Yesterday I had the honor of giving a lecture for the Center for Process Studies at Claremont School of Theology.  My goal was to show how one theologically sensitive youth minister under the influence of Process theology would think through the task of youth ministry.  Most of what I proposed does not necessitate one being committed to Process theology but you will hopefully see how the ideas come out of my own theological framework.  If you are interested in more conversations like this then come next week to the Emergent Village Theological Conversation here in sunny SoCal for some more Process inspired conversations.

If you have responses, questions, and such post them.  Bo and I are going to do a Theology Nerd Throwdown in the near future on youth ministry and we would love your input.

During the American Academy of Religion a herd of theology nerds gathered in the home of Mark Scandrette – Jesus Dojo extraordinaire – for some live Homebrewed Christianity podcast fun.  Daniel Kirk (New Testament Prof at Fuller Theological Seminary) and Philip Clayton (Philosophical Theologian and Dean of Claremont School of Theology) were our featured contributors but the crowd Deacons who gathered made the entire experience a blast. On top of the podcast we all enjoyed the wonderful food provided by the Scandrette family, the huge bottle of Bullet Bourbon from Rebekah, 3 amazing homebrews from Kirk, and some great questions at the end. 

We hope you enjoy the live brew.  If you dig it you should make plans to join us February 12 at Claremont for John Caputo going 3-D or holla about hosting a show in your own home\bar\church.

If you are wise….and of course you are…you should get Kirk’s new book Jesus Have I Loved, but Paul? and Phil’s freshest The Predicament of Belief. 

For those who don’t read atheist political philosophy…Paul is back, popular, and getting all sorts of attention.  In our conversation we play out a number of these Pauline insights and then tackle a bunch of questions being asked in the church today.  If you are interested in the philosophical discussion there is no better place to begin than St. Paul Among the Philosophers which is introduced and edited by Jack Caputo.  It includes chapters by Zizek and Badiou (philosophers) and then responses form Christian scholars from across the disciplines.

Stuff We Discuss…Paul, Crucifixion, Resurrection, Pete’s new book, Hakim Bey’s temporary autonomous zones, Kester Brewin, Occupy Wall Street condoms and T-Shirts, the Crisis of Capitalism, Red Letter Christianity, the End of History, Identity Politics, Missional Progressive Christianity, why we aren’t ‘making disciples’ in church, and if the church should still gather after the Death of the Big Other God.

Since this was recorded live in a room with a Keg of Dale Brothers Beer there are the occasional bumps from me pumping the keg. I put some soft jams underneath to help cut down the noise from the note taking audience.

To be a Christian is to hold Jesus in highest esteem. Even more important, it is to live as Jesus’ follower and as one who believes that in following Jesus one is also serving God. According to the synoptic gospels, people in his day, marveling at his words and deeds, called him “Lord.” The great question then was whether he was the expected one, the Messiah, or, in Greek, the Christ.

For his disciples, the resurrection appearances of Jesus settled these questions. Jesus was definitely Lord, and definitely Messiah or Christ. Although much that was expected of the Messiah had not happened, the title Christ almost became part of Jesus’ name or a virtual synonym. Jesus’ was God’s beloved son, chosen by God for the salvation of all who followed him.

Paul developed these ideas. As was expected of the Messiah, Jesus was a descendant of David, and through his resurrection he came to be, or to be recognized as, the Son of God. Jesus fulfilled God’s mission by opening the doors of salvation to all, including the Gentiles. Jews had been seeking salvation by obedience to the law, but this did not work. By his faithfulness to God even to death Jesus provided another way. Jews and Gentiles alike could participate in that faithfulness. This meant that they would suffer and die with Jesus. God accepts that participation as righteousness. Those who thus participated are reconciled with God and will also participate in Jesus’ resurrection.

This is truly an exalted picture of who Jesus was and is and of Jesus’ work for God and on our behalf. There is a heavenly dimension in that the resurrected Jesus is no longer an earthly figure but a heavenly one. But Jesus remains unquestionably a human being. “Messiah,’ “Son of God,” “Lord,” and “Savior” are all human titles. The resurrected Jesus is the first fruit of the transformation in which we are all to participate.

There is no suggestion that Jesus belongs in another realm as a divine being alongside God the Father. The thinking of Paul remains in the fully monotheistic tradition of Judaism.

Now in Colossians we are confronted with a very different picture. A generation has passed, and the Rubicon has been crossed. The faithful are now predominantly Gentile. Paul is the great leader, virtually the founder, of the Gentile church, and believers are eager to claim his authority for what they say. But their ways of thinking are no longer Jewish. The sharp distinction between the one Creator and the many creatures has faded. Jesus is the primary focus of their thought. He, not the emperor who claims their worship, functions as their God.

They still affirm the God whom Jesus addressed as Father. But the emphasis is now on the intimate, indeed insoluble, relation between Jesus and God. All things on heaven and earth have been created through Jesus and for Jesus. “In him all things hold together.”

To Jews of that time and to us today, it is impossible to think that a person inhabiting a human body could function in these cosmic ways. Probably that was never quite the intention. “Jesus” had come to name not only the human figure about whom we read in the synoptic gospels but also a divine being who temporarily inhabited a human body and in that role died on a cross for our sake. But there is less clarity in this Colossians passage about this distinction than in the prologue of John where it is clear that the everlasting Word of God became a human being in Jesus. There is no preexisting divine Jesus.

Even John is not as clear as it might be about the distinction between the human being Jesus and the Word that became flesh in him. The creeds likewise blur this distinction to the great detriment of Christian faith. Jews could see God’s Power, God’s Spirit, or God’s Wisdom manifest in a human being. Paul affirmed this of Jesus. If we believe, as I strongly do, that something of God is present in all God’s creatures, there is certainly no problem in emphasizing the rich and full way, certainly distinctive and possibly unique, in which God was present in Jesus. But we need to retain the distinction between the divine that was incarnate in Jesus and the human being who was partly constituted by that incarnation. In Paul the distinction is generally clear. In Colossians it is badly blurred.

The great danger of this blurring is that Jesus’ humanity be lost. Jesus became for many Christians a God walking around in human form. Fortunately, there were many Christians who resisted this loss. Antioch was a great center of the ancient church and of its teaching. There they clung to such formulations as that of the divine indwelling a human being. This is far more intelligible, far more faithful to Paul, and far healthier for the church. And throughout the whole controversy in the ancient church about the nature of Jesus it prevented the obliteration of Jesus’ humanity.

But those who in fact worshipped Jesus insisted that Jesus was not only the human being indwelt by God but also God. And over the centuries this confused and confusing idea has played havoc with Christian teaching. Jesus’ humanity has too often been swallowed up in Jesus’ deity.

If this had not happened, Jews would not have been so profoundly alienated from Christianity. There would have remained the dispute as to whether salvation comes through obedience to law or participation in the faithfulness of Jesus, but this could have continued as a debate that might prove fruitful for both parties. Christians had no business asking Jews to compromise their monotheism. Mohammed, who had the highest appreciation for Jesus as the greatest of God’s prophets before the revelation of the Qu’ran, might well have become a Christian. At least the mutual enmity of Christians and Muslims would have been greatly eased. Perhaps both Jews and Muslims might have learned from Christians to understand more fully God’s sacramental or incarnational presence in the world.

But all of this is what might have been. What has in fact been is that neither Jews nor Muslims could appreciate a Christianity that compromised God’s unity, even if it claimed that its teaching of three divine persons did not do so. What has in fact been is that many have been alienated by a teaching that places believing very doubtful ideas about Jesus over following him in humble service even when that entails sharing in his suffering.

For several centuries now Christians, especially Protestants, have been engaged in rescuing the human Jesus from his de-humanization by the church. Unfortunately, like many needed reactions, it has often gone too far. Humanizing Jesus has often meant reinventing him in the image of contemporary ideals, on the one hand, or in a negative light, on the other. Almost always it has separated him from “the Father” whose presence his followers saw in him.

Jesus is not alone in being subjected to this treatment. It seems to be important for us to bring the most admirable people down to our size. I believe that there are human beings who are truly remarkable in diverse ways and that humanizing them should expand our image of humanity rather than reduce them to fit a small one. I believe that we can and should say things about the fully human Jesus that we say of no one else. Being unique does not make one less human.

For that reason, despite my heavy critique of the confusion of deity and humanity that I find in this passage in Colossians, I also find much to appreciate. I have taken as my text verse 19: “in him the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.” In my view the more fully God dwells within us the more fully we are human. Precisely because God dwelt so fully in Jesus, Jesus shows us what humanity in its fullness can be.

Our recognition of God’s presence in Jesus is also our assurance that God is like Jesus. Far from condemning us for our sins and failures, God loves and forgives. In the language especially emphasized in this passage we are reconciled to God. If we participate in Jesus’ faithfulness, there is nothing left for us to do.

We can come to God with the assurance that we are already fully known and accepted as we are and therefore can open ourselves in responsiveness to God’s inward call. In Jesus we learn that while we are secure in our relation to God, following our calling is not a path of safety in human terms. There is no assurance that our ventures in service of the weak and the poor will succeed, but there is assurance that God affirms them and uses them beyond our knowledge. God used even Jesus’ death for our salvation.

The author of Colossians expressed his devotion to Jesus in language some of which proved harmful in later centuries and in different contexts. We can learn from that to be careful that our formulations of our devotion not put others down. But we need equally to know that it is not the strength of our devotion that is dangerous to others, but only its mis-description and misunderstanding. We need to find in our time and for ourselves the way to express no less devotion, ourselves now, than the author of Colossians expressed in his time and place.

* This and more John Cobb HERE

Caputo Writes lots of books.  He mentions Some Philosophers…Ray Brassier’s Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction and Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude.

* We are excited about Doug Pagitt coming to Soularize!

* ‘Like’ John Caputo on facebook

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.

Thanks to Tad & Stephen for setting up the interview. Ohh that sweet pic was taken while I was interviewing Merold.

In the episode we discuss…

- Heidegger & The Onto-theological Critique

- Evangelicalism

- Growing up a dispensationalist and ending up a Christian philosopher

- Hegel, the social constitution of the self, & the located nature of ‘reason’

-Necessary Conditions for Christian Theism…God is personal & speaks

- Pseudo Dionysius, Augustine, Aquinas, Feuerbach & negative theology

- Revelation, the Word of God, and Human Receptivity

* This podcast if free…Consider Helping Build a Well w/ a Deacon Shane Galloway! Pretty Please! Click & Give

* Join us @soularize Oct 18-20

I have great respect for the work of Tony Jones – blogger, author, theologian, and pioneer of the emerging church movement.  His is one of the boldest, most passionate voices in the ECM today.  As a part of a young emergent church over the last five years, many of us found his 2008 book The New Christians to be very helpful in understanding the ethos of the movement as a whole.  I still consider it to be one of the great ECM manifestos next to Brian McLaren’s A Generous Orthodoxy.

As I have studied the ECM throughout the years, I must admit that I have been disappointed by the lack of scholarly resources on the movement.  Bolger and Gibb’s Emerging Churches has probably been the best academic book on the movement so far, but very little has been published on the subject that one could really call ‘scholarly.’  Clearly, this is due to the fact that the ECM is still quite young and relatively small in numbers.  Still, it has had a deep impact on American Christianity and it’s time for scholars to engage it more seriously.

A second slight disappointment of mine has been the relative lack of more academic theological participants in the ECM.  True, the movement is deeply theological, and some profound conversations have occurred since it began.  While I greatly value these conversations, I have personally felt the need for more professional theologians to provide intellectual backing to the movement.  Like it or not, academically trained theologians have insights to offer that lay theologians are not usually trained to consider.  This is not to place the professionals ‘over’ pastors or lay theologians, but to recognize that they have an important place within the conversation.

So it was great news to hear that Jones had received his PhD from Princeton Theological Seminary in practical theology after many years of hard work, and that he also planned on publishing a ‘lightly emended version’ of his doctoral dissertation, The Church Is Flat: The Relational Ecclesiology of the Emerging Church Movement.  In this book, Jones writes as a practical theologian to study the history, practices, and theology of the ECM.  He also addresses both of my aforementioned ‘disappointments’: first, by providing an excellent sociological analysis of the ECM with an extensive bibliography; and second, by critically engaging one of the most important theologians of the last fifty years, Jürgen Moltmann to develop a more robust ecclesiology for the ECM.

While this is not a book aimed primarily at a popular-level audience as his previous books have been, Jones has managed to write a scholarly book that reads remarkably well.  He also works hard to remain aware of his own favorable bias towards the ECM in order to facilitate a more objective study of the movement – an effort that I believe paid off in the end.  Indeed, I would argue that Jones’ The Church is Flat is the new go-to book for understanding the past, present, and future of the emerging church movement.  This is an exceptionally smart book that demands equally serious attention from participants, sympathizers, and critics of the ECM.  

A central part of the book is a study of eight emerging congregations, involving interviews with pastors and laypersons, as well as Jones’ analysis of the relational practices and theological intuitions that are common to the movement.  For the ECM, relationality is absolutely central – thus its strong emphasis on ‘friendship.’ Jones describes the concentration of the book as “a theological treatment of the relational nature of the [ECM].”  He points out that there is no comparable book on the ECM that focuses on this “key component of the practices that animate these congregations.”

As one who has studied the relational theology of Jürgen Moltmann, I was especially interested in the final two chapters of the book that deal with his ecclesiology and Jones’ theological suggestions for the ECM.  Jones points to the ecclesiological importance of Moltmann’s social Trinity and panentheism, two ideas that are central to Moltmann’s theology.  The social Trinity encourages a radically relational, more egalitarian model of community by serving as a measure of all Christian practice, whether in the church, evangelism, or in interaction with other institutions and religions.

Moltmann’s panentheistic emphasis on divine immanence grounds the ECM’s rejection of the sacred/secular divide: ‘de-sacralizing’ the church while ‘re-sacralizing’ the world.  Jones writes, “By believing that God’s presence is in all things, congregation members are encouraged to recognize that presence as they go about their daily lives…the church is thus no more or less important than…other institutions.”  He calls for ECM practices that “embody panentheism.”  One way this can work out is in interreligious dialogue and friendship.  While a strength of the ECM is its ability to maintain a robust Christian identity while remaining open to the religious other, Jones recognizes that the ECM must become more active in building friendships with persons from other religions.

At the end of the book, Jones asserts that the ECM must engage in more serious theological reflection on practices in order to remain a vibrant movement.  It needs more ‘traditional intellectuals’ if it is to “develop the intellectual backing needed to sustain it as it ages and, most likely institutionalizes.”  In fact, Jones thinks it highly unlikely that the ECM will be able to avoid institutionalizing.  If it is to avoid the many problems involved in such a process, the ECM must embrace a radically relational ecclesiology now – which is exactly what Jones has developed in this important work.

This is also an answer of what happens when Bo & Tripp light cigars and throw down….theologically speaking.

- Roger Olson’s blog (which you should subscribe to)

- Void Collective (that Brandon is a part of), Brandon’s 1st Post, Olson’s response, Brandon’s later response, Bill Walker (Bo & I’s fellow Claremont friend who we mentioned)

- Tony’s multiple blog posts to check out….incarnational Christian, initial thoughts, theology

- Stryper rocking “The Way”

Now here’s Philip……….

It is difficult to describe how much the audience for systematic theology has changed over the last few decades.1 In these few pages I’ll be arguing that theology needs to change just as radically if it’s going to communicate effectively with Gen-Xers, Millennials, and the increasingly large group of non-religious Americans (“non’s”2) over the coming 10-20 years.

The changes are like the shifting of tectonic plates, which means earthquakes and tsunamis. When I arrived in Munich to study under Wolfhart Pannenberg in the fall of 1981, German theologians still set the tact for Christian theology worldwide. American doctoral programs in theology accepted large numbers of entering students, and most of those students could count on tenure-track jobs when they graduated. Theology journals thrived, and traveling theologians drew large crowds at universities and seminaries. When I asked Pannenberg and other established theologians what was the reason to do abstract academic theology, they invariably appealed to the trickle-down effect: “Our publications influence doctoral students and other academic theologians; their teaching molds the next generation of pastors; and pastors’ sermons and ministries guide the thinking and practice of the vast numbers of people who flock to the churches.” Or something like that.

You don’t have to be a specialist to know that things have changed. A major national survey recently published in USA Today shows that 72% of “Millennials”—Americans between the ages of 18 and 29—now consider themselves “spiritual but not religious.”3 Even among those who self-identify as practicing Christians, all of the traditional forms of Christian practice have sharply declined from previous years: church attendance, Bible study, and prayer. Doubts are higher, and affiliation with any institutional church is sharply lower. All of us who are still connected with local congregations already know this pattern, up close and personal. Still, it’s sobering to see the trends writ large; after all, we are talking about almost three-quarters of younger Americans!

If the decline of traditional churches and denominations continues, by 2025 the effects will have transformed the American religious landscape—even if not as radically as in Europe. (For example, on a typical Sunday, some 0.5% of Germans attend church.) Some estimate that up to two-thirds of mainline churches may have closed their doors by that time; others will struggle on without a full-time pastor. Denominations will merge in order to be able to maintain even minimal national staffs and programs. A larger and larger proportion of those who still go to church will visit large “mega” churches, those with 2,000 or more attenders on an average Sunday.

I doubt the American interest in spiritual matters will die; people will continue to report that spirituality is extremely important to them. Nor will they pursue these practices in isolation. New forms of association and shared practice will arise; new religious movements will attract participants; alliances across religious traditions will grow in strength and number. Christians who resist these trends will become increasingly strident and increasingly hostile toward the modern world, even as their numbers decrease. And, of course, discussion of religious themes—and what it means to be a Christian in today’s world—will grow in intensity and urgency. 4

What of theology?

And what of theology? In this context, one can no longer view academic theology as a product with an obvious and assured market. Within many churches, the interest in theology appears to be declining; the market base is no longer there. Those who still attend mainline churches are often deeply suspicious of doctrinal theology and more focused on ethical, political, and other practical concerns. By and large, people seem to be more interested in learning about the beliefs of other religious traditions, in debating ethical issues in our culture today, or in pursuing spiritual formation and practices.

You can bemoan the current state of affairs. You can argue that people still need the kind of reflection that systematic theologians offer (a proposition I agree with!), and you can brainstorm ways to get folks to “consume” the theological products that we “produce.” To those who think the problem is just better marketing, I say: I wish you well. If you can rekindle interest in the kind of theology that authors were producing 30 years ago (and that some continue to write), great. The remainder of this piece is dedicated, however, to those who agree with me that such an approach is not necessarily the best, and certainly not the only, way to proceed today.

One brief caveat: To pursue “theology after Google” does not mean to gleefully destroy all traditional Christian beliefs, to abandon the church, or to advocate a post-Christian worldview. On the contrary, it does, however, mean entering in good conscience into a new kind of open and exploratory discourse—a discourse in which one’s conversation partners are not committed in advance to landing where past theologians have landed. Many of them do end up with a vibrant Christian identity, but that’s no longer a pre-condition for theological dialogue. Theology after Google means navigating the treacherous waters of contemporary culture, religion, science, and philosophy—without knowing in advance that the harbor in which one finally drops anchor will be the same theological port from which the ships of old set sail. For those of us who live, work, and think in a Google-shaped world, such certainties about the outcome of the adventure are just not to be had in advance.

Church in the Google Age, or “Toto, We’re Not in Kansas Anymore”

Perhaps a few questions will help to evoke the sea change that we face today:

• Why is it that most Americans today don’t walk down to their neighborhood church on Sunday mornings for worship, Sunday school, and a church potluck?

• Although many Christians believe that “everything must change”5 why is it that the institutions and those who lead them don’t seem to recognize the enormous changes that are already upon us?

• Do we really inhabit two different worlds: those who text, twitter, blog, and get 80% of our information from the Internet, and those who are “not comfortable” with the new social media and technologies?

• Could we today be facing a change in how human society is organized that is as revolutionary in its implications as was the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg over 500 years ago?

• If we are, what does all this have to do with theology and the church?

Of course, churches will still exist in the year 2030 (and hopefully long afterwards). But we must not assume that they will look much like church practices from 1955-1995. I assume that Christians will still gather for worship, teaching, and community; that the Scriptures will still be read; that the sacraments will be celebrated. But what church means in practice has always been deeply affected by its age and culture. When these change, so too must the church. Everyone acknowledges that we are living in a time of revolutionary transformation. So shouldn’t we expect that the church is in for some radical changes?

Consider this comparison. On the eastern seaboard in the 17th and 18th centuries, and in the expansion of a young nation westward toward the Pacific Ocean, churches played very specific social functions. They weren’t only the center of religious life, the place where one came to be baptized, married, and buried (“hatched, matched, and dispatched”)… and everything in between. They were also the heart and soul of the community—the center of social, communal, political, and even economic life. There was simply no other game in town. The church stood for the moral values of the community, “what made America great.” When you see the white steeples in a New England town, or when you drive through Midwest towns with a church on every corner, you realize how central a social institution the church once was.

But things have changed. For today’s generation, churches no longer play most of these social functions. We are now a massively pluralistic society living in an increasingly globalized world. Every major world religion is represented among United States citizens. This transformation has massive implications for ecclesiology. Take, for example, the question of authority. In the frontier town, the Southern city, or the New England village there was the authority of the law and the government. Many people were not very educated, so they did not read much, and there was no radio or TV. The pastor of the church was not only the moral and spiritual authority—the representative of the only true religion and its obviously true scriptures—but also probably the most educated person in town. He (almost certainly it was a he) spoke with authority on a wide variety of issues that were important to the society of his day.

Contrast that world with today’s situation. Rarely are pastors approached as figures of authority, except (sometimes!) within their own congregations. Radio, television, and the Internet are our primary authorities for the information we need, with newspapers, advertisements, and movies coming in a close second. For many American Christians, Beliefnet.com (“Your Trusted Source for Free Daily Inspiration & Faith”) is a bigger authority on matters of Christian belief and practice than any pastor. We love self-help books, so we are more likely to read Spirituality for Dummies than to go to a group Bible study. Forty years ago people were influenced in their judgments about religious matters not only by their pastor but also by the editorials in the religion section of their local newspaper. Today the blogs one chooses to follow are far more likely to influence her beliefs.

Where’s the Revolution?

I am almost embarrassed to list these differences, because they are so obvious. But here’s the amazing fact: Denominations aren’t changing. In most cases they’re not planning for and investing in new forms of church for this brave new world. (There are some great exceptions.)

This is not a matter of blame. The assignment of the administrators who head up denominations is to run the organization that they’ve been given. I once heard a major national leader say (prophetically) to a group of similar leaders something like, “We all know that the ship is in grave danger, and it may go down. But we all seem to have the attitude, ‘Not on my watch!’”

Denominations aren’t changing. In most cases they’re not planning for and investing in new forms of church for this brave new world.

Pastors have a bit more latitude. Individual pastors and churches are doing amazing things across the U.S. (and outside it); so are para-church and extra-church groups, organizations, and ministries. But in most cases, it’s the denominations that determine how pastors are educated, what kinds of ministries they can engage in, and what kinds of church assignments they get. The training and formation of most pastors takes place in seminary, and seminaries are increasingly out of step with the 21st century world. (As a seminary professor, I get to see this up close and personal.)

Imagine that a pastor has the good fortune to depart seminary with her idealism intact. She’s then likely to be assigned to a traditional church that has virtually no youth or younger families present, an average age of 60, and a major budget crisis on its hands. Her orders are, “Keep this church alive!” The church members like the old hymns and liturgies; they don’t like tattoos, rock music, or electronics. They are about as likely to read and respond to blogs as I am to play in the Super Bowl. So the young pastor folds her idealism away in a closet and struggles to offer the traditional ministry that churches want.

In short: The majority of our resources continue to be flung at traditional church structures. Those doing the real revolutionary work, those trying to envision—and incarnate—the church of the future struggle on with the barest of resources.

Theology After Google

Progressive and moderate Christian leaders have some vitally important things to say, things that both the church and society desperately need to hear. The trouble is, we tend to deliver our message using technologies that date back to Gutenberg: books, academic articles, sermons, and so forth. (Think of how much of a typical mainline service involves reading written texts.) We aren’t making any significant use of the new technologies, social media, and social networking. When it comes to effective communication of message, the Religious Right is running circles around us.

So what does it mean for the up-and-coming theologians and church leaders of the next generation to do “theology after Google”? At the start, it involves conversations with cultural creatives and experts in the new modes of communication. The new theologians know how to listen the “theobloggers” whose use of the new media (blogging, podcasts, YouTube posts) has already earned them large followings and high levels of influence.6

Progressive and moderate Christian leaders have some vitally important things to say, things that both the church and society desperately need to hear. The trouble is, we tend to deliver our message using technologies that date back to Gutenberg.

“Theology after Google” isn’t just about techniques, though—however important they are. It happens only as the next generation of American theologians and church leaders begins to think together about the implications of these new modes of communication. Marshall McLuhan’s famous “the medium is the message” may not have been completely on the mark; still, what we say is affected by how we say it. How are the new media changing the nature of human existence and human social connections? How are they transforming human conceptions of God, Jesus, and Christianity? And what will (and should) the church become as a result? Mastering the new communication technologies is not enough, though it’s essential; it’s also crucial to understand what it means to be religious, and Christian, in a technology-dominated age.

Some will find the results uncomfortable. It means, first of all, that we can no longer define theology only as an academic discipline. Although about Christian beliefs, modern theologies sought primary to meet the standards of the Academy. But the “trickle-down effect”—the idea that the brainy books in academic theology flow through pastors to help congregations and ordinary Christians—is no longer working (if it ever did). By and large academic theologians are not addressing the questions that lay Christians are asking; or they’re answering them so incomprehensibly that only other academic theologians understand them.

Theology after Google devotes itself to the questions that all Christians ask and the kinds of answers that ordinary people give, no matter how hesitating and uncertain. This new definition has a wonderful implication: Theology is tightly bound to whatever and wherever the church is at a given time. Theology is about what the church is and is becoming now. So “theology after Google” asks: What must the church become in a Google-shaped world?

Beta Theologies for a Beta Church

Where is the church today? We face huge challenges with numbers; budget difficulties are a byproduct. Large numbers of younger Americans are staying away. Clergy may be happy about specific successes in ministry, but most are discouraged about long-term trends. And it is hard to bring about change when you serve one or more congregations with no associates, few youth, and scant financial resources.

Protestants are experts at guilt, but it helps to recognize the truth: the reasons for the decline of Christian institutions and congregations are cultural; they do not just have to do with us. We are facing a transformation of how human society is organized that is as revolutionary in its implications as was the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg over 500 years ago—perhaps even as revolutionary as the fall of Rome.7 If that’s right, what does this mean for those who are called to be leaders and to guide the church into the 21st century?

What we have to offer—the gospel and the community of the Body of Christ – has not stopped being relevant; Jesus’ promise of comfort in a time of uncertainty is more relevant today than ever before. Stereotypes notwithstanding, most pastors are willing and motivated to try new forms of ministry. But, among all the options, they are unsure what to commit to and implement … and how to make it happen.

First, we need to move from “church 1.0” to “church 2.0.” The analogy should be clear. “Web 1.0” was a series of static pages that one would visit and (passively) read. “Web 2.0a”—the web of today—offers a deeply interactive experience, in which the users themselves help to make the places that they go (Facebook, Twitter, blogs, Wikipedia).8 We respond, contribute to, and play at the places we visit; we go there to do things. (If you’re unsure about this, watch a kid playing on the web. My seven-year-old twins will click on anything anywhere on any webpage to see what’ll happen and what it will do. The idea that the Internet might be about passive reading of content never occurred to them.)

Second, in a time of rapid change, there’s no alternative; you have to experiment. Perhaps here also we can learn something from software designers. When designers want to try out a new product, they issue a “beta” release. People try it out, find out what works and what doesn’t work, and let the designers know. They make some changes and then release the next version. What would it mean for us to consciously adopt “beta church” as a model for ecclesiology and for church ministries?9

One of the greatest insights of the Google-World is the freedom of Beta. A Beta is more than a product not-yet-ready-for-consumption, but a way of thinking, creating, and living. It owns being unfinished. It expects contribution, evolution, transparency. For a long time all of culture was under a spell. It believed in the myth of perfection, a closed process of creation, an established finality before completion. Before Beta, a mistake, glitch, virus, or crash was an embarrassment, a failure of the developers. Now these “bugs” are opportunities for learning and we thank people for pointing them out as they join in to improve.

What does Beta talk have to do with the church? Everything. One of the greatest insights that the emerging church movement has shared with the church is this love for the Beta. Think of it as a call for honesty, transparency, innovation, creative participation, and inspired imagination. When we look at the church we think Beta – not because we begrudge what is there, but because we know God is not done, the body of Christ is in the Beta and it is beautiful.

What do you make of this relational vision of the Beta? How far into the life of the church and its public performances does the Beta go? Is our worship in the Beta mode? How about the church structures, or our theology? What about our own life of discipleship and our community? Maybe we could go one step further and say that the entire world is in the Beta? Does Christian theology not point us in this direction?

The Church and Her Practices in The Google Age

The Google age is about men and women who live in, and are molded by, a very different era than the Eisenhower, Civil Rights, Vietnam, and Baby Boomer eras. Those who walk here know the wilderness of unbelief. They are keenly aware that there are other options. They exist in the Matrix of belief and ambiguity. Ambiguities will not be left behind; they are the reality. As a result, these men and women exist both “inside” and “outside” the church. It may be that the goal is to find the answers (though many Google-Agers would dispute that). But the means, at any rate, is clear: one must know the questions … inside and out.

And the church? In my view, the emerging church is not about tearing down all existing structures: church buildings, denominations, and the rest. But it is about radical changes around us, and courageous responses within the church. When emergence starts happening around us, in ways and places we didn’t expect, our challenge is to learn to encourage and support it, to learn from it, rather than squelching it. Much has changed: the individuals are different; the communities are different; the ways of talking (and believing) are different. So it’s going to take some stretching on our parts. Theologies from the past won’t work as pre-packaged answers. The Catholic author Richard Rohr captures the shift in his description of spiritual practices:

One great idea of the biblical revelation is that God is manifest in the ordinary, in the actual, in the daily, in the now, in the concrete incarnations of life, and not through purity codes and moral achievement contests, which are seldom achieved anyway… We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking… The most courageous thing we will ever do is to bear humbly the mystery of our own reality.10

The Church and Her Theology After Google

The quickest way to convey a concrete picture of what this all means is to reduce my message to five theses:

(1) Theology is not something you consume, but something you produce. In the Age of Gutenberg, you read theology in a book; you heard it preached in sermons; and you were taught it by Bible teachers. In the Age of Google, theology is what you do when you’re responding to blogs, contributing to a Wiki doc or Google doc online (or on your own computer), participating in worship, inventing new forms of ministry, or talking about God with your friends in a pub.

(2) No institutions, and very few persons, function as authorities for theology after Google. Ever since Jesus’ (often misunderstood) statement about Peter that “on this rock I will build my church” (Mt. 16), the church has had issues with authority. The point is too obvious to need examples. The pastor standing up in the pulpit in the early 1960s was still a major authority.

Of course, pastors still stand up in pulpits today, and some still view themselves as indispensable purveyors of truth. But most of us who still speak from pulpits today are having to rethink our relationship with the audiences we address, since most people today shrug their shoulders at those who claim to be authorities in religious matters. (For many of us, scripture continues to be an authority, but the way in which it’s an authority has changed massively over the last 30 years.) Theology today means what some number of us find plausible about our faith and are willing to share. Today’s religious leaders are those who say things that ring true to us, so that we say, “Yeah, I think that person’s got some important insights. I’m going to read the blog or find a way to talk with him (or her), and I’m going to recommend to my friends that they do the same.”

(3) Theology after Google is not centralized and localized. Likewise, the church cannot be localized in a single building. We find church wherever we find Jesus-followers that we link up with who are doing cool things. This point is huge. Denominational officials and many pastors have not even begun to conceive and wrestle with what it means to work for a church without a clear geographical location.

(4) Similarly, theology after Google does not divide up the world between the “sacred” and the “secular,” as past theologies so often did. All thought and experience bears on it, and all of one’s life manifests it. Thus the distinction between one’s “ministry” and one’s “ordinary life” is bogus. All of one’s life as a Christian is missional. The great 15th-century theologian and mystic Nicholas of Cusa imagined God as a circle whose radius is infinite and whose center is everywhere. It only takes a second to realize that Cusa’s picture wreaks havoc on all geometries of “inside” and “outside.”

(5) The new Christian leader is a host, not an authority who dispenses settled truths, wise words, and the sole path to salvation. This last point is important enough that it deserves a section of its own.

Theologians, Pastors, and Church Leaders in The Google Age

I first really grasped the idea of pastors as hosts in a conversation with Spencer Burke, and it has turned my understanding of Christian leadership upside down. Today, the leaders who influence our faith and action are those who convene (or moderate or enable) the conversations that change our life—or the activities that transform our understanding of ourselves, our world, and our God. It could be an older Christian who convenes discussions at a church, a house, or a pub. It could be Shane Claiborne leading an activity at The Simple Way on Potter Street in Philadelphia—perhaps gardening in the communal garden—that gives you a sense of community that you’ve rarely had but always longed for. It could be a website or a blogger that you frequently go to, where you read others’ responses and add your own thoughts. Christian leadership is about enabling significant community around the name of Jesus, wherever two or more are gathered in his name.

The new models of emerging leadership in emerging communities deserve a whole article just for themselves. These new leaders are those who discern; they see, state, and honor the spirituality within those they meet – both inside and outside the church. They are “cultural creatives,” able to hear and interpret the pulse of our age. They are scouts for discovering existing communities and hosts for the emergence of new communities. There are the bridgers of conversations. They are lovers of what the church has been and welcomers of what she is becoming.

Above all else, though, they remind me of a great hostess. She makes the guests comfortable; she anticipates their needs. She matches folks up and gets the conversations started, though she doesn’t need to place herself in the middle of each one. She leads by example, often by establishing an atmosphere or an ethos that fosters deep sharing. And, at her best, she transforms the lives of those whom she hosts. I cannot think of a better model for leadership in the church after Google.

Note that a whole new set of spiritual disciplines is implied by (and required for!) this new model of Christian leadership, including the spiritual disciplines of coming alongside (cf. Parcletos, the name for the Holy Spirit in John 14), listening, sitting with hard questions, and thinking (and living) “in the gray.”11 It is, in short, the spiritual discipline of Hermes: translating the language that nurtured us into the language of those around us. Note also that Hermes did his “ministry” not on Mt. Olympus but in the “secular” spaces of this world, far from the sacred halls.

Although many authors, especially in the emerging church movement, have developed the notion of pastor as host, almost no one has explored what it would mean for theologians to understand themselves as hosts. Here’s the idea: Traditionally, the theologian was the “keeper of the faith.” He (I use the pronoun advisedly) was responsible for doctrinal purity; it was his task to make sure that what folks got in sermons and Christian books was “the faith once given.” Of course, there were some interpretive issues that had to be worked out, and the faith had to be applied to the specific challenges of one’s own day and age. Yet this task was held primarily as the trust for a professional class within the church, the pastors and theologians.12

The theologian who wants to participate in and contribute to discussions about faith today has a very different set of job requirements. She certainly is not the lecturer who conveys traditional answers and then sends people off to the examination room. But nor is she expected first to listen patiently as the group does its exploring, and then to close the discussion with her pronouncements on what people should actually think about these questions. (Note, however, that this second role is a vast improvement on the first; would that we had more theologians even willing to go this far!) Instead, her most effective role is as a convener of and participant in the discussions.

It obviously requires some significant humbling to take up this new role and to carry it out with enthusiasm, with grace, and in an edifying way. I happen to think that that sort of humbling should lie at the very center of a Christ-shaped ministry. Call it the kenotic theological method, one shaped by and around the self-emptying Christological picture of Phil. 2:5-8. Note that many of us who pursue the kenotic theological method today, often with fear and trembling, do so not because we think all previous theologies were misguided and because we hope to remake Christianity in our own image. To the contrary! Many of us are convinced that the only way to rekindle interest in core theological questions, to enable the sort of discourse that will help people work their way to something like a Christian world view, is to foster the kind of open discourse that allows them to explore the questions themselves. As the old saying goes, “If you love something, set it free. If it comes back to you, it’s yours; if it doesn’t, it never was.”

But don’t underestimate the human ability for self-deception! We often think that we are being fantastic listeners and open to the flow of the discussion, when in fact we are dominating the airwaves and holding the reins of the outcome tightly in our hands. It is essential to solicit regular, honest feedback about the role that one is actually playing. It is frequently humbling to experience what that feedback actually says. Yet the few times that one succeeds are immensely encouraging.13

In the book that Tripp Fuller and I just published,  Transforming Christian Theology, we argue that theology is about attempting to answer the Seven Core Christian Questions. These questions have impressive-sounding names: the doctrine of God (theology proper), anthropology, soteriology, christology, pneumatology, ecclesiology, and eschatology. Theologians will recognize the source of these “core questions” in the first systematic theology of the Reformation, Philip Melanchthon’s Loci communes theologici (1521). But they are really just the simple, recurring questions that every Christian wonders about as he or she struggles to be a Jesus disciple: Who is God? What are human beings? How are we separated from God, and how can that separation be overcome? Who is Jesus Christ? What or Who is the Spirit? What is the church, and what should it be doing? And what is our hope for the final future of the cosmos and humanity?

These questions do not have to be discussed in esoteric debates sprinkled liberally with Greek and German technical terms. The most humble attempts to answer these questions, in word and action, are as authentically theology as are the rarified debates within the Ivy Tower—indeed, they may be more authentic than what academic theologians do. Call it the Theology of the Widow’s Mite. What matters is that the broadest possible range of people is given the opportunity to reflect on, debate, and make up their minds about the questions that are fundamental to Christian self-understanding.

Some people who read the book will come down to the “left” of where I am as a theologian, others to the “right” of me. But those theologians after Google who follow the kenotic methodology don’t see it as their primary job description to make sure that everyone lands at precisely the same point of the theological spectrum that the theologian herself inhabits. The ongoing formation of Christian identity in a complex, multi-faceted world—and the individual’s decision about that identity—is for us the primary calling.

Can you pursue this kenotic methodology also in your written work? It is fairly obvious that popular books, articles, and especially blog posts can utilize this kenotic approach. (In fact, books and articles that do so are generally far more effective and far more widely read than those that follow the old model.) But even in academic writing it is possible to make one’s suggestions and proposals in a manner that is guided by the questions, rather than conveying only the certainty that one possesses the answers. I suspect that a survey of publications in theology over the last ten years would show that the most interesting and effective publications were those that worked out of intense and urgent questions rather than out of the guiding framework of a specific set of answers.

Conclusions for the People of the Way

Theology after Google is guided by our present context: situation, audience, and social and cultural environment. It cares about the process, the effects, and the usefulness of theology. It is about Jesus, whom we call the Christ, but it is also irreducibly autobiographical. The new theologians write theology for the needs of the church today. For us this means: we write theology not just for the comfortable insiders within the churches, but for those who are slowly drifting away—and for those who have moved so far away that it’s hard for them to imagine being part of the traditional churches any longer at all. We write with their needs and concerns in mind; we write in language they can understand; and we compose arguments that pay attention to their plausibility structures, not just our own.

If we were to write a Wiki manifesto for theology after Google, it might read something like this (edits requested!): We find ourselves here, somehow, as followers of Jesus. That part seems to stick and to deepen the longer we live.

We’re not sure exactly how we got here; it’s almost like it happened to us. We call it grace. We find others around us who follow the same Teacher and who therefore struggle with many of the same questions and issues that we face. They help us understand ourselves and to remain faithful to our Guide. We call them church.

But what exactly do we believe? What must we say, and what should we not say (and do)? The quest to know is open-ended. It’s filled with uncertainties and indecisions, and it’s constantly evolving. That quest just is theology. It’s everything we think about and do. It’s reading the New York Times headlines online each morning when we awake. It’s the philosophy text that we read in a classroom or the intriguing idea about christology that we talk about with friends over a beer. It’s the ethical questions we struggle with. It’s our attempts to be involved in authentic forms of ministry and Christian community, and the questions we ask about whether those attempts are really faithful and how to make them better. It’s that recurring question, “What should I do with my life?”

I can already hear the question from the learned theologian who reads the Princeton Theological Review: so is this approach evangelical or conservative? Well, clearly it is a method that would work well for evangelicals, or at least for question-asking evangelicals, because it keeps attention focused on the classic Christian questions, which it calls the “core” questions. It also works well in mainline and progressive communities, because it allows people to voice their questions and concerns and to take a hand in formulating the answers to which they themselves are drawn.

But what I really want to answer is: That’s the wrong question! The native inhabitants of the Google age, Gen-Xers and Millennials, just aren’t so interested in the labels that defined the discourse for the previous generations. Your “-isms” simply don’t define the social and cultural spaces that they inhabit. Identities today are more complex, shifting, and uncertain. The implicit essentialism of “isms”-based thinking is foreign to them. So to insist that we define our theological frameworks in terms of preexisting sets of categories—say, exclusively in liberal/evangelical terms (which we know has been the sacred cow of American Christianity for decades), is both misleading and unproductive.

I noted earlier that theology after Google is intrinsically autobiographical. So here is my own take: I believe that the message of Jesus is as relevant and as urgent for today’s world as it has ever been. I also find that this message is more accessible in today’s context than it was, say, in the comfortable years of the Eisenhower era—years of growth, comfort, and clear self-identities. This is an age of uncertainly, complexity, and unprecedented change. Jesus was not a provider of comfortable answers. He was not a teacher of easy black-and-white distinctions. He was not a prophet who asked his followers to identify with their friends and to vilify the others.

In each of these regards, and in many more, the inhabitants of the Google age may be more attuned to Jesus’ message, way of thinking, and way of living, than were many previous ages. In a world increasingly dominated by scientism, capitalism, religious intolerance, and a sense of meaninglessness, this profound message of the kingdom of God is more powerful than ever before. Theology after Google is far more than merely a new church-growth movement, a new way to package and disseminate the old-style theology. It is instead a radically new way of doing theology, one which (we believe) opens up the power of Jesus’ message to today’s world in new and exciting ways.

ENDNOTES:

1 Many of these ideas stemmed from the national conference on “Theology After Google” at Claremont School of Theology in March, 2010. The audience and the presenters deserve credit for anything of value that follows. What you can find are videos of the talks, live interviews, and PowerPoint presentations at www.TransformingTheology.org.

2 Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010).

3 Associated Press, “Survey: 72% of Millennials ‘more spiritual than reli­gious’,” USA Today, October 14, 2010

4 Peter Berger predicted this trend in his prophetic A Far Glory: The Quest for Faith in an Age of Credulity (New York: Free Press, 1992). For an example, see Religion Dispatches.

5 Brian D. McLaren,  Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2007).

6 I recommend regularly spending some time at HomebrewedChristianity.com and similar sites.

7 Phyllis Tickle makes the first point in The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2008). Brian McLaren draws the connections with Rome in A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions that are Transforming the Faith (New York, NY: HarperOne, 2010), and I draw analogies with Augustine’s situation in  Transforming Christian Theology: For Church and Society (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010), 43ff.

8 “The term Web 2.0 is commonly associated with web applications that facilitate interactive information sharing, … user-centered design, and collaboration.… A Web 2.0 site gives its users the free choice to interact or collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue as creators (‘prosumers’) of user-generated content in a virtual community, in contrast to websites where users (‘consumers’) are limited to the passive viewing of content that was created for them. Examples of Web 2.0 include social-networking sites, blogs, wikis, video-sharing sites, hosted services, web applications, mashups…” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0.)

9 The following three paragraphs were written by Tripp Fuller, modified by Spencer Burke, edited again by me, and widely commented on at TheOoze.com. It’s an example of beta writing, which has no single author and is constantly evolving. Imagine that seminaries would start teaching models for ministry of this sort!

10 These quotations have their own life on the web ( just Google them yourself).

11 Still classically formulated by Paul Tillich in  Dynamics of Faith (New York: HarperCollins, 1957).

12 It still surprises me to see how little interest there is today in the classic creeds and their traditional interpretations. I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that more liberal mainline churchgoers would not consider themselves bound by the past conclusions. But one finds less and less interest even among evangelical pastors and church members today. To teach the doctrinal loci with the expectation that the members of one’s class will simply write them down, memorize them, and begin believing them is unrealistic. (Not even seminary students are willing to do this!) But one does find an amazing number of people, many of them outside seminaries and churches, who are interested in the questions that the creeds addressed. They want to explore the traditional questions in the context of today’s issues, and they want to do it with the freedom to explore, question, reject, and reconstruct.

13 I remember once bumping into one of fourteen students in such an experimental group about a year after our class met. Her words were perhaps the most gratifying I have ever heard from a student: “Oh, weren’t you in my class last year?” The fact that she remembered me as a participant and not as the controlling agent was exactly the outcome we were hoping for.

Ohh I got one more Brian Ammons surprise for you soon….. a chapter that was banned from appearing in the Baptimergent book which did include my very straight chapter.

The classes include ‘Post Modern Theology: Derrida and Religion,’ ‘Transcendence and Immanence: Levinas and Deleuze,’ ‘A Theology of Flesh,’ ‘Heidegger,’ ‘The Theological Turn in French Phenomenology,’ ‘Husserl and the Foundations of Phenomenology,’ and Merleau-Ponty,’ and ‘Radical Theology from Hegel to Zizek.’  You can download the class syllabus on his web page.

All the audio files I have are in this public folder.  Just right click and ‘save-as’ to download the MP3s.

TONS OF LINKS…..Sheryl Kujawa-Holbrook, CST Practical Theology Professor, blogged at the Huffington Post ‘A New Paradigm for Theological Education‘ \ Going Interfaith: Claremont School of Theology’s Radical Move (@ Patheos) \ The Jewish Journal’s Report \CST’s President guest blogs @ the Washington Post here, ‘Methodists, Muslims and Jews: Learning together to lead together‘ \ Here’s Mitchell Landsberg’s sweet post from the LA Times\ ‘Claremont seminary reaches beyond Christianity‘ \ James, a CST grad and Theology After Google Student!!!, blogs on it here. \ Al Mohler’s radio show bit \ Methodist Thinker’s huge link collection.

In this particular post, I want to ask a few simple questions: what does it mean to be authentic?, can a consumer product make you truly authentic?, how do advertisers use a desire to become authentic to create effective, even visually beautiful, advertisments? I’ve given three examples below and would love it if you could post some commercials with similar explanations in the comments section.

Miracle Whip

This first commercial is my personal favorite. It is a Miracle Whip commercial. By means of an extremely fun looking hipster party and lines like “don’t be so mayo,” Miracle Whip makes the case that its sandwich spread can summon and articulate the true you. As an aside, Stephen Colbert had a lot of fun toying with this commercial on the Colbert Report.

Ipod Nano

Using a quite catchy and appropriately titled song called “Bourgeois Shangri-la,” the second commercial advertises the new video-recording capability of the ipod nano. Especially notable are the dancers, each of whom are trendily dressed in colors similar to the ipods recording them and are dancing with distinctly free-spirited moves. The theme in this commercial is the same as the last: by buying the ipod with which you most closely identify, you will be able to express an important and “original” aspect of your identity.

Seasonique

While the first commercial is still my favorite, in many ways, the third commercial is the most interesting. The commercial is selling a birth-control pill that allows a woman to (cleverly) “re-punctuate” her life and menstruate only four times per year. The commercial evokes a very postmodern theme, namely, that identity is a social construction and that menstruation is too. The commercial is driven by the theme, “who says…,” the connotation of which is that you need not be anything that you do not want to be. Instead, be whom you are: someone who identifies less with your menstrual cycle.

With these commercials in mind, fire away! I’d love to find some more of these.

Live streaming video by Ustream

What does all this Beta talk have to do with the Church? Everything. One of the greatest insight that the Emerging church movement has shared with the Church is this love for the Beta. A call for honesty, transparency, innovation, creative participation, and inspired imagination. When we look at the Church we think Beta, not because we begrudge what is there, but because we know God is not done, the body of Christ is in the Beta and it is beautiful.

In this conversation Philip Clayton, Spencer Burke, Florin, and myself explore this Google-ly metaphor and ask this question, ‘How far does the Beta go down?’ Is our worship in the Beta? How about the church structures, or our theology? What about our own life of discipleship and our community? Maybe we could go one step further and say that the entire world is in the Beta? What if we even ask,Is God in the Beta?

While I am sure some will think we go too far in this conversation, it will also show how we plan on talking about a real God who was and is being revealed in Jesus Christ. Philip calls out some forms of progressive theology when he visited the Nick and Josh Podcast.  Thanks to Spencer and the ooze viral blogger crew for sharing the conversation.  If you blog and like free books you should join them!

For more info on ‘Theology After Google’

Ohhh and if you haven’t….you should order Philip and my book!

Ohhh let me remind you how awesome the Theology After Google line-up is….

Tony Jones, Spencer Burke, John Franke, Helene Slessarev-Jamir, Adam Walker Cleaveland, Bob Cornwall, Dwight Friesen , Jon Irvine, Monica Coleman,  Glen Stassen, Philip Clayton, Ryan Parker, Bruce Epperly, Barry Taylor, Ryan Bolger, Jana Riess, Doug Pagitt, Phil Snider, Emily Bowen, Jeff Jarvis, Steve Knight, Jonathon Walton, Joshua Case

At the American Academy of Religion I was able to join LeRon Shults, Philip Clayton, and Stephen Knapp for a discussion about how theology finds traction in the world.  Other than being slightly out of place being paired with these three theological super stars, I believe something happened that was worth sharing.  Enjoy!

HT: Transforming Theology

Theology After Google: Leveraging New Technologies and Networks for Transformative Ministry

We invite you to join us March 10-12, 2010 in Claremont, Calif., for a first-of-its-kind national conference, “Theology After Google.” Thanks to a generous grant from the Ford Foundation, we are able to keep registration costs low, as in 99 bucks.

Who is coming?

Tony Jones, Spencer Burke, John Franke, Helene Slessarev-Jamir, Adam Walker Cleaveland Bob Cornwall, Dwight Friesen , Jon Irvine, Glen Stassen, Philip Clayton, Tripp Fuller, Ryan Parker, Bruce Epperly, Barry Taylor

Why “theology after Google”?

Progressive Christian theologians have some vitally important things to say, things that both the church and society desperately need to hear. The trouble is, we tend to deliver our message using technologies that date back to Gutenberg: books, academic articles, sermons, and so forth. We aren’t making effective use of the new technologies, social media, and social networking. When it comes to effective communication of message, the Religious Right is running circles around us.

Hence the urgent need for a conference to empower pastors, laypeople, and the up-and-coming theologians of the next generation to do “theology after Google,” theology for a Google-shaped world. Thanks to the Ford funding, we’ve been able to assemble a stellar team of cultural creatives and experts in the new modes of communication.

Why should you come?

Over the three days you will…

• Discover the impacts of our Google-world on theology
• Gain new tools for your church and ministry
• Attend break out sessions around your interest (ex. youth ministry or creative artist)
• Get to hang out with the presenters (and compete in a Corn-Hole Bean-bag tournament)
• Enjoy the 70 and Sunny SoCal weather
• You want to answer the question, ‘Is your theology googlicious?’ with a resounding YES!
  

For more info and to register visit Transforming Theology.

This is the first book we are reading\blogging through in the theology after google class (and conference you can come to!!!).  As part of the class at Claremont I am kicking off the blog discussion of the book and the other class members, along with any of you readers, will be discussing the ideas in the book over the week. The book itself is organized into two parts.  In section one Jarvis lays out the results of his investigation in a series of rules that illuminate the shape and nature of a Googlely organization.  For example, in his chapter on the New Relationship he charges us to ‘give people control and we will use it’ and part of the New Economy is being ‘post-scarcity.’  By moving between lucid descriptions and well framed stories the reader not only comes to understand these new Google Rules and the world they describe but begins to dream with them.  That is one challenge for the class (and anyone else who wants to play along).  Dream with a couple rules and then share your dream of transformation for your own church OR the Church.  In class I just may throw the WWGD slide show up on the screen and get you all to start using it like you were making a presentation to a group of denomination heads at the National Council of Churches…hmmm that would be fun!!!

In part two of the book Jarvis takes the rules and puts them to work in a variety of industries.  I have to say that as he moved through chapters I would have expected like the music industry to Detroit and health care, I kept being amazed at how pertinent his collection of Google Rules continued to be.  At the end of section two he discusses ‘God’ for a minute, but I know there is much more going on in the church to report on and rip on.  At the beginning of the section he says ‘there are two ways to attack the problems of these industries: to reform the incumbents or to destroy them.’  I want to know which you believe is true about your own community of faith.  How would you outline an additional chapter on the church in America?  What stories, examples, etc would you link to as examples of a Googlely feast? What lessons do we have to learn from other industries that Jarvis tells?  I hope you are thinking about a cool blog entry now!

At the very end of the book Jarvis closes with a reflection on ‘Generation G,‘ those who grew up digital. It is radically impacting our relationships, privacy, connectedness, problem solving, expectations, etc, etc, etc.  How do you respond to the questions he raises?  What to they mean theologically? Anthropologically? Ecclesiologically?  Where would you begin a conversation on these issues philosophically? What new ethical questions will your kids need answers for that we haven’t even started talking about?

If you haven’t read the book get it or just dive in to one of the many links and videos below.  I will update the post over the week to link to the other bloggers who join in

• Jarvis’ 5 tips for a Googlier you
• Google’s 10 Things We Know to be True
• Jarvis gets the church as ‘network of niches’ from Chuck here and then blogged it in ‘What Would God Do’ (A Post the Theology After Google class should read!!) Maybe you could blog an answer like Ron Smith?
• Pastor Stu asks a great question in response to Jarvis, ‘Is your church a Google or Yahoo church?’
• How Googley is your Church? Now you have a question for the next Deacons’ meeting.
• Bill Thompson’s review is great
• Next Week Mike Morrell and Steve Knight will be coming to our class (via skype), so check out their blogs.
• PS….CLASS….when your professor publishes an article online that has the same name as your class you should read it, blog it, tweet it, share it, and comment on it.  You know, in the words of Jarvis, give Philip some Google-juice!!

Truth is dangerous business.  Truth is really dangerous when it comes to religion.  It is definitely not a fashionable topic to bring up at the dinner table and yet there is something about being human that makes us ask the question, ‘What is truth?’  Often the reason the question of truth is skirted is because it assumes the discussion is related to absolute truth.  Absolute truth or universal truth focuses on truths that correspond to reality regardless of the context, time, place, situation, etc.  Clearly if one had access or possession of an absolute truth it would really silence the conversation at the dinner table.  The only options for those hearing the truth would be to accept it or face the consequences.  The history of Christianity is full of moments where individuals or groups thought they had possession of truth wrapped up tight in their hands and went out on behalf of the truth of God to share it and compel people to accept it.  On occasion, they even did this in very violent ways.  Between the inquisitions, witch trials, crusades, colonizing, and abortion clinic attacks, it is safe to say we should definitely be suspect of  those who think they possess truth absolutely.

“Never swallow anything whole. We live perforce by half-truths and get along fairly well as long as we do not mistake them for whole-truths, but when we do mistake them, they raise the devil with us.”, Alfred North Whitehead

If we are to reject the absolutism of truth how can we answer the question what is truth?  In avoiding the discussion altogether we are tempted to resort to a strong form of relativism and not for bad reasons.  We know just from personal experience alone that there is a plurality of truth.  We know people who live beautiful and gracious lives in a diversity of religious traditions, and it is their own understanding of truth for them that compels them.  To live with open eyes today is to live in a plurality of truth claims, be it from other Christians, a Jewish co-worker, or agnostic neighbor.  Many of us have a felt desire to affirm the goodness of their life, their experience, and their truth because of its effects on their lives.  If we want to affirm the plurality of truth, recognize its relativity, and reject absolutizing truth, how are we to talk about truth?  What is truth?  Can we answer the question as a person of faith without crossing our fingers? After all, it would seem that any affirmative answer neglects what we want to affirm in the lives of our neighbors.  At the same time we also really want to reject some understandings of truth.  We want to say no, genocide is wrong, Hitler Germany was immoral and we want to say it with the same passion that we celebrate the saintliness of people from many faiths.

For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts., Isaiah 55: 8-9

Luckily the possession of truth is not native to the Christian faith.  Sure we can know God and even have some confidence about who we are relating to, but that is a ways away from possessing the truth ourselves.  Being known by the Truth and knowing the truth are very different.  Only God can possess the truth (thank God) and we are in the business of beautiful approximations, or as Paul said concluding his famous reflection on love, “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known” (1 Cor. 13:12).  Notice Paul’s use of first and second person.  The communal ‘we’ sees, albeit dimly, while the individual ‘I’ knows only a partitioned piece. If truth is not something we have but something God has then it makes sense that we will know more of the truth together.  When we bring the diversity of our experiences, insights, and stories together there is a better chance of ‘seeing’ the truth.  In a very real sense we get closer to the truth by expanding the conversation, not limiting it.  This is not a leap into blind relativism, but the recognition that the God we desire to know exists on and beyond the boundaries within which we so often attempt to put the Creator in.  It follows that to be open to discovering God on the other side of our boundaries is part of recognizing the universal nature of the God who issues the call to ‘follow me’ into every particular context.

‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’, John 14:6

When it comes to religion, truth often gets thrown around as a way of disregarding people of other faiths.  The refrain from the Gospel of John has become a particular mantra for many conservative Christians in their dismissal of other faith traditions.  The problem with using the text that way is that it makes the text an answer to a question Jesus was not asked.  In the gospel, Jesus, surrounded by his disciples, is asked by Thomas, “we do not know where you are going.  How can we know the way?”  The point of Jesus’ answer is not the distribution of some special knowledge that leads to eternal salvation or some particular theological doctrines about the divinity of Jesus and what was accomplished on the cross,  In this conversation Jesus is making clear that truth is tied up in a form of life.  Both here and after the resurrection Thomas wanted to know things objectively, he wanted to touch the risen Jesus and here he asks for a detailed map and itinerary for union with God, when all the while Jesus was already bringing it to them through their relationships.  As Jesus says in the following verse, “If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.”  The truth Jesus gets at is a way of living into the reality of God’s grace in the world.  Tom Reynolds refers to this as the “Truth-Effect.”  When we come to understand truth as a living into grace then it becomes easy to understand talk about the ‘way’ and ‘life.’  When Jesus tells his disciples that he is that the way, the truth, and life to the Father and then that they have seen the Father by being his disciple, he is giving a rich description of the relational nature of truth.  The truth is the way of Jesus, the life-giving way of Jesus.  When you hear this text as part of a community of Jesus followers it becomes clear that when Thomas wanted a destination Jesus turned him towards the community and when Thomas wanted directions Jesus gave him a call to gracious living.  The effect of truth is not the means to excluded others from God, but the call to live a life shaped by the truth, the life-giving way of Jesus.

As long as we consider truth something we possess and can grasp it, it ends up taking the shape of our hands, it has our fingerprints all over it.  Jesus was wise enough to redirect the disciples from seeking objective truth about God.  Objective truth is God’s business which we can attempt beautiful approximations of.  God is Truth; so no truth is alien to God or forbidden to the believer and yet to realize we cannot possess the truth frees us to seek the truth.  After becoming a disciple, Jesus directs us towards our neighbor and expects truth to be discovered through committed living in the way of Jesus.  The nature of truth in the life of faith is in this sense subjective.  As Helene Russell describes, subjective truth is the form of one’s mind and soul in relation to that which is most important, ones commitments, and way of engaging others, the world, and God.  For a Christian to ask the question, what is truth subjectively is to think through how one’s awareness, experience, and living in the world can come to cohere with that of God revealed in Christ.  In the words of Paul, what does it mean to let the same mind (subjectivity) be in you that was in Christ Jesus?  This means there is much more to truth than coming to know something, truth is coming to embody something.  To say Jesus is the truth is to say that in his life and in his way the God who is love was embodied among us and for us.

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death…
even death on a cross. , Phil.2:5-8

As Christians we too come to participate in God and God comes to shape our subjectivity.  God begins to make us true.  Through prayer, art, worship, reflection, friendship, service, and many other practices we are shaping our subjectivity and letting the mind of Christ take root in us.  Helene describes the subjectivity of one who knows the truth as one who sees all people as ‘loved and loveable’.  In this simple phrase a sensitivity to the good news is expressed for if we look at anyone, regardless of difference, as loved and lovable then we relate to them without trying to erase their difference.  They are not changed by us but our own subjectivity, our experience and understanding of the truth, is transformed as we emoby the truth, way, and life revealed in Jesus.  To see truth through this lens connects well with Paul’s description of the mind of Christ in the Philippians hymn (2:5-11).  Christian truth is misunderstood if it is grasped and exploited, instead it compels us to become a servant of all and even become vulnerable because there is no one in who is not loved and lovable.

The story of Jesus is full of examples where truth is understood and embodied in relationships.  In fact a hallmark of Jesus’ ministry is his identification with the marginalized, ignored, and oppressed.  The mind of Christ, the truth of Christ, is intrinsically tied to solidarity with the marginalized.  There are many forms of marginalization, economic, societal, cultural, religious, ethnic, and for handicaps.  To be marginalized seeing things from a different perspective, often from the underside or dark side of the culture dominant understanding of ‘truth.’  To be shaped by the experience and perspective of the marginalized can change your understanding of the truth about a subject, even a religious one.  Joreg Rieger pointed out that this was what Jesus was doing in the conflicts over Sabbath healing.  In the Gospel of Luke Jesus heals a woman’s arm that had been crippled for 18 years on the Sabbath.  The religious leaders quote Jesus the Bible in order to demonstrate his infidelity to the truth, ‘There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day.’  Their hypocrisy and presumptive leveling of God’s truth at him ignited Jesus’ and he replied, “ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?”  So what is the truth about the Sabbath?  Can you work? Can you give your animals water? Can you heal a woman?  Can you set her free from bondage?  The conflict between Jesus and the religious elites is not a conflict over the a Bible passage, but the nature of the truth to which it points.  Is the Sabbath an objective truth that all people are subject to or is the truth of the Sabbath the people?

This lecture is still part of Roderick’s Self Under Siege lectures. And what I have realized are the most important points to consider in this series are found in the first lectures, entitled ‘The Masers of Suspicion‘ (pay special attention to what Freud does with knowledge). The reason I make this last claim is because he sets out the trajectory and logic of the course there. That is, the masters of suspicion undermine the idea that we, as humans, know either ourselves or really anything at all. But, to deny a knowledge of (and presence to) the self is to deny knowledge of a boundry between ourselves and the natural world, the natural world and our own creations.

This point, I believe, is important. Mr. Callid called me out in my previous post for defining Baudrillard a postmodern thinker, and he was right to do so. (As you’ll see through this Derrida lecture, postmodernity understood in Derrida’s terms has little to do with Baudrillard). Unless, that is, one accepts the basic premises of Roderick’s argument, that the loss of self–a trust in the self–in any respect sets the conditions for moving toward Baudrillard. Baudrillard is the logical conclusion of postmodernity if (and this is a big ‘if’) we are not careful. Then again, to someone in Baudrillard’s case, this loss is not a loss at all.

That’s a long quote, highlighting two important contemporary ecclesiological thinkers, both of whom I, in fact, respect, and a book with which I’m pretty much in agreement. However, what’s important to bring out of this quote is the degree to which these two thinkers and, frankly, the degree to which most persons in general misunderstand that ever-popular term ‘postmodern.’ What these thinkers describe is really still part of the modern project; a fallibalist understanding of truth and its relationship to humanity. I say this because postmodernity is much different than any simple claims on truth, though that is what it’s often reduced to.

Whether the Christian faith ought or ought not think in terms of postmodern critiques, I will have to leave to you to decide–you’ll find ample compatriots on both sides of this issue, the Radically Orthodox being perhaps the only ones that I know of who actually argue for ‘postmodern sensibilities’ Christianly in a way that is actually consistent with the trajectory of postmodernity (see the debate between Oliver Davies and Graham Ward in this book). But, I would say, to perhaps defend yourself either way with a sense of what postmodernity actually means, and not with the commodified senses of the ideas that are now tossed around in contemporary circles.

Take a look at this Roderick Video for a good interpretation of the postmodern and what Roderick sees as its problems. For a good example of its meaning, read the first half of this op-ed piece in light of Roderick’s break-down between reality and image.

Here Roderick talks about the need for absolutes without being willing to define them.