church history

May (the End of) Your Kingdom Come

February 16, 2012 by Bo Sanders 28 Comments

I think that I might be done with the kingdom – not the dynamic of God’s power or God’s interaction with the world – just the word ‘kingdom’ and its imperial implications. It comes with too much baggage, it is so antiquated, and it is masculine in the way that is unhelpful.*

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

Jesus didn’t use the word.

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

The age of Kings is over.

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

The power of pronouns.

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

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

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

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

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

Filed Under: bible stuff, books, church history, engaging, latest, living, thinking Tagged With: Basileia Theou, Bible, book, books, Capitalism, church, economy, empire, God, Isaiah, jesus, Kingdom, Kingdom Come, She, univocal

Horse Gods – C.S. Lewis, Xenophanes and John Piper’s blaspheme

February 14, 2012 by Bo Sanders 11 Comments

I spent this past week explaining that saying God has given Christianity a masculine feel is like saying ‘God has given America a Capitalist feel’. It was the point of my post “Bananas, Bullies and the Bible – you can’t start in the middle.”

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

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

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

Xenophanes is famed to have said:

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

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

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

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

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

Footnote to All Prayers

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

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

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

Filed Under: bible stuff, church history, engaging, latest, living, news, post-something, sermon, songs, speaking, thinking Tagged With: Bible, book, books, C.S. Lewis, faith, footnote on all prayers, George Lindbeck, God, horses, jesus, John Piper, Marc Driscoll, masculine, masculinity, poem, prayer, Xenophanes

Preaching Happiness

February 9, 2012 by Bo Sanders 21 Comments

It is clear that there are 3 predominant Christianities in place in Canada & America.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Filed Under: bible stuff, books, church history, engaging, latest, living, thinking Tagged With: Bible, book, books, consumer, consumerism, happiness, Joel Osteen, John Piper, Marc Driscoll, postmodern, preaching

Bananas, Bullies and the Bible – you can’t start in the middle

February 6, 2012 by Bo Sanders 20 Comments

by Bo Sanders

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.

Filed Under: bible stuff, books, church history, engaging, latest, thinking Tagged With: Banana, Bible, book, books, God, jesus, John Piper, man, masculine, Ray Comfort, revelation, society, Women

Clarifying the Quadrilateral

January 27, 2012 by Bo Sanders 4 Comments

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:

You can’t get rid of reason, it is already present in the other three. Scripture, Tradition and Experience are inextricably laced with it.
The quad may need a little something extra. The 21st century may require some zest, adventure and imagination
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.

Filed Under: bible stuff, books, church history, emergent, engaging, latest, living, philosophy, random, thinking Tagged With: Bible, book, books, experience, God, jesus, John Wesley, quadrilateral, reason, scripture, tradition, Wesley, Wesleyan

There is no Evangelical Orthodoxy

January 26, 2012 by Bo Sanders 7 Comments

Roger Olson posted an excellent article by Mike Clawson (hubby of Julie Clawson) on his blog last week. It was about the fundamentalist roots of evangelicalism and their contemporary implications. In the comments (and Roger always has tons of comments) Olson reminded everyone of an article he wrote 12 years ago for Christianity Today. I subscribed to CT back then and remembered the article. I went back and found it but what I did not remember was just how contentious things were.

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.

Filed Under: bible stuff, books, church history, conversations, emergent, engaging, latest, living, post-something, thinking Tagged With: Al Mohler, Bebbington, Bible, book, books, Brian McLaren, calvinism, calvinist, catechism, Christianity Today, Emergent, evangelical, God, jesus, John Piper, Liberal, Marc Driscoll, orthodox, orthodoxy, Rob Bell, Roger Olson, Stanley Grenz, Tony Jones

What God doesn’t say and how not to read the Bible

January 24, 2012 by Bo Sanders 3 Comments

The unpleasant topic of what God doesn’t say has shown up in three different conversations this week (and its only Tuesday!) :

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.

Filed Under: bible stuff, books, church history, emergent, engaging, latest, living, thinking Tagged With: America, Bible, book, books, church, homosexual, homosexuality, Lot, Lot's daughters, Native American, Roger Olson, Tad Delay, Tony Jones, Women

TNT: Eschatology – Resurrection call and response

January 24, 2012 by Bo Sanders 11 Comments

What do N.T. Wright, Marcus Borg and John Cobb have in common? This podcast!

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

Standard Podcast [ 1:15:41 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Filed Under: bible stuff, books, church history, engaging, latest, living, podcast, thinking, TNT Tagged With: 2012, book, books, End of the world, eschatology, john cobb, Marcus Borg, NT Wright, resurrection, revelation, The End, theology

21st Century Theology: four locations for the endeavor

January 23, 2012 by Bo Sanders 13 Comments

I come from a Methodist tradition that looks to John Wesley as its founder. Wesley utilized a famous quadrilateral to talk about how we do theology. The four elements were Scripture, Tradition, Reason, and Experience.

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.

Scripture: No matter how fancy we want to get with our theology (I am looking at you Tillich) or whatever else we want to do (Griffin), it must account for the scriptural witness . I am not saying that we must always begin with scripture (like neo-Orthodox or Open folks) nor am I saying that we must only do scripture – but any 21st century theology must account for it. The Gutenberg and Missionary eras have reinforced a global importance and influence that must be acknowledged for any theology to carry weight. There is just no sense in having a theology that is not thoroughly scriptural if you want it to count widely.

Tradition: I grew up evangelical and developed a disdain for tradition. It was a bad word to me – like religion. It meant thoughtless, empty ritual done on autopilot in rote repetition. I see things a little differently now. Back then, I actually thought that we were free to do whatever we wanted as long as it was meaningful and effective for accomplishing the goal – which was to bring people into a deeper relationship with the living God. Now, I understand that we are all socially conditioned into elaborate human constructions. These constructs (like language or religion) are part and parcel of both the communal/social order and the religious tradition. Tradition and community must be recognized and honored since all theology is contextual theology.

Reason: I loved quoting Colossians 2:8 when I was an evangelist and someone would ask me a better question than I had an answer to

See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces[a] of this world rather than on Christ.

It was the deceptive word play that depended on human thinking that was so dangerous to my Josh McDowell faith. I had evidence that demanded a verdict and you had tricky mental gymnastics and endless questions. I had never heard of Neoplatonism and why did I need to? I had Paul and the Epistle to the Hebrews! … Which is to say that I had never encountered the philosophical underpinnings of the New Testament writers nor of my Protestant declarations of faith.

Experience: I know that part of my fascination comes my charistmatic-evangelical roots. I know that part of it is my American protestant upbringing and that it is reinforced by my personality. But I find it on the pages of the New Testament, and I am simply uninterested a religion that is all in the head and not in the heart. I want a full body religious experience. Nice words are fine (and OH how I love nice words) but we have to walk the walk (as they say) and not just talk the talk. Theology must be validated by the community’s experience.

I always attempt to frame things in the positive. In this case, I will also attempt to reinforce the need for all four by allowing myself to state them in the negative as well.

Scripture: I am not interested in a Christianity that does not engage scripture or does not seek to be faithful to those initial witnesses. We can update, renovate, adapt, evolve and reinterpret … but we must always interact with scripture. It is scripture that we update and reinterpret.

Tradition: Let me say first that I loath tradition for tradition’s sake. It makes be somewhere between vomitous and irate – which is not pretty. But in our global context you can’t just ‘do theology’ as if it were in a vacuum or you were starting from scratch. We are not starting with a blank slate! I did not write the Bible, I am not the first to read the Bible – it was handed to me, was given to me and it is that ‘givenness’ that must be absorbed.

Reason: who wants a faith the un-reasonable? Not me. Plenty of other people do. In fact, this is really in vogue right now. Lots of conservative folks are retreating into their orthodoxy silo and playing their own isolated word games. That is a theological dead-end for the faith. It is a desperate remnant of Christendom monopoly and wholly counter to the very impetuous of the gospel they so proudly claim to defend.

Experience: I am as uninterested in a theology that is not experienced as I am in a faith that is unreasonable.

I have been reading a lot of theology lately in preparation for the 2012 Theological Conversation. Much of it has been philosophical 20th century theology, some of it has been early century and reformation era. At the end of the day, I keep coming back to the Wesleyan quadrilateral as a framework that works for the inter-active, cross-cultural, multi-voiced engagement of the 21st century.

Filed Under: bible stuff, books, church history, engaging, latest, living, philosophy, thinking Tagged With: barth, Bible, book, books, Cobb, Context, contextual, experience, God, Griffin, jesus, John Wesley, Methodist, philosophy, quadrilateral, reason, religion, scripture, theology, Tillich, tradition, Wesleyan

Jesus loves you … some more than others?

January 18, 2012 by Bo Sanders 3 Comments

In recent weeks both Tim Tebow and Marc Driscoll have been hot button topics of conversation in my circles. The whole thing peaked this week when Tebow was knocked out of the playoffs and Driscol was interviewed on a popular British radio show.

In t he 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.

Filed Under: bible stuff, books, church history, conversations, emergent, engaging, latest, news, prayer, thinking Tagged With: Bible, book, books, British, Bruce Epperly, curse, evangelical, God, in ministry, jesus, john cobb, Justin Brierley, Marc Driscoll, marriage, men, open theology, prayer, Process, rachel held evans, radio, saved, theology, Tim Tebow, Tripp Fuller, Women

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