The “Inverse Theology” that is referenced is from Walter Benjamin and Theodore Adorno.

Also referenced is the popular blog from last month “Undercover Boss” by Stephen Keating 

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. 

Two things: #1 If you want to read an amazing response to Piper (via Rachel Held Evans) then check out HBC Deacon Austin Roberts’ response here:

#2 It might be far more profitable to avoid the whole Twitter/Facebook/Internet argument and read these women:

Elizabeth Johnson on She Who Is 

Sally McFague on Metaphorical Language about God 

Rosemary Radford Ruether on Sexism and God-Talk 

Ellen Leonard on Women and Christ

Monica A. Coleman on Making a Way Out of No Way

Naomi Goldenberg on the Changing of the Gods and the End of Traditional Religions 

Rita Nashima Brock on The Feminist Redemption of God (Christianity) 

Letty M. Russell on Church in the Round: Feminist Interpretation of the Church

Jacquelyn Grant on Black Women’s Experience as a Source for Doing Theology 

In my opinion, that would be a fantastic spend of your time.    - Bo

You can follow along and ask questions on Twitter at #EVTC where the main sessions will also be streamed live.

Some of you will be looking to download some last minute audiological goodness for your journey.
Here are some suggestions:

Philip Clayton was interviewed on Doug Pagitt’s radio show. Link is here [all of these are also available on I-tunes]

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.

The ooShirt website is easy to use and you can either design your shirt their or upload your design.  The only complaint I could have is that during the design process you don’t see how what you are doing design wise is impacting the actual cost per shirt.  Other than that the experience was great.  The shirts were high quality Tees and the graphics are much more legit than the glorified iron on graphics at Cafe Press. If you are on the look out for a cool gift, a way to promote your blog\podcast, or sweet youth retreat T shirt supplier check out the good people at ooShirts for your custom shirt needs.

When reading his last book What Would Google Do? I decided I would intentionally be more open about my core convictions, life experiences, and challenges.  Jarvis articulated rather clearly how the growing openness of our lives via social media is in fact making us a more honest and gracious people.  Being open went against most of the advice I have received from other ministers and in theological education about one’s status as a minister and cultivating appropriate boundaries.  I am all for boundaries around integrity issues but if it leads to the creation of a minister who doesn’t have genuine convictions, political leanings, vices (like delicious cigars), attraction to all things Kevin Smith (he made Dogma,  the best movie of 2011 Red State, & the coolest podcast network), suggestive yard games like cornhole, and over tweeting then I would rather pass.  I have found that for every person who is uncomfortable knowing that their minister is a real human many more people, within my congregation and outside of it, are grateful to know my ordination didn’t undo my humanity.  I am not saying Paul really meant for us to “tweet our sins one to another,” but I have also found that in sharing struggles and asking questions publicly I can be blessed in ways that would not have been possible if I kept old school ‘ministerial distance.’

Last week in the ‘Becoming a Public Scholar‘ class I am teaching with Monica Coleman we watched this video where Jarvis discusses the benefits he had in sharing info about his private parts in public (yes it is what you are thinking but not for dirty reasons).  The conversation lacked consensus but it was clear the topic had some heat bound up in it.  I have no idea what the correct answer is but I have decided to err on the side of over sharing because I just feel dirty trying to keep up with multiple versions of myself for multiple audiences.  While I don’t have any final answers I will say that Jarvis has the most helpful way of framing the choices we have to make by differentiating between privacy and sharing.  He says that our “privacy is an ethic made by the recipients of someone’s information.  Publicness is an ethic governing the choices made by the creator of one’s information..Privacy is an ethic of knowing and publicness is an ethic of sharing.” Ministers are likely some of the best people to ask about an ethic of privacy since we end up being the ones people share the most difficult parts of the stories with.  So what advice would you give to those thinking about their ethic of privacy?  What ‘private parts’ of a minister do you think should go public and which should stay off line?

Check out this interview with Jarvis to get a feel for the book.

Also check out Jeff Jarvis’ visit to the ‘theology after google’ conference where he told us what google would do if they got hold of a church.

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.

Here’s what happened in this week’s episode: The CEO of Diamond Resorts puts on a (really bad) disguise and pretends to be a new hire at various jobs in the company. He works alongside receptionists, plumbers, etc. At the end of the show, he reveals to the people he worked with that he’s the CEO and then he gives the workers that he worked alongside a big bonus, like paying off their mortgage or a new truck. Super generous of him right!? I don’t think so, and here’s how Karl Marx showed me why:

Ok, let’s look at the idea of work more generally first. If we look around we can see that in every society there are people that work and people that don’t work (this isn’t necessarily bad, some of the people that don’t work are children, the elderly, etc.). In order to take care of the people that don’t work, the workers have to produce more than they need for themselves. The word that Marx used for that “more” is “surplus.” Surplus is the extra stuff that the workers produce that goes to take care of needs/wants that are not their own. 

For example: let’s say I have a small shoemaking business and at home I have a baby. In order to take care of the baby (who obviously can’t work), I have to make some shoes to sell to take care of myself and I have to keep making more shoes so that I can take care of my baby. Part of the money that I make from my labor of making shoes goes to me and part of it goes to my baby. Any of the money that comes from my labor that doesn’t go to me is called surplus (obviously, the surplus that goes to my baby is good!).

In the shoemaker example, I make the shoes and I choose to make extra shoes (in Marxist terms: I choose to produce surplus) so that I can take care of my baby. Notice, and this is key: As self-employed person, I’m in charge of my own surplus. 

Now, let’s say that I apply for a job at McDonald’s. Like everyone else, I want to “get paid what I’m worth!” But here’s the rub: we all know that McDonald’s will only pay me $10/hour as long as I am producing more than $10/hour worth of Big Macs to sell. If McDonald’s doesn’t make more than $10 off of my labor, then I’ll get laid off. This is true in all businesses that are organized in what Marx called a capitalist business structure. In other words: in a capitalist business, the worker does not get all the surplus from their labor. Capitalism is not a way of organizing government, it’s a way of organizing labor relationships in a business.

So McDonald’s makes money off of my labor, i.e., they get to keep part of my surplus and I have no say in what happens to it. Marx called this “exploitation.” Now, stick with me because it sounds inflammatory, but all it means is that in capitalism, the worker does not have control of their surplus. The caplitalist business keeps the worker’s surplus. It doesn’t matter if the worker is aware of this, or if you have a really nice boss with good intentions that pays you the “market rate.” It simply means that the worker doesn’t have any say over the surplus of their labor. In US corporations, it is the board of directors who decide what happens to the surplus (keep in mind the workers have no say in electing the board!). Thus, in capitalism, there is a built-in tension between the workers and the people who get the surplus. They must continually argue about how much or how little of the worker’s surplus that the owners keep. For example, every time you ask for a raise, you’re in essence asking to keep more of the surplus from your labor.

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  

“The poll, published Wednesday, found that while Americans overall tend to oppose socialism by a strong margin — 60 percent say they have a negative view of it, versus just 31 percent who say they have a positive view — socialism has more fans than opponents among the 18-29 crowd. Forty-nine percent of people in that age bracket say they have a positive view of socialism; only 43 percent say they have a negative view.”

So ‘socialism’ being popular among young Americans doesn’t mean they have any clue what it means.  Surely some do but I think it may be the fact that for most young Americans we know our lives – regardless of our hard work – will not as a whole be as good or better than our parents.  So if ‘socialism’ is the word for a different way of organizing our economic relationships as a country why not say ‘positive’ when asked because ‘capitalism’ has broken the promise of the American dream.

 Perhaps another reason ‘socialism’ is growing in popularity is thanks to our growing outlandish political Right in the country.  I thought of this when a high school student told me he was a socialist and I said “What? Do you have any idea what that means or would mean for your family?”  He said, “Yeah, you want college to be affordable, healthcare available to all, and to go back to Clinton era taxes.  I mean that’s why everyone is upset at Obama and he’s a socialist.”  What if our hyper-polarizing rhetoric in America and in particular the socialist name calling on the Right is actually making an audience for the very idea they abhor?

Two theological asides.

1) If you look at just the poor and non-white stats our country is significantly critical of capitalism.  Should those on the underside of our system get a hearing from the church about the effects of our system on their lives and family?

2) ‘Progressive‘ is way more popular than ‘Liberal.’

Public reactions to the word progressive are far more favorable than to the word liberal; two-thirds have a positive reaction to the former compared with just half for the latter. There is very little difference among Democrats – who view both terms favorably.  The largest difference is among Republicans most (55%) of whom have a positive reaction to the word progressive, and a negative (70%) reaction to the word liberal. (link)

Does that mean liberal Christians should use progressive?  And why didn’t they ask about ‘Incarnational Christians?’

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. 

In the past week people over at Tony Jones, Rachel Held Evans, and Kurt Willems have been asking prayer and the relationship between Process theology and Openness theology.  Well John Cobb is here for you!

Of course y’all sent in questions about other stuff too…Occupy Wall Street, Postmodernism, Economy, Ecology, and other theological goodies.  I (Tripp) did this interview in Cobb’s library so listening to it will be like my first time because in real time I was a very distracted FANIAC!

For other resources check out:

Our TNT podcast about why people should come to the Emergent Conversation.

Marjorie Suchocki’s entry level PDF is super helpful.

The schedule for the conference looks amazing!

Bruce Epperly’s podcast continues to generate conversation.

His book Process for the Perplexed is fantastic.

1) The Pope: Gay marriage threatens humanity’s future

2) Pastor Joel Osteen to Oprah: Homosexuality Is Sin — But Gay People Will Get Into Heaven

3) Rick Santorum: A Straight Dad In Prison Is Better Than Two Gay Dads Who Aren’t

4) Pastor Mark Driscoll’s book on Marriage hits the shelves

It is interesting that all four of these stories have come to my attention in the past week. What most people will focus on is whether there is a Bible verse to back up what they are saying or not.

What needs to be stated before that is two-fold:

• All four are white males. Somebody may ask “are you implying that their gender or race somehow diminishes their right to speak with authority?” and I would answer “No – I just think that it is worth pointing it out in case later we wanted to examine how people come to power and in what ways authority is constructed, bestowed, or recognized.”
• When you have the leader of all the world’s catholics, a guy who is renowned for not speaking up about anything or coming down on anyone, a presidential candidate, and one of the most influential evangelical pastors in America saying the same thing… one of a couple of things has to cross your mind.

Either
a) they are all sticking up for the truth or
b) they are all sticking up for an antiquated perspective of the past

The reason that this issue has grabbed my attention is that many are calling it ‘The Last Taboo”. In the past 2 centuries, the issues of race (civil rights) and gender (women’s lib) have advanced to the point the if anyone held an opinion from a century ago about either issue – the people around them would say “what is wrong with you?” or “wake up man, its the 21st century.”

I asked Tony Jones, Lauren Winner and Phyllis Tickle about this issues last year.  Only Phyllis was willing to tackle it.

No matter which side of this thing you are on, it is worth noting that the ‘last taboo’ is predicted to be the worst and most vicious. The problem with the last of anything is that when it is over … it is really over.  We tackled the race issue, we overcame the gender barrier, and now the sexuality issue is front and center.  We can’t go back. This is the last taboo. Once we have dealt with this, there are no more big ones to fall. This is kinda it.* 

I just think that it is worth noting A) who is framing the conversation and B) who is charge of the information and how the process is to be handled.  There might be more going on here than simply the rightness or the wrongness of any given issue or the interpretation of 6 bible verses. 

This will most likely be decided in our lifetime. Denominations will split over it. The future of the faith will be challenged because of it. Like race and gender before it, history will evaluate how we participate in it.  

* somebody might say ‘economics’ or some form of disparity, but that is not really in the same category as it is not inherently value laden .

• 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

Overall, the relation is friendly, supportive, and overlapping. Of course, there are differences and disagreements. I think the difference is primarily that of the context and constituency of the two theologies. The disagreements reflect those differences.

Openness theology is the outgrowth of the experience and reflection of thoughtful and sensitive members of the conservative evangelical community. They have seen that some of the doctrines that this community has inherited are not consonant with either Christian experience or the Bible, and they have undertaken to modify them. They do not see this modification as in any way contrary to evangelical faith, and it is important to them that that the changes they are making are in no way a compromise with secular culture.

Process theology has attracted some people who had reacted strongly against conservative forms of Christianity. They are often people who have wondered, both for intellectual and existential reasons, whether they could believe in God at all. Some have reacted against the way the Bible has been imposed as an arbitray, external authority. Some trust philosophical reflection more than the theological tradition, and some are more interested in coherence with contemporary science than with orthodox theology.

What is remarkable is how close these two movements have come in the content of their affirmations! Both reject the impassive, nonrelational God of traditional philosophical theology. Both reject the idea that everything that happens is a direct expression of God’s will. Both strongly affirm human freedom and responsibility. Both emphasize the goodness and graciousness of God, putting love central among God’s attributes.

Openness theologians argue for these views scripturally, and process theologians do so philosophically. But this difference is far from total. Openness theologians are interested in the reasonableness of their beliefs, and Christian process theologians are interested in their faithfulness to the basic message of scripture. Since the lines are not sharply drawn, there are those who feel comfortable in both communities.

One doctrine on which a fairly clear line of disagreement can be drawn is on divine power. Although the two groups largely agree on how that power actually operates in the world, it is important to those rooted in the evangelical community to affirm that God’s giving us freedom and responsibility is a voluntary divine decision. God’s power is such that God could control everything, but God chooses to limit the exercise of that power so as to make room for creaturely freedom.

Process theologians reject this solution on three grounds. One is the problem of evil. If God could have stopped the Holocaust and failed to do so in order to honor the freedom of the Nazis, we find God’s judgment highly questionable. The second is the nature of divine power. We believe that divine power is not coercive power but empowering, liberating, and persuasive power. The exercise of divine power enhances the power of the creatures. It does not remove it. The third is the nature of being as such. To be, in our view, is to have power. God could not have created powerless creatures because the idea of powerless creatures does not make sense. To create is to share power with creatures.

This is not the place to pursue the debate. Nor should this disagreement block friendly cooperation and mutual respect between the two groups. Indeed, there is no reason that Christians should not identify in a general way, at least, with both.

We who are Christian process theologians and do care greatly about the relation of our affirmations to the Christian scriptures are particularly gratified by the development of openness theology. Whereas we have recognized that in our reading of the texts we could be accused of bias and even eisegesis, the very similar reading of the texts by openness theologians is reassuring. We can claim scriptural support for many of our views with greater confidence.

There is a recent book that grew out of conferences we have held in Claremont with openness theologians. It is called “Searching for an Adequate God.” Clark Pinnock did most of the work on putting these essays together and deserves 95% of the credit. To my embarrassment, by insisting on putting my name first among the editors, he has given the impression that I made a major contribution. But it is a fine book, and I am proud to be associated with it.

* Check Out Cobb Answer More Questions HERE Monthly….Submit Your Own

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

Rachel Held Evans put up Tripp’s blog about how God is not omnipotent

Our TNT podcast about why people should come to the Emergent Conversation this month is getting great feedback.

People are finding Marjorie Suchocki’s entry level PDF super helpful.

The schedule for the conference came together and looks amazing!

Bruce Epperly’s podcast with me continues to generate conversation.

I was reviewing his book Process for the Perplexed and found this quote that continues to rock me:

The world emerges from the dynamic interplay of flux and permanence, in which the eternal and unchanging finds its relevance through its relationship to the temporal and changing world, and the temporal and changing finds completion in its role as contributing to the ongoing universe, embraced by God’s everlasting and ever-expanding experience of the universe… God is not the exception to the dynamic nature of the universe, but rather the dynamic God-world relationship is the primary example of creaturely experience in its many expressions.

I am so excited that so many are open to having this dialogue about a faith that really a) works and b) makes sense.

Since then he has lost 3 games. The choir has gone shockingly quiet. It appears - and this may come as a surprise - that Americans worship success more than any ‘god’. In fact, one might wonder if success is America’s god.

It always piques my imagination when politicians say ‘May God bless America” at the end of their speeches … I try to pay attention to how they say it and what they might be expecting that blessing to look like.

 There are two elements to this that really attract my attention:

Part of the reason this sticks out to me so sharply is that I have dual-citizenship with Canada. I went to High school and started Bible College there. When I see Tebow bowed on the sideline praying in the 4th quarter, I smile as I think of the completely different religious and political atmosphere in Canada. Almost every Canadian I know – even the believers – I can hear saying “Easy big guy, don’t make too much of a display”.

 American zeal is a phenomenon. I have a theory that it is actually embedded in the DNA of this country courtesy of those original Calvinists who brought with them the concept of “signs of divine benevolence”. This little mechanism says

‘while we can’t know who is elect unto salvation or damnation – certainly we say that a good tree will bear good fruit. So, while no can know for sure if they are “in” certainly God graces the chosen with “signs of divine benevolence”.

This is how we get that famous “Protestant Work Ethic” in order to make it as easy as possible for God to ‘bless you’. It almost boils down to ‘If its good  = its God. If its bad = its you… unless your good = then its the devil.”

The second element is this idea of the 99 and the 1. I heard over and over in the Tebow hysteria “If even one person comes to Christ because of what God is doing for Tebow and Tebow’s witness, then it is worth it.”  I hear this “if even one person” thing so often that I can see it coming a mile away.

Admittedly, Jesus told a story about the 99 sheep and the 1 lost sheep. But I just have to say that it was a metaphor- a poetic picture of how much God loves each person. It is NOT a permission to be irresponsible with our resources and strategies to either neglect or disrespect the 99 in order to attract the one.

I became of aware of this during the 80s and 90s when statistics about Billy Graham’s actual effectiveness regarding Stadium campaigns and alter calls. Studies found over and over again that of all of those thousands who came forward, the number who were actually un-churched was quite low … and of those, the number who were associated with a Christian church in the years that followed was atrocious. But if any question the effectiveness of this style of Evangelism and the millions of dollars that were spent on these campaigns, the battle cry would go up “If only ONE … then it is all worth it”.

I’ve said before that I like Tim Tebow, that I am amazed at both his life and his work ethic. I have also been clear that he does not think that God intervenes in football games. But Tebow and his zealous cheerleaders have actually exposed an interesting trend that I can’t quite put my finger on… America worships success, we hold it to be a ‘Sign of Divine Benevolence’ and we are fine with collateral damage to the 99 if, in the end, “the one is found… then it was all worth it.”

Thoughts?

* Tim Tebow is the Quarterback for the NFL football team the Denver Broncos

I will be teaching this fun four weekend intensive class with a seriously amazing mentor Monica A. Coleman.  If you are in the SoCal area and want to gain the tools and hone your voice to speak in public square then think about joining us.  For a local who just wants the knowledge, conversation, and community of the class and not the degree seeking credit it is only 300 bucks.  So check it out and feel free to holla if you are interested or have questions.