrate it, but it was the institution emerged from Christ’s command to eat his body and drink his blood. It was, in fact, the institution that the early Christian apologists defend against their Roman accusers (who often thought of it as on par with certain sexually explicit and cannibalistic cult rituals). These are the same feasts, that is, about which Paul excoriates the Corinthians for drawing class distinctions, saving the good portions of food for the wealthy and serving the lesser to the poor.

In this same regard, I believe that the Fellowship Hours that we celebrate at my church are the more important when compared with the Eucharistic. Not only do they emulate the shared celebration of the Good News of Christ, but they do so directly by giving us the chance to act in love with and toward one another. Moreover, all are equal in this celebration; while someone will generally be first in line, this positioning is based solely on an individual’s athleticism and his or her capacity to avoid conversation on the way out of the sanctuary to the buffet line; it is not based on some silly idea of the ontological priority of the priest, just the pangs of teenage hunger! In other words, like the early church, it is in this Fellowship where the truth of all the symbolic sacraments (and I fully understand that not everyone considers them such) actually begin to emerge: that we have been reformed for the capacity to love in a way that we were unable to do before—as equals to one another before the God who saves in Christ—and that our love for one another is practice for the love we are to express to a fallen world.

This need not mean, of course, that we rid ourselves of the Eucharistic ceremony. By no means! To the degree that Eucharist is an explicit reminder of the covenant found in Christ, who may or may not be mentioned in the Fellowship Hours, it points us in the proper direction for our Fellowship Hours: to whose life we should look at and emulate in reenacting the last supper and whose death gives us the power to do so. It’s just that I am becoming more and more convinced that, if the celebration of communion truly transfers the Grace of God to us, the transference takes place not in Eucharist but in Fellowship, for which Eucharist is only a pointer.

In other words, it is only in love and our conformity to it within church walls and beyond, that we are receiving the sacrament; for the gift (the sacrament) must match the nature of the giver, and the giver is the ground of all lesser and anterior expressions of love. After all, I am not wrong to say that the God found in Christ is love.

This love, so it seems, is best expressed in Fellowship rather than Eucharist.

Contextual theology was the subject of my Master’s thesis.*  I was, and continue to be, enthralled with the possibility that the gospel could be uniquely expressed in every culture in a manner that was both authentic and indigenous to that group’s place and time. Lamin Sanneh goes so far as to say that it is the distinguishing characteristic of the Christian religion and that unlike Judaism, Islam, Hindu and Buddhist traditions there is no language, place, culture or time that is inherently superior for expressing the gospel.  In Whose Religion Is Christianity: the Gospel Beyond the West, he has it like this:

Being that the original scripture of the Christian movement, the New Testament Gospels are translated versions of the message of Jesus, and that means Christianity is a translated religion without a revealed language. The issue is not whether Christians translated their scriptures well or willingly, but that without translation there would be no Christianity or Christians. Translation is the church’s birthmark as well as its missionary benchmark: the church would be unrecognizable or unsustainable without it…  Since Jesus did not write or dictate the Gospels, his followers had little choice but to adopt a translated form of his message. (Sanneh p. 97)

When I wrote the thesis, I had yet to really encounter liberation or post-colonial thought in depth. My interest in contextualization arose from being a church-planter in a Missionary denomination. I did not realize at the outset of the project just how strong the critique contextual theology brought to classical (traditional) approaches. Since then I have engaged de-colonial, feminist, liberation, post-modern, and pluralistic voices that have even harsher critiques.

 I keep circling back, however, to a much simpler concern: the practice of the church. 

It is in this concern of practice that I have stumbled onto - and now stumble over - a haunting inconsistency between our thought and our practice.

The irony is thick. In my experience, those who are most excited about missions and evangelism are quite fond of the Bible. They often reference the Bible and even say things like “In the Bible” as a validation for doing something a certain way or “that’s unbiblical” as criticism of something.

Yet, never in the Bible do you see anyone intentionally learning another language in order to present the gospel. In the Bible, God repeatedly used dual-citizens and bi-lingual folks to get the message out. In the book of Acts we see three examples:

• a miraculous bridging of the language barrier at Pentecost
• the Ethiopian eunuch was a bi-lingual traveler who took something back to his ‘home’ in Africa
• Saul/Paul was a dual-citizen who took the message to the Roman Empire

That, it seems to me, is the Biblical model for missions. (This is true whether or not one translates the Great Commission as the imperative “Go” or the more passive Greek rendering of “as you are going”. The precedent of Acts is the same.) The Biblical model is very different than the Colonial model we are so familiar with.

The past 5 centuries have had their effect – but now that the whole world is ‘mapped’ and ‘spoken for’, maybe its time to move away from the colonial obsession with conversion and trust the bilingual and dual-citizens among us to translate to and for their cultures. We would need to repent of our compulsion to import ourselves into foreign peoples or countries and then impose our cultural expectations on them.

In a global era it is time to stop importing and imposing our cultural entrapments into alien environments and presuming that we know what is best for them. There is enough migration, travel, immigration and cultural exchange that we can now trust God that this will happen in the right time and in the right way – without us taking matters into our own hands any longer and asking God to bless our efforts. The era of elaborate organizations for foreign missions needs to come to an end.** They are unbiblical – and I think they always have been – but now they are also inappropriate for our age.

Both stories turned tragic last week. Invisible Children, the group responsible for Kony 2012, came under heavy criticism. It turns out that the conflict as it was presented was not all that accurate – It had been accurate in the early 2000s but after 2004 no longer represented the true affairs of the country and Joseph Kony himself had left Uganda and migrated to a neighboring country.

People accused the film’s star Jason Russell  and his Invisible Children crew of knowingly misleading people and falsifying content in order to elicit a greater emotional response.

The Apple story went down a similar road for Mr. Daisy. It turns out that he had taken some artistic license in presenting his one-man-show and that not everything he claims would qualify as ‘journalistic standard’ of truthfulness. For instance, while he was in China for that week, he saw a news story about some factory workers in another province suffering horrible effects from a chemical. He never went to that province nor talked to those workers but just imported that story and connected it to his subject. The result was that this one factory seemed to be layers and layers of horrific working conditions – but in reality what was presented was an amalgamation of many factories in several provinces.

In the follow-up  interviews this weekend Mr. Daisy said that he took license with the facts because he wanted people to care about this. He knew that the conditions were bad and so orchestrated the story to draw a response.

 These two stories, taken together, point to a series of issues that are relevant to the church and her theology.

The first issue is complacency. Both of these ‘presenters’ knew that some tweaks and modifications needed to made in order to overcome our collective complacency. We see  so much bad, that unless something is really bad – it just doesn’t register. We are so overwhelmed with images, adverts, messages and pleas that unless something is sensational or horrific, we have evolved mechanisms and filters to catch it and screen it out.  The result is that we become complicit in maintaining the status-quo and passive participants in the system, structures and institutions that comprise the ‘Powers the Be’ that Paul reference in Ephesians 6.

The second issue is Paternalism. At some point white people from the West are going to have to stop thinking that the solution to what ails Africa or Asia is us coming over and fixing it.  Now, I applaud the generous heart behind both Invisible Children and Mr. Daisy but until we repent of our Colonial impulse and step away from that model of missions, we are going to continue to run into problems and run over the very folks we purport to be helping.

• We want to help – that is great.
• We do it in our way – and that is hurtful.

There is no doubt that in global system of international trade and foreign policy that the church must come to terms with our inter-connectivity and inter-relatedness in a way that transcends outdated clichés and antiquated platitudes of centuries past. We live in an evolving world that is experiencing exponential and radical change.

I love that good folks want to care about that and not just go shopping to bury their head in the sand. BUT until we repent of our ongoing paternalism and acknowledge the devastating effects of our colonial missions we will continue to replicate the harm and multiply the devastation.

As Christians, do we need to think through and address our participation in the global market and international structures that dominate our contemporary economy? Yes.

If, however, we do not first repent of our Colonial missions mentality, we will continue  the pattern of paternalism and Imperial impulse that has created these very situations we want to address. 

p.s. I know about Jason Russell’s arrest episode this weekend but did not want to distract from the bigger issue. 

Narrative theology examines the fecund relationship between story, Biblical interpretation and the ongoing life of the church. It examines the relationship between narrative as a literary form and theological reflection.

It is in the reading, telling and interpretation of narratives that humans derive their communal and personal identity as well as provide a basis for meaningful activity of the world.

Accordingly, biblical scholars and theologians have considered how narrative functions

• biblically
• doctrinally
• historically
• liturgically
• morally
• missiologically

and what implications this might have in terms of a Christian understanding of the nature of God.

Narrative draws deeply from philosophical insight into the relation between narrative and rationality. Knowledge is thus not derived from random collection of “facts” but only in light of the inherited narrative frameworks passed down through meaningful stories.

In Christianity, the primary narrative framework is supplied by Scripture. For Karl Barth the critical matter was not whether the narratives could be proved historically inerrant or scientifically verified, but rather how the stories functions themselves to span the gap between the believer and Scripture’s ultimate Author who lives and moves through these narratives.

Because the truth of Scripture is ordered to its narrative, Hans Frei argued that modern emphasis on pure reason or universal religious experience has led to a damaging eclipse of the biblical narrative and thus the theology that rests upon.

I also recognize that it is getting harder to do in our contemporary context. I am a loud critic of simple dualism (constantly contending with my Evangelical associates)  – but even I must concede when there are two main schools of thought that have set themselves up in opposition to each other.  I buck the ‘spectrum’ thinking like Liberal v. Conservative (as if those were the only two options) in almost every circumstance. However, when it comes to reading the Bible, it is tough to avoid the set of major trenches that have been dug on either side of this narrow road.

 The first group reads the Bible in what is called a ‘straight forward’ way and while they spend a lot of time with the text, there is little acknowledgement of what is going on behind the text. This group reads the Bible primarily devotionally, preaches exegetically and views it as not just instructive but binding for all times and places.

In my interactions with this group, there is little awareness of hermeneutics (in may cases they may have never heard the word before) and even less willingness to engage in scholarship that does anything behind the text.

The second group engages in Historical-Critical methods. They are willing to look at things like redaction (later editing). They don’t harmonize the Gospels into one Gospel. They are willing to acknowledge that Matthew and Luke’s conception, birth and subsequent details do not line up. They understand that while the story of Daniel happens in the 5th century BC – it was not written in the 5th century BC. They joke about Moses writing the 1st five books of Bible (how did he write about his own death?).

 Lately I have been engaging books like :

How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now by James L. Kugel

To Each Its Own Meaning, Revised and Expanded: An Introduction to Biblical Criticisms and Their Application by Stephen R. Haynes

Whose Bible Is It? A History of the Scriptures Through the Ages by Jaroslav Pelikan

She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse by Elizabeth A. Johnson

Sexism and God Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology by Rosemary Radford Ruether

 Over the last 4 years, it has become painfully clear to me that we have a problem when it comes to reading the Bible. Simply stated, those who spend the most time with the Bible know less about it but make greater claims for it than those who do more scholarship on it but may have little faith in it. 

I was listening to a seminar on the Historical-Jesus and talking to several friends of mine who do Historical-Criticism, here are 3 sentences that no evangelical I know even have ears to hear:

• Paul didn’t even write that letter
• Jesus probably didn’t say that sentence
• The Bible is wrong about this

I get in trouble for saying much much milder things about the literary device of the virgin birth, the prophetic concern of Revelation which is limited to the first 2 centuries CE, and  Jesus being ironic about ‘bringing a sword’. Can you imagine what would happen if I thought that Paul didn’t write the letters that are attributed to him, that Jesus did not utter the red-letter words we have recorded in the gospels or that the Bible was wrong about something?  I can’t.

So how does a moderate engage Biblical scholarship without stumbling over Historical-Critical pitfalls and Historical Jesus land-mines?  The thing that I hear over and over is

“Just stick with N.T. Wright. He has navigated the gulf for you”

Now, I love N.T. Wright as much as the next emergent evangelical (especially his Everybody series) … but I am as unwilling, on one hand, to forego the best and most comprehensive stuff (like Dom Crossan’s work on Empire) as I am, on the other hand, to subscribe to the inane prerequisites of the Jesus Seminar.

What I would really like to see is a move within the emerging generation that is tenacious about engaging contemporary scholarship while fully embracing the kind of devotional passion that the innerant camp demonstrates  – all the while avoiding the fearful and intimidating chokehold that camp utilizes to squelch innovation & thought.

I want the next generation to both find life and direction in the scriptures and also to not have to read the tough parts with their fingers crossed behind their back.

a hopeful moderate – Rev. Bo C. Sanders

For those who do not want to scour the comments to find the links to other resources:
Daniel Kirk’s book  “Jesus have I loved but Paul?”
Ben Witherington’s  book list   

This whole controversy gets to me at two deep levels:

•  I used to say those things. Just 4 short years ago I was an evangelical church-planter who regularly contrasted Jesus’ message to ‘religion’.
•  I am shocked at how dismissive so many educated and/or mainline folks are being to Bethke’s poem.

I have heard many people just brush aside his use of ‘religion’ as ignorant, immature, stupid, uneducated, silly, shallow, un-historic, and false. The thing that I want to yell is

“YOU FOOLS – like it or not, that is how people use the word religion in our culture.”

If you asked A) people under 40 and B) evangelicals to define religion you would get a picture that is almost identical to Bethke’s .

I now hang out with mainline folks and people who read books on theology. They are  quick to say

• that shows a poor understanding of religion
• that is a silly/stupid/shallow definition of religion
• that shows little historical perspective on the role that religion has played

Like it or not – this is the definition that many young people are using for religion. When they say (increasingly) that they are spiritual-but-not-religious , this is what they mean.

I am pursuing a PhD in the field of Practical Theology for the very reason that I want to engage how people live out their faith – practice it – in particular communities. The two things that I am willing to concede up front are that

• Many North American Christians and most Evangelicals utilize simple dualism (Physical v. Spiritual, Natural v. Supernatural, Temporal v. Eternal, Secular v. Sacred, Old v. New Testament, Law v. Grace). This is how they think.
• Religion is conceptualized as the man-made structures that attempt to facilitate, replicate, and falsely imitate the real thing that God does/wants-to-do in the world.

It is popular to say in these circles “Religion is man’s attempt to connect with God. Jesus is God’s attempt to connect with man.” *

I know that there are many good attempts to connect with religious tradition. I have heard many addresses regarding the root of the word religion and how the ‘lig’ is the same as ligament or ‘binding’ and how it is an attempt to bind us together – not to have us bound up in rules! My question is this: Are you willing to engage this dualistic and uniformed populist definition of religion that is in place OR would your rather hold to your enlightened and informed historical perspective and allow a conversation to happen without you because you are above it? **

I know that it can be frustrating to circle back and entertain naive perspectives. But if the alternative is to let the conversation happen without a historically informed perspective, then I think we have no choice but to concede the initial conditions of the dialogue in an attempt to express an informed/educated alternative.

*   there are alternatives like “Religion is our attempt to connect with God, Christianity is God’s connecting with us.” 
**  I have intentionally provided two alternatives to honor the dualistic nature of this mentality. 

I said that it can be thought of as Four things:

• God Talk: the most basic thing it to look at the etymology (theo- logy).

• Faith Seeking Understanding: Anselm’s famous dictum is still many’s favorite.

• Unquestionable Answers:  in contrast with Philosophy’s unanswerable questions. I got this funny line from one of the best little books I have ever read – John Caputo’s Philosophy and Theology 

• 2nd order activity carried out by disciples within hermeneutical communities. The primary activity is the faith lived out in particular locations and within cultural contexts – theology is the secondary discipline reflecting upon the primary expression.

Now within theology it is important to acknowledge that there are distinct schools of Systematic, Historical, Philosophical and Biblical – these are recognized as the “Big 4” – and there is also my discipline of Practical Theology.

I am big fan of Grenz and Olson’s book Who Needs Theology? and the way that they conceptualize it.

I feel good about my 4 fold answer, but I thought it would be fun to throw it to the deacons and see it what you thought.
I also created a poll to see what was the common consensus would be.    Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

J.W.: So, what does your god look like? And how is that look any different from Piper’s or Driscoll’s?

Me:

Thanks for asking! Actually there is quite a substantial difference. Let me point out just a couple of things to start:

A) I don’t believe that language about God is univocal (as I have said). SO we begin in humility understanding that all our words, metaphors and concepts are OUR best attempt.
B) I believe that langue (since it is not univocal) functional relationally. When Jesus uses ‘Father’ language, he is talking about the WAY in which relates to a father. Not that God’s ontological being is Father in an exacting and representative way. It is an expressive use of language. That is the nature of language.
C) The way that Scripture is expressed is historic. I believe that the Bible is Inspired by Holy Spirit. That means that Holy Spirit was at work in the authors and ultimately in those who collected and validated the canon. (I confess this by faith). Those authors were historically situated and particularly located. They expressed their thoughts in their best language in their best frameworks. We see that historical locatedness and account for it when we engage their writings.
D) Whether you call it ‘original sin’ (I don’t) or ‘human nature’ or (my favorite) relational brokeness and conflicting biological impulses … humans have a problem. We are not 100% whole. Something is wrong (we don’t even do the good we WANT to do). That means that in every epoch and era there are things in place that are not perfect. Those show up in scripture – since it is a snap shot of its environment. The Bible is fully human (and I believe fully divine in a Process sense) but it is not ABSENT of humanity. It is full of humanity.

So If you take just those 4 things in contrast to Piper and Driscoll, then my God talk is:

1. in Humility not certainty or pushy
2. Relational not static or exacting
3. Historical not trans-historic
4. Human not un-human

Does that help? SO that is my starting point. From there I diverge wildly from the other two.

J.W.

Well, first of all, thanks for a response.
Second, no offense, but you use an awful lot of words to not say too much. Or, to say the same thing over and over while denying that you are saying one thing, yet actually affirming another. Since I don’t have any real idea what you believe Piper and Driscoll believe, I still don’t know that you are painting a different god or not.
You start out saying that all expressions of God are only a best attempt, but then you claim to believe the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. So, which is it? Our best attempt, or Holy Spirit inspired? See the problem there. It’s either one or the other, can’t be both.
Certainly the Bible is written situationally. God could have inspired men to write it so it only made sense at one point in the entire course of time, or He could have inspired it so that it meant the same thing from beginning to end, from the beginning of time to the end of time. And written so that ordinary people could figure it out with a little help from His Holy Spirit. Which is what I believe. You seem to believe that only post-modern thought with a lot of help from certain philosophers can figure out this whole humility, relation, human thing. Sorry, way too many creeks have flowed over their banks throughout history for me to believe that only recently have we been smart enough to figure this whole mess out.
God (Holy Spirit) inspired the whole Bible. He could have very easily caused His writers to use words that wouldn’t mean anything to their (at the time, current) readers, but would only matter eons later. IF that is what He intended.
Again, you haven’t showed me anything but dichotomies, and nothing of substance that disproves anything Piper et al believe-which I still don’t know what you believe they believe.

Me:

1) I did use a lot of words, but it was to say quite a bit. Unfortunately it was not what you were looking for so you think I didn’t say much. I assure you that I say quite enough in my 300 words to get in a lot of trouble in many circles!

2) You are 100% wrong that “It’s either one or the other, can’t be both.” Inspiration is not the OVERriding of human intent – it is the filling UP and expanding of human intent. Inspiration does not make something inhuman. You are thinking of something else not inspiration. Then you accuse me of dichotomies? Weird. I am talking about a participatory-relational model that transcends either/or thinking. You must be confused.

3) Here is an example of the difference (which you apparently were not able to pick up on): It is equally a valid to call god She as it is to call god He. Because in the end, god is neither. Those are pronouns that stand in for their antecedent but which do not entirely explain god or contain god’s ontological reality. God did not give Christianity a masculine feel. We did. God is God that is beyond our biological categorizations and anatomical classification. God is not defined by those – we simply conceptualize God and these terms and portray those conceptions in our language.

This is the nature of language. It is symbolic – analogical – and metaphorical.  That does not mean that we are not saying anything when we talk about God. We are. It does not mean that there is no inspiration. There is. Those are not mutually exclusive.

To quote Elizabeth Johnson in She Who Is :

Words about God are cultural creatures, intwined with the mores and adventures of the faith community that uses them. As cultures shift, so too does the specificity of God-talk. 

To call God She is just as accurate and as inaccurate as calling God ‘he’.

This book isn’t the first time Peter has been in evangelical hot water and probably not the last.  Peter is not scared of controversy but from what I can tell it comes right out of his evangelical commitment to scripture.  On his blog Rethinking Biblical Christianity he just replied to Kevin De Young’s 10 reasons to believe in a historical Adam with precision and a generous account of what has a rather harsh, unkind, and (for me at least) nonsensical defense of an incredulous assertion.   James McGrath’s response was also pretty awesome.

This interview is part of the Baker Blog Tour organized by the talented Bryan Dyer.  Check out this list of the other contributors….

Joy Bennett -  “Joy In This Journey”
Nate Claiborne – NathanielClaiborne.com
Rachel Held Evans – RachelHeldEvans.com
James McGrath – “Exploring Our Matrix”
Gregory Smith – “Jesus Loves Darwin”
Jacob Sweeney – “Jacob Sweeney’s Blog”
Justin Topp – “A Biologist’s View of Science & Religion”
Kurt Willems – “The Pangea Blog”

Here are three reasons that I think we have permission to move on if we were so inclined:

• Jesus didn’t use the word.

It might seem simplistic but Jesus didn’t speak english and there is nothing magical about the english word ‘kingdom’. The New Testament uses the phrase Basileia Theou. Maybe we should just go back to that. We keep words like ‘koinonia’ and ‘selah’ in their original form so maybe we could just say when Jesus did and let it go untranslated. Then people would have to reconstruct what the concept means without importing all of their preconceived impressions.

• The age of Kings is over. 

I can not believe the hysteria that occurred around the ‘Royal Wedding’ of William to Kate Middleton – especially by Americans. Just the name the House of Commons make me wince. I am so glad that Age of Kings is over. Divine Right would be just laughable to me … if I didn’t know how much sway it held for so long. Regardless, those days are over and maybe it is time to update our language about God’s ways as well.

• The power of pronouns. 

Even those who acknowledge that the nature of language is symbolic and metaphorical – even those who recognize that God language is not univocal – can get caught up if one refers to God as ‘She’.  Even those who know that it is only a pronoun that functions as a place holder want to be careful about the antecedent to the pronoun.  That is why I am not sure that it would work to move to a counter Queendom, a more inclusive Kin-dom or a non-authoritarian Commonwealth.

Now I know that there will be some obstacle to overcome.
Number one among them will that ‘it is in the Bible’. Let me say two things
A) I love that it is in the Bible. It was powerful imagery for its day and it says something really important about God.
B) The authors of scripture conceptualized of God’s work in a way that was relevant to their time. Maybe we should as well.

Another problem I see is Christmas pageants. What will be do when we quote passages like Isaiah 9:7 which get translated into english as “His kingdom will have no end”. But I think it would be fine to have passages like this along side the shepherds and the manger (both are virtual artifacts of an agrarian society)  - as long as it was not our primary (or only) way of articulating and conceptualizing the work of God in the world.

One last thing to suggest: Jesus was in a context that was dominated by Empire. He positioned his vision and language in contrast/opposition to it. But is that our predominant contemporary element? I would suggest that in a venue of Global Capitalism  it may be more appropriate and powerful to speak of the Economy of God. 

* I always have to clarify that as a man, I am not anti-masculine. I really like being a man – it’s just that only using masculine terms may have been helpful for clarity when Genesis 1-3 was written, it has become unclear and unhelpful. The hegemonic patriarchy of religious language is pitiful to hold onto and especially when it is done in a univocal way. 

I never struggle to believe in God. I believe in the deep core of my being. I have faith in my bones. I breath this stuff. I am filled with Holy Spirit and that gives purpose to my day and direction to my life.

I never doubt the reality of the Christian faith … until I listen to a conservative like John Piper or Marc Driscoll talk. Then, it is all too apparent to me that we are (at least partially) projecting our greatest hopes and dreams onto the screen of the heavens. We are outsourcing our fears and evils onto a cosmic bad guy called the devil. We have created a galactic father figure in the sky (paging Dr. Freud).

It is so clear when Piper talks that it makes me want to retreat into the post-liberal work of George Lindbeck!  

Xenophanes is famed to have said:

“If oxen and horses and lions had hands and were able to draw with their hands and do the same things as men, horses would draw the shapes of gods to look like horses and oxen would draw them to look like oxen, and each would make the gods bodies have the same shape as they themselves had.”

It gets boiled down to “If horses had gods – they would look like horses.”

Most days I can stave that off. I can avoid the haunting suspicion and nagging doubt … but what Piper does is create a God in his own image – there is no other way to say it – it is idolatry.

So what? you may ask. Why even bother with it?  Because, I believe that there really is a God.

C.S. Lewis wrote a poem one time called “a footnote to all prayers” (it references Pheidias who was  a legendary statue maker in the ancient world) 

Footnote to All Prayers

He whom I bow to only knows to whom I bow
When I attempt the ineffable Name, murmuring Thou,
And dream of Pheidian fancies and embrace in heart
Symbols (I know) which cannot be the thing Thou art.
Thus always, taken at their word, all prayers blaspheme
Worshipping with frail images a folk-lore dream,
And all men in their praying, self-deceived, address
The coinage of their own unquiet thoughts, unless
Thou in magnetic mercy to Thyself divert
Our arrows, aimed unskilfully, beyond desert;
And all men are idolators, crying unheard
To a deaf idol, if Thou take them at their word.

Take not, O Lord, our literal sense. Lord, in thy great
Unbroken speech our limping metaphor translate.

This is why we must acknowledge what it is we are doing when we pray, when we preach, and when we practice. We are doing the best we can with words, symbols, sounds and images. But if those images are solidified and codified past their point of original artistry, mysticism and metaphor – then it becomes something deadly to the soul and dangerous to the one seeking the real and living God revealed in Christ.

• Prophetic Christianity – critiquing the empire
• Therapeutic Christianity – chaplains to the empire
• Messianic Christianity – escaping everything (including the empire) through utopian visions

Nowhere are these three more evident than in the realm of preaching.

I found this flowchart a couple of weeks ago. It is just a simple illustration but it reminded me of so many sermons that I have heard. I love a good sermon. I love listening to good preaching and I love trying to deliver a good sermon.

But I have been haunted by this funny flowchart since I first saw it.

The reason that it got to me is that so many sermons I have heard follow this exact formula. It is like they are using this exact progression for sermon prep.
…which wouldn’t be terrible – IF the point of the gospel was to make people happy.

If the point of the gospel was to make people happy then this progression would be the best and most helpful thing that has ever been invented.

But, and this is a big butt, if the point of the gospel is anything other than making people happy, then this kind of formulaic thinking is the most distracting thing in the world.

In fact, I am almost willing to go out on a limb and say that the point of the gospel is something other than to make people happy and therefore… this is not the way that we should be constructing sermons. I’m not the only on who thinks so. One of my favorite books has a section about Postmodern Christology that says:

 Of course, the goals and ethos of spirituality in this culture are very different from those of the early church or even the modern church. The postmodern notion of religion is characterized by consumerism:

“the individual in the role of consumer is encouraged to pick and choose from a vast inventory of religious symbols and doctrines, to select those beliefs that best express his or her private sentiments.” 2

Such spirituality is individualistic; it does not require a form of communal direction or oversight but may be enjoyed in the privacy of one’s own life. This kind of spirituality is effectively delivered within the marketplace of desire. The church of the third millennium finds itself in the midst of a culture that has become

“nothing but a meeting place for individual wills, each with its own set of attitudes and preferences and who understand that world solely as an arena for the achievement of their own satisfaction, who interpret reality as a series of opportunities for their enjoyment and for whom the last enemy is boredom.” 3

I am haunted by this reality. If we think that consumerism is the problem and we think that christianity is the solution then we are in competition with other options. What is clear is that we are no longer the big kid in the sandbox. Christianity no longer has a monopoly as it did during Christendom when so many of our doctrines and expectations were solidified.

 I have utilized a lot of whit, sass, and spunk in this post but now I just want to say it:

The point of christian preaching is not to help people be happy. In a consumer culture we are called to empower the believer, comfort the downtrodden, challenge the status quo and proclaim a preferable future.  It is also within the scope to proclaim freedom to the captive, remind the righteous  of their roots, impart gifts to those in need, and call the wayward to repentance.

The one thing that I am sure of is that the goal of christian preaching is not to make consumers happy. If that is the case, we need to utilize a different flowchart than the world provides when preparing to preach.

if anyone doesn’t want to talk about preaching but would rather chat about environmentalism and postcolonial stuff – I have this other article as well. 

Let me say upfront what I’m going to end with and then build from there:

You can’t verbalize the way things are – which is a result of the way things have been – as proof that this is how it should always be. 

Creation ‘expert’ Ray Comfort famously made a fool of himself by producing a video with Kirk Cameron where he praised the glories of the (modern) banana as evidence of God’s grand design and love for human beings. You can watch the video here – it is a hoot. There is only one problem. Comfort was highlighting many of the adaptations and ‘improvements’ that were results of human modification through deliberate cultivation.

This the problem starting in the middle. You can’t just walk into the way things are, assume the status quo and then make a case for it. *

This is not an isolated school of thought. I was camping in a national park with a long time friend who lives in and loves his ‘red’ state. We were hiking out and enjoying the beauty when he began to tell me about how ridiculous the environmentalists are and how stupid it is to put all these regulations on industry – we are handcuffing these innovators who create jobs for people. His evidence was to point to the trees around us and say “look at all of this amazing space – what are they so worried about? I don’t see why we need to have all these regulations and get so upset at industry.”

I pointed out that if somebody 100 years earlier had not had the foresight to preserve this land, the timber industry would own all this land and would have harvested all these trees. It would look nothing like it did and we would not be walking or hiking there. He had literally never thought about that.

You can’t start in the middle and ignore how things came to be – then present it as evidence of how they should always be! 

Then this week John Piper comes out and says In the Old Testament God was a King not a queen – Jesus was man not a women – and he picked men, not women, to deny him, betray him, doubt him and abandon him.

I may have tweaked that last part a little bit… but you catch my drift.

It would be like walking into a grocery store, seeing a steak wrapped in saran wrap on a Styrofoam platter and beginning to articulate how perfectly the  steak was designed for your grill – how the saran wrap crumples in your hand for ease of disposal in the waste basket – how the steak is the same dimensions in thickness from side to side for consistent grilling. Clearly God designed this steak to go on your grill and for your enjoyment!!

This is the danger of starting in the middle.

Piper’s view of God is Comforts view of the banana and my buddy’s view of the national park: completely ignorant and disconnected from the narrative & trajectory that lead to it.

and here is where it gets serious: this is a consequence of privilege. I would love to ascribe it to some classicist view of god or an a-historical understanding of theology. It might be from those two things as well, but it is a consequence of privilege and the blind spot that results from it.

If you don’t account for socialization in things like gender – and instead argue for orginal design … if you don’t give validity to things like constructions and conditioning then you look at how society has been as evidence of how it should be.

 Like Ray Comfort and his banana, John Piper ends up making the opposite point than he wanted to! Comfort intended to exalt the original design but instead highlighted human cultivation, influence and adaption. Piper desired to show how God has made us but instead showed how we have made God. 

I believe in Jesus. But Jesus doesn’t make Piper’s point. Quite the contrary – Jesus shows us a different way to be a human by challenging the as-is structures of society, and changing the rules of who belongs and who gets to participate in what.

Did Jesus finish the job? No.
Did Jesus shirk every convention of his day? No.
Did Jesus establish a precedent and set us on trajectory towards liberation and equality for all? Yes.

If you are looking for a good read, I suggest Elizabeth Johnson’s She Who Is – you can listen to one of our interviews with her [here] 

* I don’t have time here to get into the problem of a young earth, ignoring emergence thought or a having a magical ex nihilo God creating out of nothing. 

a quick follow up to the post earlier this week

 I wanted to thank everyone who gave feedback on the Four Locations of Theology in the 21st century post from earlier this week. I appreciate the comments here, on facebook, and the emails.  It has given me a lot to think about and I wanted to clarify three themes that have emerged.

Three clarifications:

• Reason seems to be the suspicious quadrant. Every time I bring up quadrilateral, more than half of the conversation will be centered on reason. This week was no exception. Reason draws the most concern – which is funny to me because tradition is the one that I find most suspect.

Here is the thing I would want to clarify: the other 3 themes of Scripture, Tradition and Experience all have reason woven into them. Those who wrote the scriptures, those who established the tradition and even our won experience are all saturated with reason. It is inescapable. The scriptures did not fall from the sky! They passed through the author’s minds and were processed with reason. Same with tradition. The creeds were not divined in some sort of supernatural ceremony. The were constructed and reasoned. Our experiences are interpreted utilizing our filters, frameworks and lenses.

 It seems important then to clarify that those three are not independent of reason but are dynamically intertwined with it. It would be useless to take out reason (as some have suggested) because it interlinked and inescapable. 

•  It may be that the quad needs something else. Some suggested replacing one of the 4 elements with an alternative. My favorite idea came from my friend Raphael who said

 “I suggest we add a fifth source for the practice of theology in the 21st century: Imagination!”

Admittedly, it would no longer be a quad! but I think that the tradeoff is that you would get adventure and zest incorporated and not just a static, conserving, or historical product.

•  There are no guarantees. Even if we could all agree to utilize the quad for the theological endeavor, there is no guarantee that we would all come up with some thing or come out with the same conclusions. This seems to be a major concern – that we can not ensure the outcome of such an endeavor.

I am surprised at the conserving nature of such mentalities! People are ok to ‘go on the journey’ as long as we predictably end up basically where we started.

Think all you want. Explore new thoughts and incorporate science … just don’t stray too far from the foundations of antiquity!  Integrate new realities and account for ongoing historical developments … just make sure that you end up with the same thing we started with.

I have not overstated this hesitancy and resistance. But the reality is that there are no guarantees. You may start out an Evangelical and end up being an Emergent type working in a Mainline church with Process theology as your main conversation partner!  (for instance)

 In summary: 

1. You can’t get rid of reason, it is already present in the other three. Scripture, Tradition and Experience are inextricably laced with it.
2. The quad may need a little something extra. The 21st century may require some zest, adventure and imagination
3. There are no guarantees. While we want to honor the historical expression and provide continuity with the trajectory … it might look a little different and think a little different than it did in the 3rd or 17th century.

Thanks for all your feedback, thoughts, and concerns. I appreciate the conversation.

In the article Olson is trying to fight off criticisms from the ultra-reformed, or rabbid-Calvinist wing of the Evangelical camp. Folks like MacArthur, Piper, Driscoll, and Mohler – besides being continuously contentious – are always throwing around words like heresy and orthodoxy at folks like Olson, Rob Bell, and Brian McLaren (all former pod guests).

 Here is the thing: there is no Evangelical Orthodoxy

I love reading books like Revisioning Evangelical Theology by Stanley Grenz, Discovering an Evangelical Heritage by Donald Dayton, History of Evangelical Theology by Roger Olson.  I was part of the the Lussane gathering of young leaders in Malaysia. I was very vocal last summer that Evangelical is not only a political term but has deep theological implications and is inherently and historically theological (I used Bebbington’s 4 indicators) .

 But there are two things I think need to be clear:

I got a book called the Evangelical Catechism. It is a compilation of consensus beliefs from 200 leaders, pastors, and thinkers that were surveyed. I like the book – but that is not the same as a catechism! We have no Pope, no ability to call a council, no catechism … so we need to knock it off with the “Orthodox” insistence and throwing around the word  “heresy”. LOOK: there actually is an ‘Orthodox’ church and they think that  the likes of Driscoll, MacArthur, and Piper (as well as the rest of us) has lost their way!  *

1) There is no evangelical catechism and there is no evangelical orthodoxy!  I proposed earlier this week that a dynamic conversation is the best we can hope for (I am partial to the Wesleyan quadrilateral). Can we have consensus? Ok. Can we have conversation? Absolutely. Is there a governing body to enforce your brand of ‘orthodoxy’? NO – so knock it off. Get some new words in your vocab. Think of some other ways to say what you want to say and stop pretending like you believe only what the early church believed. It fantasy at best and delusion at worst.

2) You can’t kick me out of the family. We all have siblings that think we are off and even wrong. Some brothers don’t talk to each other for years … but they are still family. That is not what determines if you are a part of a family! It is not how it works. So snuggle up sister! We are in this together, like it or not, we have the same parent, we were birthed through the same water, and we have the same blood. We don’t have to agree on everything – but stop trying to kick me out of the ‘fam’ bro! We are in this for eternity.

Now I know someone will come along and say “I told you its a meaningless term” … but I want to say

Hey Mr. Jones – if you don’t want to be evangelical that is fine. But some of us call this family and it means a lot to us. If you are done with the term, fine. But to us it has deep meaning we still use it as a family name. If you don’t count yourself as a member anymore – that is your call. But stop telling us who are inside the conversation that Evangelical doesn’t mean anything. It does to us. 

We may not have a catechism or an actual orthodoxy, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t a  living branch on the family tree.

I also shared some thoughts about Christian unity and conformity on a TNT episode. 

* I appreciate the real Orthodox and have learned much from them.

Tony Jones gave a little pushback to Daniel Kirk (a recent guest on Homebrewed) about homosexuality and the Apostle Paul. Both Paul and homosexuality are hot topics right now so the discussion was vibrant.

Kirk is clear about those infamous Old Testament ‘clobber’ passages but is a little more allusive when it comes to the New Testament. He pulls what appears to be equivalent to an ‘argument from silence’ saying that Jesus would have commented on it if he wasn’t OK with the dominant view of his day. Tony makes this argument:

Apply that logic to any number of other moral or ethical issues, and I’ll bet that Kirk and his fellow evangelical biblical scholars don’t agree. For instance, Jesus was silent about:

• Slavery
• Abortion
• The death penalty
• Corporal punishment
• Racism
• Rape

I could go on. Does that mean that we should argue that Jesus was implicitly endorsing each of these? Of course not.

The same line of reasoning has been showing up over and over again in blogs written by women about issues of church leadership, image-beauty, and marriage.

 It is tough to argue about what the Bible doesn’t say. 

I actually try to pull this off in the latest TNT (Eschatology and Resurrection) when it comes to reading the Old Testament. I use the story of Lot’s daughters (Genesis 19) and point out that there is a noticeable lack of commentary in so many places in the Bible. In that Genesis 19 narrative it never says “and what they did was wrong” or “and they should not have done that”.   It just tells the story.

I compare this to the Canaanite conquest when the Israelites come out of slavery, violence, and oppression – into a new land – and then become violent and oppressive to the inhabitants. It reads to me like a cautionary tale about groups who escape violent oppression and come into a new area will always think that A) God is on their side (which is different than saying ‘God is with them‘  B) God has prepared the land especially  for them C) that God wants them to kill the current residents

 I got this idea of the cautionary tale from a book called Native and Christian - specifically two essays entitled The Old Testament of Native America by Steve Charleston and Canaanites, Cowboys and Indians by Robert Allen Warrior.

These three topics: homosexuality, women’s roles in church & home, and religious violence are not just arguments from history … they are on our doorstep knocking angrily everyday of the 21st century. They also share something else in common: the make arguments from silence about what is not in the Bible.

Here is where it gets even stickier. I was reading an old article by Roger Olson (also a former podcast guest) from Christianity Today 10 years ago. He was illustrating how American Christianity came to be and specifically the influence that the 1800’s had on our contemporary situation.

I also stumbled into Tad Delay’s blog about American Populism in early American religion, dealing with The Democratization of American Christianity by Nathan O. Hatch. Tad explains :

The language of a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ,” a sinners prayer for salvation, and a strong emphasis on unschooled individuals reading the Bible without need for rigorous theology came out of this period. Those with any training or expertise were openly spoken of as the enemy. The most flamboyant and charismatic circuit preacher garnered fame- which was certainly a goal of many- but to be charismatic, you had to convince the hearers that the message was simple. So, the message became very simple.

And this is where I get really nervous. A plain & simple reading of the Bible is one thing – a surface understanding I am always encountering and navigating. That is one thing. But arguments about what God didn’t say and what is not in the Bible are complex and nuanced. Our popular simplistic impulse leaves us in a pickle – one that I am not sure we  commonly have the tools to get out of and one that leaves us with an increasingly irrelevant message that our young people simply walk away from.

If everything needs to be understandable to anyone … we might be in trouble when it comes to reading the Bible in 21st century.

In this hour, Tripp and Bo take 4 calls from hotline and respond to questions about eschatology and the resurrection.

You can call in with any questions or comments at 678-590-2739 (brew) and let us know what you want us to talk about.

Two books that we reference today are Surprised by Hope and Simply Christian. We also alude to the John Cobb prayer podcast.  Thanks to Jason, Angela, Garret, and Keaton for calling in!

Graphic Option TWO

I love the quad! I am a proud descendant of Wesley and I still find it quite helpful to utilize the same quad.  Here is why I find each element so valuable.

In the Driscoll interview (he was going after the host because his wife is a pastor) he said something that is hugely troubling about its implications for the value of certain types of people. Driscoll was asking about how many young single men have come to Christ in the past year. Not how many people, but how many of them were men. Still not satisfied, he asked about what kind of men they were – were they strong men?

Do you see the sequence? (some might call it a pecking order)

He asked not about numbers of people who came to Christ, not about Church health or the British context (ie. implications of having a Church of England)

• How many were men … specifically young single men.
• Not men in general, but a specific type of man (strong)

Some may want to simply dismiss this as an eccentric fascination of an isolated mentality. I beg to differ.  I see this as a ongoing, if below the surface, mentality that is pervasive in the North American Protestant-Evangelical-Charismatic camp (also known as ‘my people’).

I have written recently that we may worship success more than any God – and I don’t want to make sweeping generalizations about the fallout of the 20th centuries rejection of the Social Gospel or the inherent downside of anti-intellectualism that is still widely pervasive – what I am saying is that Driscoll’s views and Tebow’s fans are not an anomaly. They are the logical end expression of an underlying belief about who God is and how God works.

The Driscol-Tebow controversies are merely the public manifestation of an underlying theology surfacing in examples that bring to the public’s attention to what is always bubbling just below the surface – or behind the closed doors of the sanctuary.

The Gospel as it is configured in some quarters is surprising to those who are outside this stream. Does Jesus love everyone? Technically, yes. Is there a type of person that Jesus loves more … or a part of that person (soul, gender, etc.) that Jesus is more interested in?

If this concept is completely foreign to you – I may need to come at this a different way:

I had a chance to talk to a faithful saint who suffers from a chronic degenerative disease. She found a piece that I wrote about why we need to move away from old understandings about curses. She had undergone more than a decade of people ‘discerning in prayer’ that someone had placed a curse on her when she was younger and then attempting through intercession and deliverance to break the enemy’s power over her.

She was intrigued by my insistence that God was not picking and choosing who to intervene for and which situations to interfere in. She had heard last week’s interview with John Cobb where he said that we believe that God is doing in every situation all that God is able to do that in situation.

This is a radical assertion and a sharp departure from the common belief about how God can and does work in the world.

I told her about an old interview that Tripp did with Bruce Epperly where Tripp paraphrased him by saying “God does not hold out or run out”.   Think about the implications of those two statements:

In every situation God is doing everything that God is able to do

God does not hold out or run out

I love this view of God. Some people get really upset because God is not as powerful as the Zeus-Caesar (theos) character they have been told lives up in the heavens watching us all and intervening/interfering according to ‘His’ will. But we are actually saying that God is powerful – its just that God’s power is a different kind of power from the unilateral and coercive power that has classically been ascribed to the Divine Being.

In this past week’s TNT I said that I thought something really positive came out of the pushback we got from our cross-efforts with Rachel Held Evans and Kurt Willems. It became clear that Process-Relational thought really is saying something quite different than classical theologies based on Imperial assumptions and Greek metaphysics.

This is not a simple tweak of the existing system (like Open theology). This is not a program that you just download and install into your already in place operating system. It is not a patch that employ to get rid of the bugs and kinks in the classical program. Relational thought is a different operating system (to use the fun Mac v. Microsoft Windows analogy).

I am excited about the upcoming Theological Conversation Jan 31-Feb 2  between the Emergent Village and Process-Relational thought. I am not under the impression that P-R is for everyone or that many folks will ‘convert’. But I am hopeful that we can engage, in a significant way, the ongoing and persistent glitches that  (while they may rarely come to full blown Driscoll-Tebow levels) are perpetually just below the surface.

I like reading Linbeck.* I used to say that I love Lindbeck but I ran into two snags:

•  I had no idea what people did with Lindbeck. I did not realize that it often led to retreat into a neo-Catholic expression.
• I did not (and still do not) fully understand that there is some inherent wrinkle in his idea that language creates our religious experience that implies a one-way limitation of language – not allowing our experience to change language and that somehow limits God. Like I said, it is a philosophical wrinkle that is a bit technical for me.

Having said all that … 

What I am a big fan of is his critique of language. He has a riveting analysis of the way that religious language functions in our communities and personal experiences.  I was prone to like Lindbeck because of my deep appreciation for Nancey Murphy’s book “Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism”. I was primed for what Linbeck brings to the table.

To become religious–no less than to become culturally or linguistically competent–is to interiorize a set of skills by practice and training. One learns how to feel, act, and think in conformity with the religious tradition that is, in its inner structure, far richer and more subtle than can be explicitly articulated. The primary knowledge is not about the religion, nor is that the religion teaches such and such, but rather how to be religious in such and such ways. p. 35

Then I found out that saying you appreciate the post-Liberal approach is like saying you cheer for the New York Yankees in Boston. I get the concern with the descendants of Lindbeck’s work … but I am still suspicious that he is right about how language works in our faith communities.

Fast Forward: I was reading some stuff to get ready for the 2012 Emergent Village Theological Conversation and I stumbled onto a section of Whitehead’s thoughts on religious language.** I got to a section called “Doctrine and History”. After dealing with the fact that language does not have a one-to-one correlation and that all language thus requires interpretation, the author explains:

“The language of a tradition and the central doctrines that reflect and support that language are the prime turbulence of the particular mode of existence characterizing that tradition. Furthermore, as human existence is shaped in specialized ways during the course of history, experiences occur that are not possible to persons shaped by other traditions.”

I resonate with the idea that a person is shaped by the language one is groomed and conditioned by – and that would both empower and naturally shape the experiences that one has and the interpretation of those experiences … even (or especially) the religious experiences.

It just makes sense that because religious in a communal endeavor – one is always a part of a community that has a tradition and set of practices/beliefs – that it determines, at some level, both the types of experiences one has , can have and how one translates or interprets those experiences.

 This is a vital assertion for the 21st century! We no longer live in the monopoly of Christendom or the frameworks of the Colonial Era where one tradition imported and imposed foreign expectations and alien interpretations on another.

With works like “The invention of world religions” by Masuzawa  and “God is not One” by Prothero (among many others) we are entering a time in world history (and thus church history) where we need to come to terms with two things that both Lindbeck and Whitehead are pointing out:

• Language is both inherited and powerful in shaping our experiences and subsequent interpretations of those experiences.
• Language used in doctrines like ‘the Church’ and ‘Eucharist’ actually facilitate the ability to have certain experiences that are simply not available to those outside the community or language game. Practices like Yoga or Ramadan would be the same for those in different traditions. That is why North American Christians who do yoga are not having the same experience as those in India.

We live in an era where the realities of inter-religious education, cross-denominational communication and trans-national citizenship are going to challenge all of our inherited traditions and conceptual frameworks.

If we are unwilling to do so and insist on simply repeating the same rote answers week after week under the misguided impression that we are being faithful to the tradition … we are in danger of an irrelevance that leads not only to extinction but ultimately failure to accomplish our great commission.

* George Lindbeck wrote “The Nature of Doctrine” and along with Hans Frei (author of “Eclipse of the Biblical Narrative”) is credited with starting the Yale School of thought. One of the most famous proponents of which is Stanley Hauerwas famous for his books like  “Peaceable Kingdom” , “Resident Aliens” as well as other things.

** Alfred North Whitehead was a 20th century philosopher who is credited for helping to come up with what became Process-Relational thought.

• podcast with Dr. John Cobb
• Calvin blog with Rachel Held Evans
• Granny blog with Kurt Willems
• Paul Capetz on Calvin 
• Tony Jones blog on Prayer

It is a wild and woolly 30 minutes as they prepare for the 2012 Emergent Village Theological Conversation. You have two week to sign up and get yourself to Southern California.

p.s. it was 76 and sunny here yesterday*

* previous results do not guarantee future success  

I have said before that I respect Tim and that he does not think God helps the Broncos win football games.

Why I love Tim: He works incredibly hard, has an amazing energy, lives out his faith, and serves orphans. This guy is incredible!

Why I hate his success: If you are in the NFL, you are gifted. Every player is extraordinarily talented … and I think that those talents come for God. I would prefer if we said that every player was blessed by God –  some acknowledge it and some are quite vocal about.

The assertion that God blesses one player more than another is where I run into the problem: that God is picking and choosing this person over that one – and interfering in this moment but not that one is a view of God that is irresponsible and indefensible. 

 I will go as far as to say that it is somewhere between superstition and missing the entire point of Jesus’ life and message. This certainly is not a Christian view of God.

Last week Tripp had a blog posted by Rachel Held Evans where he said that God was not omnipotent and that the future is not determined. In the TNT podcast that comes out today, Tripp and I talk about the line of reasoning that some people took in not only their objection to Tripp’s note but came to the defense of an omnipotent conception of God . Some people just came out and said “the book of Job shows that God is omnipotent”. This is a terrifying sentence to hear from a Christian.

There are three things about Job that need to be clear:

• It is not a newspaper report. It is a dramatic presentation (broken into distinct acts).
• That God rewards those who do right and love God and punishes those who disobey and turn away from God … is exactly what the book of Job is written against. That is against the narrative of Job’s life story at the beginning and against what God says at the end.
• Christians believe that Jesus lived a perfect life – and was brutally murdered. I see that as the Death of Job’s God. That old concept of God died on the Cross.

So the BIble doesn’t teach this view of God and the history of the world does not reflect this view. God does not reward those who are faithful and put down those who are evil. The evil prosper and the righteous suffer as much as everyone under that evil. 

We have to stop with this superstitious system of rewards and benefits that treats God like God as some sort of cosmic Gum-ball Machine.  It is extremely hurtful and insulting.  The part that baffles me is how prominent the view is among evangelicals … who make bold claims about being based on the Bible and ‘being Biblical’.

This view of the interfering God who doles out blessing to ‘His’ favorites is a relic of the past that we must outgrow.

This antiquated, superstitious view needs to die on the Cross so that the God revealed in Christ can be resurrected for our time. 

I applaud Tripp Fuller for initiating this stimulating and provocative discussion about Calvin’s theology and the question of metaphysical determinism.  As someone with a deep appreciation for Calvin (I have taught 6 seminars on Calvin at my school in the past 20 years as well as written a book on Calvin’s understanding of religion), I hope I can add some words that are intended not polemically but thoughtfully, thereby giving expression to some of the issues with which I have had to wrestle as a student and teacher of Calvin.

Let me begin by stating that of all the premodern theologians, Calvin best captures the whole of what is important in my understanding of Christian faith.  He is deeply indebted to Luther in his doctrine of justification, he is profoundly Augustinian in his understanding that religion is a matter of the heart and its affections, and he veers in the direction of Wesley with his emphasis upon sanctification.  Moreover, his high view of the Old Testament and his belief that the third use of the law is its primary purpose account for his oft-noted affinities with Judaism and thus make him an important bridge between Jews and Christians.  Finally, one cannot help but notice that Calvin is also vitally concerned with the political life and the shaping of society in the direction of greater justice for all and care for the needy.  In each of these respects, I follow Calvin without reservation!

But there is another side of Calvin that explains the stereotypically negative picture of him.  First, there is his utterly deterministic view of divine providence.  Not only does God allow events we deem evil to occur but God is the active agent behind each and every event.  Of course, Calvin strives valiantly not to impugn God’s character by accusing God of injustice.  Still, it is hard for even the most sympathetic reader of Calvin’s theology not to find a logical problem in his theology at this point.  Second, his doctrine of election means that before creation God has predestined who is to be a recipient of salvation and who is to be damned.  Again, it is hard not to suspect that his position here leads to insuperable problems.  After all, what is the point of preaching the gospel if some people (indeed, the majority of people!) are incapable of responding to it by virtue of God’s decision to damn them before they are born?

As a theologian I employ an existential hermeneutic, if I may call it that.  What I mean is that I always look for the existential question being addressed behind any particular theological statement of doctrine.  So, for example, it is clear in the above two cases that Calvin is addressing two concerns near and dear to his heart.  First, his doctrine of providence is concerned to assure us that the events of personal life and history are meaningful because God is actively involved in all events.  Second, his doctrine of election is concerned to uphold the priority of God’s grace in human salvation.  But, having identified the motivating questions behind his formulations of these doctrines, we have to ask: are there other ways we could affirm these religious points without Calvin’s problematic interpretations of these doctrines?  This is how I believe we should approach the question of whether metaphysical determinism is really as essential to Calvin’s theology as most of those who call themselves “Calvinists” believe to be the case.

Process theologians and others with related viewpoints have correctly pointed to the influence of Greek metaphysical assumptions upon all classical Christian theology, whether Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, or Protestant.  There can be no serious doubt, I think, that the classical tradition is guided by an unquestioned axiom regarding God’s impassibility.  I have found process theology particularly helpful in offering new ways to think about this issue, especially its insistence that there can be a perfect exemplification of receptivity in God.  If we let go of the classical bias that looks upon change and passibility as imperfections—and I think we should—then there might be another way of working through the problematic aspects of Calvin’s theology identified above.

There is, in my judgment, one other problem with Calvin’s theology and that is a formal or methodological one.  Calvin, like all the premodern Protestants, believed it is necessary to account for every single statement within the Bible and to make them cohere with one another in a “system” of doctrine.  Calvin’s Institutes of 1559 is probably the finest achievement in the era of the Reformation of this form of biblical theology.  Two centuries of historical-critical labor, however, have sufficed to demonstrate that there are multiple theological perspectives in the Bible that cannot be harmonized apart from doing damage to the integrity of the biblical text itself.  Let’s take the example of divine determinism.  Obviously, Calvin has plenty of exegetical support for his deterministic doctrines of providence and election in both testaments.  Yet the Bible itself also offers counter-examples where the emphasis is precisely to assert human responsibility and hope for a redemptive outcome of even the most desperate circumstances if only sinful human beings will repent of their destructive ways.  I believe that an honest reckoning with the Bible requires us to leave behind Calvin’s basic methodological assumption of a unitary biblical theology and to think systematically about the various possibilities offered to us by the Bible for thinking about providence and election.  But agreement with my view means that we have to move away from the understanding of exegesis and theology bequeathed to us by the sixteenth-century Reformers and to grapple with the difficult issues of modern theology that have arisen of necessity from the historical-critical study of the Bible.

In sum, I believe that there is much of importance to retrieve in Calvin’s theology but that it cannot be salvaged in its entirety.  But is this a betrayal of Calvin?  I think not.  If Calvin was able to adopt a critical posture toward Luther, why cannot Reformed theologians today adopt a critical posture toward Calvin?  I might note in closing that two of the finest heirs of Calvin’s tradition in the modern world have done precisely that: Schleiermacher and Barth.

Paul E. Capetz
Professor of Historical Theology
United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities

• We are not under the impression that everyone is on board with the Process thought 
• We love to hear from other perspectives at they illuminate, challenge and respond to this ongoing exchange.

I was reading something that other day that really excited me. It was a comparison of the existential approach of someone like Rudolf Butlmann and the “powerful and illuminating analysis of post-christian existence” with the approach of someone like A.N. Whitehead in his book “Religion in the Making”.
It was particularly this sentence which caught my attention:

Bultmann’s belief that through Jesus’ death and resurrection a change was effected in the human situation at the most fundamental level can be examined as a historic hypothesis without introducing any ad hoc notions of a unique act of God.*

Fairly straight forward stuff, but it piqued my interest enough to go back and make sure that I understood the whole section leading up to it. What is interesting is that just before the above quote is this little nugget:

In such a context (exploring distinctive Western structures) the role of such historical figures such as Buddha, Socrates, and Jesus can been seen a bringing new structures of existence into being.

“Whoa! Hold it right there! I like it when you say wonderful things about how great Jesus is … by why do you have to include those other people?” I can hear my conservative and evangelical friends saying.
This is not the only time I have seen something like this and had the same reaction. (God is not One by Stephen Prothero springs to mind). It can almost be framed in this simply rubric

• God is Great!
• Jesus is super.
• don’t elevate anyone else or Jesus won’t seem unique

I remember giving that original Homebrewed interview with John Cobb (ep. 38) to some friends and how uncomfortable they were (across the board) that Francis of Assisi, Mother Teresa, and Siddhartha Gautama may have been as open to the will of God as Jesus was.
According to Cobb, what makes Jesus unique is not simply that he was so open to the call of God but what God had called him to. In my circles you have to tack Bible verses on to the end of every major point, so I referenced Romans 5 that what God did in Christ satisfied something in God and changed humanity’s relationship to God. Was that enough? That God did something unique in Jesus … or does there also have to be an absence of affirming what may have done in others?

The other night I was talking to a college student from a different continent. She asked me why there was so much confusion in religion and if it “was the work of the evil one?”. I tried to explain how religions grew up in relative isolation during a much simpler time and they were simply not equipped to handle the complex world we now find ourselves in nor are they meant (or even attempting to) answer each other’s questions. They are just not set up for it.

Religions developed in a simpler time and are not set up for a) this level of complexity or b) this much overlap. There is going to continue to be a need for work to be done within each religion and between the religions (or traditions/communities). What will be the Christian contribution?

We all agree that if there is God that God would by necessity be great! Even those who don’t think that the God of Abraham is Allah and Jesus’ Abba will agree with that. Almost everyone agrees that Jesus was extraordinary. Even those who are not so sure about the accuracy of the historical record will acknowledge his impact. But was Jesus unique? Can we affirm something great in other figures without diminishing him?

Unfortunately those who have inherited an unquestioned view developed in Christendom’s monopoly will just quote John 14:6 and Acts 4:12 as if that settles the matter. A pre-existent Christ came down in Jesus and that is all you need to know.
This is why I am so intrigued to have Process theology as conversation partner. I am excited to hear what John Cobb has to say on Thursday morning at the Emergent Theological Conversation when we talk about Pluralism. I have been reading a lot of Cobb and when talks about the way that God was present in Jesus … it makes more sense than anything else I have ever heard on the subject. I would be interest in your thoughts. How does your tradition handle this? What will the future hold in this arena? Is the Christian tradition capable of this give-and-take of the 21st century?

*p. 86 of Cobb’s book

Omnipotence:  A Compliment Jesus Wants You to Take Back

I (Tripp) have one important rule to guide my theological thinking: God has to at least be as loving as Jesus.
It seems rather obvious for a Christian, given our confession that Jesus was indeed the ‘image of the invisible God,’ but throughout church history, God, Jesus’ Abba, has been given a very theologically destructive compliment– namely that God is Omnipotent , All Powerful.

While this philosophical compliment is absent in Scripture, yet present throughout much theology, it was John Calvin that made God’s power the ultimate theological principle.  I used to be a Calvinist. I read Calvin’s Institutes in high school, used Charles Spurgeon sermons for devotions, and quoted Jonathan Edwards to my crazy Arminian friends in college.  Then I realized the God I had come to know in Christ was way too awesome for my Calvinist theology.  The theology was not simply off, but set against God’s nature, name, and essence being love.

This isn’t to say Calvinists aren’t Christians (or that I wasn’t when I was there theologically). I am simply saying that omnipotence is a theological compliment Jesus wants you to take back for four reason:

1. An omnipotent deity is responsible for the evil in the world.  When God can do whatever God wants to do, whenever God wants to do it, everything that happens is either the direct will of God or permitted by God.  Of course Calvin, in his obsession with making God uber-powerful, rejects the idea of God’s permissive will and keeps God as the prime actor in all actions.  That means God has willed genocide, murder, rape, cancer, abuse, and the torture of children.  When God is omnipotent, one can read history as the will of God, and history is way too full of evil, suffering, and violence to imagine it as revelatory of God’s will.  If God ever willed the violent death of an innocent child, then that God is not Jesus’ Abba or worthy of a Christian’s worship.

2. An omnipotent deity is not capable of genuine relationships or love.  Loving relationships require openness, vulnerability, risk, and genuine duration.  We  intuit this. For example, when two lovers consummate their marriage in a passionate act of sweet love-making, it is their freedom vulnerability, and willingness to risk that make their intercourse an act of love and not rape.  If one side of the relationship  is determined, it just isn’t a relationship.  I remember in my Calvinist past thinking that God elected me to love God, but being coerced  sounds much more like a relationship to a gangster than God. There’s a big difference between a puppet and a person, an object and a subject.  The God of Jesus created, sustains, and redeems people, children of God.

3. An omnipotent deity runs eternity like a tyrannical dictator.  “For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.”  Paul said that, and I think it makes perfect sense.  Of course, if Calvin is correct and God is actually the one in charge, then it becomes a bit odd…or flat our disgusting…to simultaneously think God elects people to suffer for all eternity for their sins.  That’s worse than me spanking my son for eating a cookie I made and gave to him.  This image of God is morally bankrupt and need not be defended.  Instead we could imagine God to be a Woman who seeks out each lost coin until it is found, or a faithful and patient Father waiting to throw a party for the return of his son.  These images sound like a God as loving as Jesus.

4.  An omnipotent deity builds crosses.  The cross and resurrection are the center piece of the faith.  The cross of Jesus was not simply a convenient way for Jesus to die so that God could raise him from the dead, but a symbol of Rome’s power.  Rome and only Rome built crosses and put people on them.  Jesus died with the power of empire inscribed on his cross-dead body.  It is that body that God raised from the dead, and it is the future of the Cross-dead Christ that we as Christians share. Yet for some reason, we so easily speak about God’s power as if God was being revealed in the building of crosses and not in their bearing. God’s self-revelation in Jesus was a rejection of the coercive, determining, and controlling power that the empires of this world love so much for the power of love.  Infinite divine love, the freedom it gives, the risks it takes and the possibilities it continuously creates offer an alternative ultimate theological principle for Christian theology and one I think coheres with the story of Jesus.

Process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once stated that, “When the Western world accepted Christianity, Caesar conquered; and the received text of Western theology was edited by his lawyers…. The brief Galilean vision of humility flickered throughout the ages, uncertainly…. But the deeper idolatry, of the fashioning of God in the image of the Egyptian, Persian, and Roman imperial rulers, was retained. The Church gave unto God the attributes which belonged exclusively to Caesar.”  

This observation rings true to me, but Caesar’s lawyers do not have to have the last word and Christian theology does not need to protect an idolatrous image of God anymore.

Process is a theology that has grown over the last 100 years from the philosophy of Mr. Whitehead. It is a global community (big in China and Europe) that engages both theory and practice with contemporary scholarship. For those who take it theologically, it is a way to address the Bible that is fully faithful to Jesus‘ vision, while integrating modern Biblical scholarship at every level.

The easiest access point for most is to say that because God IS love, then God’s very nature is loving, and so God’s use of power is not coercive – it is persuasive (almost seductive).

 So God is not omnipotent.

Secondly, God is omniscient in that God knows all there is to know – but the future is undetermined.

Thirdly, God is omnipresent in an even more radical way than traditionally thought.

Lastly, God is neither immutable nor impassable – those are concerns of early Greek thought and not from the Christian scripture.
So quit saying God is omnipotent.  Jesus was just too loving for that to stick.

To learn more about Process Theology, check out  Marjorie Suchocki’s short PDF intro (free), and Bruce Epperly’s book, Process Theology: A Guide for the Perplexed. 

___

Thank you all for the amazing conversation today – and even the push-back! This is the major development of our era over the previous centuries … the people of god in theological dialogue I want to make three general responses to some clear trends that have been displayed here:

1) Open Theology: folks are right (like Kurt Willems) to say that there is a significant distinction between Open and Process thought. Open is only/primarily concerned with the nature of the future. They hold that God reserves the right to do whatever God wants … its just that in love God has chosen to limit God’s self. It’s like God is just being nice but “He” doesn’t have to if “He” doesn’t want to.

Process make a clear philosophical assertion that God is not just self-limiting. God’s essence IS love and that is the determining criteria of interpretation.

Thomas Jay Oord does a great job at addressing Philippians 2: this beautiful poem that illustrates a wonderful truth and draws a dramatic picture of how we should BE in the world – like Christ.

2) Classic theology, Calvinism and Theodicy: I really like that folks have objections. They should. My only concerns are with the “we are making God in our image” and “ this is too philosophical” objections.

I want to clarify – Process doesn’t start with the problem of evil, it was just an access point for this format of conversation. If people look at their theology’s approach to scripture, its philosophical underpinnings, and its accounting for evil… If one holds to an approach of the past, sees it flaws, and says “I can live with that problem” – that is one thing. BUT if someone doesn’t see the in-congruence (and thus ‘there is no problem’) then THAT in itself is creating a 2nd problem.

I think that you would really enjoy looking into “Process Theology – an introduction” by Cobb and Griffin… especially pages 108-110 which deal with the Trinity.

Two things that I want to address are A) the baby and the bathwater B) making God in our own image.

I get what folks are saying. Here are a couple of things to consider:

A)  No one wants to throw the baby out with the proverbial bathwater … per se

• That analogy actually illustrates an interesting patriarchy/hierarchy. IT comes from and era when Dad bathed first, Mom and then the kids … to the point that by the time one got to the baby … the bathwater was SO filthy that It was actually possible to lose the baby in the dirty water and throw it out.
• We have indoor plumbing now. We take care of our babies. That proverb, that mentality, and that concern may need to be revised for the contemporary situation.

Theology is no different.

A) Making God is our own image: no one wants a God that is just a big version of themselves projected onto the screen of the heavens. This kind of anthropomorphic imagining has happened so often in history that there is a huge rubbish heap of Gods (Thor, Zeus, Rah, etc.) that folks have no time for anymore.

While we are not interested in making a god in our own image, we are in danger of making our concept of god just that irrelevant if we continue to use only frameworks from the 2nd – 16th century.

Process makes an important distinction between Primordial and Consequential nature of God (called the Di-Polar nature of God). This is an essential  element to engaging the huge concept and historic understanding that we are dealing with.

I would be interested in your response to this! – Bo

Graphic Option TWO

I have been researching some famous takes on ‘the end’ (or ‘final things’) in preparation for an upcoming Theology Nerd Throwdown (TNT) about the resurrection and eschatology.

One of the reasons that I wanted to go back a re-visit this topic wasn’t just because we got several calls into the phone-in hotline (678-590-2739) – and not just because it is 2012 – but because my own eschatology has changed so radically in the past 10 years. So, I should probably put all my cards on the table before I interact with these legends. Two confessions:

• I do not believe that the book of Revelation is about the end of the world. I see it primarily as a political commentary on the first centuries (CE) utilizing an apocalyptic genre and therefore of little profit for purposes of this doctrine or for future-casting. Our hope come not from the book of Revelation but from the truth of Christ’s resurrection. 
• I was raised pre-millennial partial-dispensationalist, with amillenial charismatic leanings and an eye toward post-millennial expectations. My dad was a church historian and preacher so I know those camps’ strengths and weaknesses pretty well. I would obviously no longer frame the conversation the way that whole argument is constructed.

I find that in each of the following authors there something deeply attractive and then something a little troubling – some more troubling than others. Here then is my sampling of perspectives. I would welcome any feedback or new suggestions.

Irenaeus: this 2nd century writer was perhaps the first great postbiblical theologian  and he believed in a physical resurrection (Against Heresies, book 5, chapters 32-33, 36). You can see in his writings where we get most of our historical literal reading. He even believed that the new flesh would be identical to the old in which the saints would inherent the ‘new heavens and the new earth’.
The hesitation comes when he gets to this part where he is working with Matthew 26:27-29 where Christ promises not to drink of the fruit of the vine until the new kingdom. He is putting a lot of stock in the literalness of both the presence of grape vines as proof of  the physical nature of new creation and the assuredness of the resurrection because of the disciple’s presence for the drink.  There is a hermeneutic in place that I am just not sure anyone wants to assimilate in the 21st century.

Origen: this 3rd century writer has a spiritual take that stands in sharp contrast to the literalness of the Irenaeus. His doctrine is known as apokatastasis ton panton – the restitution of all things (On First Principles, book 3, chapter 6). I was prepared to like Origen – as I am a big fan of his on several other subjects.
I was not prepared however for his big leap! He puts so much stock in the idea of God being ‘all in all’ that he even goes as far as to say that there will be no more contrast between good and evil and this will be true for each individual person as well. He was definitely working with a model of ‘Mind-Body-Spirit’ that is ancient and I was not sure I wanted to go back to.

Augustine: this 5th century writer is perhaps the most famous writer on this subject (City of God, book 22, chapter 30). He helps us dream of perfect peace and promises rewards where “virtue will be the best and greatest of al possible prizes”. His is truly the stuff of bliss and delight.
I have several hesitation with Augustine, not least of which is the whole best of all imaginable worlds suspicion of human creation and limitation … but it is how he get there that is notable.

“There is a clear indication of this final sabbath if we take the seven ages of world history as being “days” and calculate in accordance with the data furnished by the Scriptures. The first age or day is that from Adam to the flood…”

We obviously live in the seventh day (of indeterminate length) before the 8th day of Sabbath rest. I’m assuming that I don’t need to elaborate why this antiquated mental construct and hermeneutic employed is problematic for the contemporary thinker.

Schleiermacher: This 19th century writer actually has a really healthy and vibrant reading (The Christian Faith) … but it is framed in a unique bracket. He begins by saying  (essentially) that the doctrine related to the consummation of the church is going to be different than other doctrines (like Christology) because so much of it is speculation and can not come from human experience. He makes a strong case for seeing prophetic pictures through the rules of art and an insistence on tracing everything back to the utterances of Christ. He points our the inherent limitations of conceiving of a future life by analogy with the present one. He is right about that! Too often talk of heaven is nothing more than a projection of the best of here. The glitch with this guy is that the minute you bring up his name in conjunction with experience you have a whole can of worms you have to deal with. 

 Bultmann: This 20th century writer stressed that our is essentially an eschatological religion that is not simply ethics or morality. He says “According to the New Testament, Jesus Christ is the eschatological event, the action of God by which God has set an end to the old world.” (History and Eschatology)
I like what Bultmann had to say. I mean REALLY liked it! But let’s be honest: unless you are going to get down with his whole existential-demythologized program … you are not going to be quoting a lot of Bultmann. He just comes with too much baggage. It seems to me that he is an all-or-nothing kind of resource.

Tillich: This 20th century giant runs his interpretation of the kingdom of God through his philosophy of history (The Protestant Era) making an important distinction between Kairos (fullness of time) from Chronos (measured time). I won’t review it here except to say that it is blazing awesome stuff and if you are prone to liking Tillich, then definitely check this out. He even explains how democracy, socialism, and anarchy are leftovers of religious utopia concepts. Tillich, however, is not for everyone – his heady and philosophically elaborate ideas are not entry level stuff. 

Pannenberg: I have never read anyone like Pannenberg. This 20th century writer accounts for the existentialist concepts of his peers while transcending their concerns and focusing on a real history and real future of the kingdom of God, not just internal personal experiences. I read a selection from The Idea of God and Human Freedom because I had just recently reread Theology and the Kingdom of God. Tripp is a big fan of Wolfhart P. so I will not take too much time here as I am sure that we talk about this plenty in the TNT.  I will just pass along this quote:

“In my opinion this is to misunderstand the meaning of the eschatological prophecies of the future. They are of course concerned with the real future, but in a different sense from predictions on the basis of natural laws, forecasts of political developments or the intuitive foreknowledge of contingent future events. The eschatological prophecies of the future formulate the conditions of the final realization of man’s humanity as a consequence of the establishment of the righteousness of God, which is essential to man’s being as such.”

You can see that it is thick reading with nuanced distinctions… but I love his insistence on a real historical expression while accounting for the abstract-conceptual concerns of the existentialists.

I am excited to talk with Tripp about Marjorie Suchocki’s process idea of being taken back into God and our experience being remembered in God and being free to experience the fullest of God’s presence for eternity – as well as N.T. Wright’s concept of  “the world being put to rights” that is so popular right now, as well a little Jurgen Multmann to make our good friend Tony Jones happy.

If you haven’t signed up for the conference yet, it is not too late! You have a month get your tickets and get to Southern California where it will be 86 degrees and sunny today.  Go to http://www.processtheology.org/

Here are the top 11 blogs of Homebrewed Christianity in 2011  :

1. Theology Nerd Book Survey 

2. That’s “Too Gay” – Brian Ammons’ Banned Chapter from Baptimergent

3. Your First Steps into Biblical Universalism…

4. 31 Reasons I Left Evangelicalism and Became a Progressive But Not a Liberal by Michael Camp

5. God Takes Sides….or When Karl Barth Was Right

6. Defining the Secular: Charles Taylor (pt. 3) by Deacon Hall

7. Rob Bell Wins 

8. The classic ‘Footprints in the Sand’ poem revisited

9. Are you a Bellian or Piperian?

10. a big difference between Christianity and Islam 

11. Goosing Emergents into the Mainline

Thank you all for your amazing participation and feedback – that was a wonderful year of conversation and theological brewing!

Let us know if you had a favorite that didn’t make the list.

From Chad, Tripp, and Bo – thanks for a great year, Brew On!  and don’t forget to share the brew.

I understand people’s reaction to his abrasive, condescending, and bombastic style. His attacks on religion were vicious behind his stunning wit and comprehensive recall of material.

Those who were big critics of his rightly pointed out that he was in some sense just a reverse fundamentalist. He had conceded that the God of Jerry Falwell, the suicide bombers, and Israeli occupation was the God up for debate and he simply didn’t believe in that God.

Here is the thing: I don’t believe in that god either! Hitchens helped me by rabidly critiquing that false god of Empire and cutting open the giant bloated carcass of Christendom with razor-sharp clarity. 

This morning Julie Clawson tweeted

“To everyone posting “Hitchens no longer exists – God”, 1- I doubt that’s actually your theology. 2- It’s not witty or cute, just jerky”

and she is right.  How could any believer think that he no longer exists? That is just a stupid thing to say! Of course Hitchens still exists – he just doesn’t have a body anymore. What are we physicalists now?  Its that kind of unthinking that he was pointing out.

The real question is where does he exist now?  The fundamentalist he hated so much would say that he went straight to hell. That of course is ridiculous and completely not Biblical. In that framework there is a holding area (like Abraham’s Bosom) and then the Great White Throne Judgement.

The ‘all we are is dust in the wind‘ crowd thinks that this is the end of the story and the he lives on in legacy and memories.

The Love Wins crowd thinks that he is with God and they are having a little talk about ultimate reality and some other fun stuff. I like the imagery of reconciling souls.

That will all take care of itself but one thing I am sure of is that Hitchens helped me think through some crazy crap I had inherited and some messed up ways of thinking that had been passed down to me. He unintentionally challenged me to streamline my faith by stripping away gobs of baggage that has gotten attached to the simple Galilean vision.

For that, I am thankful for Hitchens. I obvious don’t believe what he believed. But his critique of the established order with its crumbling foundation and rotting rafters was something that propelled me to re-think my approach to some pretty central issues.

One of my good friends taught an undergrad course on feminism in religion several years ago and assigned a book of John Cobb‘s.  The class read it, loved it, and began a conversation about whether or not men could be feminists.  They decided that they could and that John Cobb surely must be a feminist.  And so they sent him one of the “This is what a feminist looks like” t-shirts, which he happily received and reportedly still has to this day.  I tell this story not only to demonstrate that John Cobb is a feminist and cares deeply about feminist issues, but also as a way of pointing out that the process theology that Cobb has been so instrumental in developing and that has become his academic trademark is itself strongly supportive of and compatible with feminist thought.

At Claremont I and several of my friends have become the “ambassadors” of process theology among our classmates, often defending it above theological accounts we find much less compelling and sometimes downright unhealthy.  And so I want to take this space to present briefly the reasons for which I find process theology deeply compatible with feminist thought.  My aim is not necessarily to win any process “converts” (though that would be lovely), but merely to elucidate why I see process theology as a healthy, promising, and extremely compelling form of theology.

1.  Process theology views God’s power as collaborative, not coercive. 

Discarding the dominant view of power as power over some other subject, process thought adopts instead an understanding of power as power with another subject.  God does not coerce the world, but rather attempts at persuading the world through God’s patient and loving call.  Humans then have the freedom in each moment of their lives to respond to God’s call or not.  The reason process thinking is able to present this altered understanding of divine power is because it see’s God’s power as necessarily limited (not self-limited, but inherently limited).  While lots of people don’t like this and see it is a weakened form of God, process theology holds the idea of God’s collaborative power as far more worthy of worship than a God who acts unilaterally in the world through coercive force.  I see this reconceptualization of God’s power as compatible with feminist thought because it breaks down deleterious power relations that promote the power of the one over the many, offering instead the opportunity to be collaborators in the on-going creation of the world.  God’s collaborative power promotes justice, equality, and the value of human life.

2.  Process theology values difference and understands God as valuing difference. 

Integral to process thought is the idea that difference and diversity in the world create contrasts that lead to higher valuations of the world and increased production of a creative and diverse future.  These contrasts can be positive and not solely negative contrasts, so that difference is not judged negatively but as something to be valued and as something that contributes to the promotion of goodness in the world.  This difference that is valued includes gender difference, sexual difference, racial and ethnic difference, cultural difference, etc.  While God seeks to bring this divergent world together in order to work collaboratively toward a better future, process theology does not see this as a unification that glosses over or erases difference.  Rather, it is difference itself that creates the contrasts that move the world forward in creativity and diversity.

3.  Process theology is inherently relational.

Process thought conceives life as comprised of moments (or events) that are related to other concurrent moments, as well as to all moments of the past.  In this way, process theology holds interconnectedness or relationality to be one of its vital principles.  When we think about this on a more abstract level than that of individual moments, this means that each human life and indeed each “thing” in the world are in some way interconnected (and God’s self is deeply relational).  Aside from aligning itself with feminist thought just on the grounds of relationality, I think the implications of process theology’s interconnectedness further touch on deeply feminist issues.  One of the most important implications of the world’s inter-relatedness comes in the form of eco-justice or environmental ethics.  If we are all in relation with one another and in relation with the environment in ways we cannot even consciously acknowledge, then it behooves us to care for the earth in ways we currently are not.  The ethical mandates of such relationality then encourage us to care (preferentially) for those women in developing countries who are most affected by global warming and ecological crises.  To deny this care is to deny the ways in which our lives impinge upon one another and to deny that action toward which God calls us through God’s own relation to the world.

These are (briefly) the three most significant ways in which I see process theology as compatible with feminist thought and as deeply promising as a means of theological reflection.  If you want to read up on process theology, I highly recommend Marjorie Suchocki’s God, Christ, Church: A Practical Guide to Process Theology, as well as John Cobb’sA Christian Natural Theology.  Also, look for a future book on feminism and process theology to come out soon, edited by Monica Coleman, Nancy Howell, and Helene Russell.

__________

If you want to hear more  about integrating these ideas SIGN UP FOR THE CONFERENCE at the end of January and be a part of the conversation!!!! 

1. I’m allergic to contempary Christian music.
2. I never believed in the inerrancy of the Bible (and think it’s rather obvious it’s not inerrant) and got tired of hiding that fact.
3. I realized biblicism (the notion that the Bible is infallible, internally consistent, universally applicable, contains all the truth we need, and makes us certain about most everything) is intellectually hallow and dishonest (see The Bible Made Impossible).
4. I think it’s not only fine to try to ascertain what Jesus meant or what Bible authors meant, in the original culture, but more importantly, if we don’t, we’re not taking the Bible seriously. We love tradition over truth.
5. I think it’s perfectly acceptable to pick and choose what one thinks is inspired and true in the Bible. After all, that’s how the Bible was composed. Someone else picked and chose and copied and translated, so why can’t we? Why do we have to take it on faith and they get to decide? How does one do that you ask? Have an open mind, look at objective biblical scholarship, use some common sense, and let the Spirit speak to your heart. What? You think that’s crazy? If accepting everthing at face value works, then why does evangelicalism have a thousand denominations and opinions about what the Bible teaches?
6. Despite 2-5 above, I think much of the Bible is inspired by God.
7. After studying the historical and cultural context of the Bible and learning how it has sometimes been miscopied, and frequently mistranslated and misinterpreted (by people who care more about tradition than truth), I find it a remarkably progressive book–okay, okay, minus that stuff about genocide and killing women and children, etc.
8. I might be called to love him, but I don’t like Rick Warren, and especially those Hawaiian shirts he wears.
9. R.C. Sproul defending Mark Driscoll makes me a bit nauseous. Okay, a lot nauseous.
10. I not only think believing in The Rapture is delusional, but also believing we live in the end times too.
11. I believe Jesus already returned (figuratively) in the first century (you gotta read my book).
12. I believe the Bible teaches the good guys get left behind (again, it’s in the book).
13. I sometimes agree with R.C. Sproul. For example, he actually pretty much believes #11 too.
14. Going to a U2 concert is a spiritual experience for me.
15. I no longer believe evolution is the enemy.
16. I think intelligent design is a grand idea that needs to be seriously considered.
17. I think one can be a practicing gay or lesbian and still follow Christ.
18. I’m a microbrew enthusiast and love to talk theology over a couple of brews.
19. Rick Perry makes me really nervous (but not as much as Sarah Palin).
20. I hate sexual exploitation but find some erotica perfectly acceptable for adults.
21. I think the evangelical church is sex-negative (okay, there are a few good evangelical marriage sex manuals out there, but that’s the only exception).
22. I think Charlize Theron is hot and I’m not afraid to admit it.
23. I voted for Barak Obama. I still support him but see a lot of things he could do better.
24. I hate it when Republicans accuse Obama of doing or proposing things that George W. Bush (increased the deficit by $5 trillion) and Ronald Reagan did (raised taxes 11 times).
25. I think what evangelicals call “church” is a non-biblical, man-made construct (back to my book, and yes, these are shameless plugs!).
26. I think nine times out of ten spiritual disciplines (praying, fasting, time in the Word, worship, going to cutting-edge, spiritual conferences, and following the latest, trendy book — think Purpose Driven Life) becomes a legalistic treadmill.
27. After studying the issue and examining the historical and biblical evidence, I became a Universalist.
28. I think the emergent “conversation” is good (and I really like Brian McLaren), but wish they’d come to a concluson once in awhile. Just for grins.
29. I often disagree with Bishop Spong, but sometimes I do agree with him.
30. I like Bishop Spong way more than Rick Warren or Mark Driscoll.
31. I think the truth is embodied in a composite of Marcus Borg and N.T. Wright.

I could go on, but you get the picture. Please comment, challenge me, and share your own lists of where you’re at!

In this episode we reference (among others) books by

• Andrew Sung-Park
• Douglas Ottati
• Elizabeth Johnson
• Brian McLaren
• Peter Rollins
• and the famous Incarnation podcast with John Cobb 

In the Clayton Crockett podcast (Radical Theology), many names come to the surface. Who do you think had the greatest impact of the 20th Century theologians that were named (or another who was not)

you can pick 2 if you must .  Feel free to  leave a comment and let me know of any oversights!

Clayton Crockett is Associate Professor and Director of Religious Studies at the University of Central Arkansas. His work focuses on postmodern theology, Continental philosophy of religion, psychoanalytic theory and theoretical issues concerning religion and politics.

In the 1960s, the strict opposition between the religious and the secular began to break down, blurring the distinction between political philosophy and political theology. This collapse contributed to the decline of modern liberalism, which supported a neutral, value-free space for capitalism. It also deeply unsettled political, religious, and philosophical realms, forced to confront the conceptual stakes of a return to religion. (from the book description)

In this conversation with Tripp Fuller, politics, history and religion are evaluated from thoroughly theological lens. His book  Radical Political Theology : Religion and Politics after Liberalism is available from Amazon in hardcover and Kindle editions.

Don’t forget to sign up for the 2012 Emergent Village Theological Conversation in Claremont, CA January 31-February 2.

 I think that we may have overdone it on the cross. It is out of proportion.  I want to I hear more about the empty tomb (resurrection) and the coming of Holy Spirit (pentecost). 

Just this week I have run into multiple conversations on the subject. They are all good on their own – but it is the larger picture that I am concerned about. From Daniel Kirk’s fantastic post about Luke-Acts, to Kurt Willems and Tony Jones or Roger Olson.  It can seem like , for Protestant Evangelicals – it’s ‘all atonement theory – all the time’.

Last week my friend A.J Swaboda said “Discipleship is photo-shopping the cross into every picture and angle of my life.”  I asked him if the empty tomb  wouldn’t be more appropriate. He said (wisely) that you can’t have one without the other.

So is that what we are doing? Is ‘the Cross’ shorthand for the whole story? Is it assumed that when we say ‘Cross’ we mean also Resurrection and Pentecost?

That would make me nervous.

Here is my concern: in the resurrection God spoke a new word over the world. I would like to live into that new word and participate with God’s Spirit who was given as a gift and a seal of the promise.

To obsess on the cross and related atonement theories is to live perpetually in the old word and to camp in the final thing that God said about the old situation.

It manifests in odd ways too. When my school, Claremont, was entering into a new venture of a Multi-Faith University, new logos were drawn up for each participating school. One symbol and one color for each represented religion or tradition. It is actually a cool branding that sends a message I can really get behind.

The problem is that we, as the Christian representative, got a red logo with… the Cross as our symbol. Ugh. Really?   We couldn’t have gone with the Flame or the Dove or the Bible or anything else?  What is the deal with the Cross obsession? Is it really the best representative for what the whole religion is about?

I know that Tripp is going to say something about “How the cross bearers became the cross-builders” which is a consistently good point about the historic shift. It has also takes on weird Colonial connotations that have compromised its essential message.

I’m just a little Crossed-out. It’s too much. It is out of proportion with the other elements of our faith and used disproportionally to the other symbols we have.

I would like to see us move into God’s new word for the world – and move out of our perpetual lingering in God’s last word over the old world.

Here are my two big points:

 What Pentecostals have to say to Progressives

Jesus laid hands on people, the Disciples laid hands on people and the letters of the New Testament tell us to lay our hands on people. If you have bought into a brand of Christianity that does not have you laying your hands of people and praying in expectation that something would happen – you may want to revisit the reasons why.

If your faith is primarily intellectual, abstract, and conceptual … it may not be the religion that the writers of the New Testament called us to. The early church was a hands on movement and prayed with expectation.

What Progressives have to say to Pentecostals

Being delivered from personal demons is great and praying over whole cities to break or bind the ‘strong man’ that holds people in bondage is fine. There is a vital missing element that needs to be added. Its not just about the personal (mini) and the heavenly (meta) – that leaves a gap that must be filled. In the middle is the address of systems, structures and institutions (what Walter Wink calls ‘The Powers the Be“).

If you faith is primarily personal-congregational and supernatural-heavenly, then you might want to revisit some understandings of Scripture and the address of systemic sins (like injustice).  Otherwise you are in danger of being so heavenly minded that you actually reinforce and empower that very structures that you say you are praying against.

The 21st Century

I think that it is important to have these two camps in conversation. Since the Azusa Street renewal of 1906 started, charismatic Christianity has swept the globe and become the largest branch of Christianity in the world. [see Philip Jenkins ‘The Next Christendom’ or 'New Faces']   But in the century that has passed we have come though the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and the internet age. Things have changed pretty radically. We think of the world differently and the remnants of the 3-tiered universe (pre-modern) are a real barrier to some. This is why I am favor of rethinking some of the vocabulary, conceptions, and constructed imaginations that go unquestioned (or assumed) by many.

The two best conversations I have these days are:

1. The future of the church is not to be found in Europe’s past. What is happening in the Global South (Asia, Africa, South and Central America) are the voices we need to engage with, learn from, and partner with.
2. I believe in the miraculous but I do not believe in the supernatural. The supernatural is a construct that come with too much baggage.  God’s work is all around us and is the most natural thing in the world.

I would love to your thoughts on all of this. Plan on being at the 2012 Emergent Village Theological Conversation where there will be a breakout session on Pentecost and Process. 

Open Theology (we stated) was primarily:

• A) grounded in a reading of Scripture – versus other schools of theology that are a result of philosophical or systematic concerns.
• B) focused on a specific aspect of concentration: the opened ended nature of the future.

This explains why Open does not even attempt to account for everything ( atonement theories for instance) or provide a totalizing system as other schools of thought sometimes do.

 So my theory is this: I have found that Open Theology tends to appeal primarily to folks – often of some fashion of evangelical persuasion,  past or present – who get trapped between three other boundaries.

1. That theologies based on philosophy require a priori commitments before one can even begin to interact with the ideas. Philosophical theologies like Process are too abstract and require too many mental gymnastics. When someone looks into Process (or many other schools) and wades into the explanation against substance/matter and its replacement with packets of time/moments/actualities – it is just too much jabber-talkie and vocabulary.
2. That Biblical Scholarship is too much work behind the text before one ever gets to the text. In fact, that work behind the text may keep one from engaging the text much at all. Biblical Scholarship has become so elaborate, contentious, and contradictory that it is intimidating to even begin. Sometimes you just want to read the Bible and talk about what it means! 
3. That the round-and-round cul-de-sac conversations of bumper-sticker Calvinism vs. ‘Arminianism’ are exhausting and pointless. Open thought gets you out of that endless loop of antiquated argumentation.*

This is the appeal of Open Theology. It avoids the a priori assumptions of so much philosophical theology, it gets you into the text instead of spending all your time behind the text and it gets you out of the repetitive circular logic of centuries past.
Those three thing appeal to a distinct group of people.

*  (I’m not talking about real Calvin-Calvinist like the honorable Paul Capetz.)

 A few weeks ago Joerg Rieger cautioned about a type of Christianity that was a cheerleader for the system, that reinforced the status quo, and participated in society in way that strengthened Empire.

I have said before I come from a background where this type of thinking is not just disorienting but alienating. The focus is on individuals – with little mention of anything systemic. The goal is the salvation of souls for the afterlife – with no address of collective issues.

It was reading Walter Wink  “the Powers the Be” that radically impacted the way I could see this. I have since encountered other writings and teachers who have opened the subject even further.

Now, it is odd to look at the central figure of our faith and ask how did Jesus ever get portrayed as a guy who basically told people to be nice and obey the rules? Cornell West would talk about him be sanitized, deodorized, and neutralized. Someone else might call this being a chaplain to the empire.

Tripp and I have a theme that shows up in our personal conversations on a fairly regular basis. It revolves around the idea that variable X or Y may be changed or tweaked, but the outcome of the equation is never in doubt. A specific issue may be protested, but the machine itself in never in danger. Certain areas can be challenged or  even overhauled, but the system itself is never in jeopardy.

This is not limited to Empire. It goes beyond hegemony. It is not limited to Capitalism.

The powers that be, or the system, or the machine (as you prefer) is an omnibus. It can absorb – incorporate – and co-op any variation, deviation, or even challenge … and in the end the structure is nearly unchanged. The system is never in danger. The machine doesn’t even slow down. The Powers are never in jeopardy. It eats new ideas with barely a burp – let alone beginning to buckle.

 We could talk about an anarchist musical band that signs a record contract, or a retail store that sells Buddhist trinkets from ‘the far east’, or a seminar on Native American spirituality that meets in a university classroom… but I don’t want to get sidelined.  

Benjamin Barber in his book Jihad vs. McWorld talks about the market in such a way that sketched a picture (for me) of a machine that needs to be fueled by new authentic-indigenous expressions, otherwise it runs dry and burns out on it’s own the boredom of its generic repetitions and knock-offs.

“McWorld cannot then do without Jihad: it needs cultural parochialism to feed its endless appetites. Yet neither can Jihad do without that world: for where would culture be without a commercial producers who market it and the information and communication systems that make it known?”  

We have talked with Joerge Rieger (ep. 116) about a theological look at global economics. We have talked with Graham E. Fuller (ep. 117) about a historical perspective on East-West relations.

I am curious about the theological address of some revolutionary response to the machine. We talk about Jesus and Empire. We talk about the Constantinian compromise. We have the Hauerwasian response that gets interpreted as withdrawal & testimony. Cornell West wants us to be Prophetic.

What is the theological answer to the question that the machine is asking? Certainly, like Tripp is fond of saying, we have to be about more than a slightly kinder gentler empire. Jesus challenged the status quo of his day – economic, militaristic, racial, gender, and religious. How does a follower of Jesus address a system of oppression, domination, invasion and economic disparity?  Thoughts?

Over the last 5 years I have been transitioning toward more of a Professional and Academic location. This is not as simple as it might appear. It is complicated by the presence of two variables:

1. I continue to be a pastor while I am in the Doctoral program. The church and the academy do not always communicate that well, are not always focused on the same things, and have developed a level of distrust/suspicion at points.
2. My field in the academy is Practical Theology. This discipline is primarily focused on the activity of the local congregation-community and so even my academic pursuit is church oriented.

The result of this is that I seem to have the same two conversations on a fairly predictable monthly loop. One conversation is with my former congregants who knew me as only a pastor. The second conversation is with my fellow students who are pursuing an interest in one of the “Big 4” Theological disciplines (Philosophical, Historic, Systematic, or Biblical).

The first conversation with former congregants who are suspicious or or unaware of theology usually finds me trying to explain that “theology is a 2nd order reflection – or a 2nd tier discipline – that as a practical theologian I recognize is not the main event (1st order) but an examination OF  that main event.”  I compare it to being in the balcony  watching those who are in the auditorium who are watching what is happening on stage.   I am concerned with the interaction between the stage and the auditorium. I am not focused on the stage primarily. I am analyzing and describing, from a 2nd tier position, the dynamic that is at work and its effect.

The second conversation is usually with people much further into theology than I am. I am continuously explaining that I am not looking for a system to buy into wholesale or a framework that accounts for everything in a totalizing way. I am simply looking for conversation partners.

• I am intrigued by Liberation Theology by am not (as of yet) convinced of God’s preferential concern for the poor. I want to hear what Gutierrez and Boff have to say.
• I am not a Whitehead-ian (yet) but love John Cobb and the host of other Process thinkers (Epperly, Suchoki, etc.)
• I am not Catholic but get so much from Elizabeth Johnson, John Caputo, Karl Rahner and Joseph Bracken.
• I think that George Linbeck and Hans Frei are really onto something about theology and scripture, but I am certainly no Wittgensteinian.
• I am fascinated by Paul Knitter and John Hick but have no interest in trying to defend a Kantian dualism in order to explain how a Barth style-Protestant might access the noumenal real (an actual challenge I received when quoting Paul Knitter).

Admittedly, I don’t understand the “guilty by association” Lord of the Flies atmosphere that seems to previal in many post-Barth theological conversations. I am simply looking for dialogue partners. This fits my field, as Practical Theology is an inter-disciplinary endeavor.

Unfortunately, I get accused of being a “cafeteria Christian” – picking and choosing what I will take from each discipline or tradition. I am accused of theological “Bricolage”…  I choose to call it Mosaic thinking – piecing together the little elements that present a fuller picture of the whole.

On one hand I get why people are repelled by the lingering attitude of “total buy in”. On the other hand, I simply embrace that this is the atmosphere under which I am transitioning toward being a theologian.

I would love your thoughts. 

I grew up with Josh McDowell being the most reasonable (pun intended) voice of faith. I even went to the Billy Graham School of Evangelism and focused on apologetics. I bought Ravi Zacharias books on tape (and later CDs) and used my best stuff when I spoke to college groups or at outreaches. I loved it and it went pretty well most of the time.

At one point the questions changed and then the answers didn’t seem to work as well. Around this same time I read Brian McLaren and Len Sweet and, like a billiard ball struck by the cue ball, I was radically redirected into a different trajectory. Actually, truth be told, I didn’t know that at the time. I didn’t figure it out until I was cautioned about using N.T. Wright as my go-to scholar. One day it just hit me: if McLaren and Wright are the far edge before you are ‘out of bounds’ then I might be playing the wrong game… or least have been taught the wrong rules.

I went to a progressive Evangelical seminary* (by that I mean that it acknowledged post-modernity and interacted with biblical scholarship) and then moved again to a radically liberal Doctoral program and started working at a Mainline church.  I love the doctrinal freedom and the intellectual integrity, even as I do miss a couple of things as well.

Perhaps the greatest adjustment I have had to make is not just the absence of apologetics (which is noticeable) but the presence of apologizing for our Christian heritage/perspective. It gives me whiplash every time I realize that we have moved from apologetics to apologizing for Christianity. 

Now, I have strong anabaptist leaning and I am as suspicious of Christian-ism as anyone. But I think that we are in real danger here.

A very popular blog from a renowned scholar came out this week that asked if Progressive Christianity is the last best hope for the future of the church. I’m not convinced that it is, in fact I’m nervous about the future of this branch of the family tree. Do I think that the nature of the universe and science are with us? Absolutely. Do I worry about the organizational and motivational challenges that seem to work against us? Definitely.

Forgive me if you think that I am being harsh. I am simply trying to say that if we who are not conservative-fundamentalist go into the world feeling bad about what we represent and embarrassed about the tradition that we have inherited, it doesn’t provide much to build on.

As a contextual theologian I am a huge proponent of articulating our particular – constructed – embedded – conditioned located-ness. But if we are going to walk around with our tails between our legs people will mistake our epistemic humility for being spineless and impotent. 

I’m proud to be a thoughtful Christian. I think that we bring something great to the world. I have no interest in apologizing for speaking from a Christian perspective, but neither do I have any desire to concede the microphone or public spotlight to less-thoughtful [since no one is thought-less] Christian voices (ie. Pat Robertson) just because they are loud and proud.

p.s. I have been contending for the inherent theological value of the terms Evangelical, Liberal, Progressive, and Emergent.
p.p.s McLaren has a great story about not being spineless  in Inter-religious dialogue during my interview with him.

*George Fox Evangelical Seminary 

In the intro we  have fun dreaming of Johnny Depp playing Pete Rollins in The Insurrection movie  with Christopher Walken as John Caputo. (Bo has unofficially trademarked this idea -so don’t get any fancy plans)

Come to SOULARIZE Oct 18-20 & Chill w/ us, Deacons, and a herd of awesome peoples!

Also worth noting for those of you who are into Holy Smokes, Tripp was smoking a Rocky Patel 1992 during the interview.

In the podcast Tripp recommends Paul Fiddes’ The Creative Suffering of God & Participating in God.