By Tuesday night this North Carolina pastor was showing up all over Facebook and Twitter. By Wednesday morning he was the ‘most popular’ link on all of Yahoo! world homepage.

If you have not seen this video, be warned. It is in no way understated. Here is the link:  NC Pastor 

 I have 3 main thoughts about this:

1. I know tons of people who are not for ‘same sex marriage’ who would not speak of electric fences. Anytime you are suggesting some tactic that the Germans used in WWII you may want to take note.
2. This is a different TYPE of Christianity – one that is the concerned with governing morals. We going to have to address why the church is even doing State sanctioned marriage in the first place. So often we try to have the second conversation without the first – no wonder it doesn’t go anywhere.
3. My church and 50 others that I know of and communicate with on a regular basis do kind things and say loving words all the time and no one press covers it. That is the nature of the modern media. Deal with it.

Nothing thus far is that surprising – save the actual sermon by the NC Pastor. Here is my concern:

• At what point is some pastor so deep in the Constantinian compromise that he is more Roman than Christ-like? At some point do we say ‘that is not even Christian’ ?
• OR is this just one branch of Christianity and it is our obligation to treat this man as a brother who has simply lost his way?
• OR is this Preacher doing more harm than good and actually crippling the gospel message – and in that sense he is an enemy of our cause?  And at that point, what do we do with Jesus’ admonition to love our enemy?

Admission: I have been re-reading Stuart Murray’s Post-Christendom and … while that is admittedly probably not the best idea … I have to admit that this whole ‘legislating civil unions and marriages’ thing in North Carolina could not come at a worse time for me.

For what it is worth, here is my 2 cents.

1. This is not Christianity. Well, it might be Christendom but it is not whatever Jesus was after.
2. This guy is my brother (in humanity even if not christianity) and has simply lost his way.
3. Whether he is my crazy cousin or my enemy – Christ compels me to love and respect him as a person even as I wholly (and holy) disagree with his inhuman and immoral speech.

I’m not really sure what other course of action I have in this situation. I spent last week in the woods with no technology and unless I want to perpetually retreat away from all this ugliness, I have got to address this kind of craziness at some level. What else is there in the face of hate except to love?

1. Creation Out of Nothing isn’t Biblical, as in it isn’t in the Bible. If you read through the Bible you will not find the affirmation that God created the world out of nothing. It’s just not in there. In fact, even Biblical scholars who in the end want to affirm the doctrine for theological reasons will not point to the idea being present in the Bible. Just re-read Genesis 1 and ask yourself ‘where did the darkness and waters come from?’ They weren’t created but were there when God began to create.
2. Creation Out of Nothing isn’t a part of the Biblical Imagination. Not only is the doctrine absent in scripture but in the quite robust doctrine of Creation in both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures you don’t even see an interest in the question itself. There is plenty of interest in the goodness of Creation, God’s on-going relationship with Creation, Creation’s role in God’s on-going mission, the Cosmic Christ’s relationship to Creation, Creation’s groaning and it’s worship of God but not an affirmation that it came from nothing. It seems odd to me to insist on a doctrinal nuance that isn’t in scripture or even asked. Sure you can hold it but if no author of scripture thought about asking, relax with the dogmatism.
3. Early Church Fathers didn’t sweat Creation out of ‘something.’ Both the Hellenistic tradition via Platonism and Judaism assumed that God created out of some unoriginate matter. Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, and Clement of Alexandria all explicitly affirm the doctrine. In one of his apologies to Greek philosophers Justin martyr insists that Plato stole the idea from Genesis! If Creation out of Nothing was necessary to preserve Monotheism or the Biblical doctrine of Creation then someone needs to call Justin.
4. Creation out of Nothing was a Theological Over Reaction to Gnostic Dualism. Creation out of Nothing developed as a response to Marcion’s insistence that the material world and its Creator were evil. Clearly insisting that everything came from a Good God eliminates Marcion’s dualism but it isn’t necessary to go that far. Both Plato and Genesis have no problem envisioning pre-existent matter as lacking qualities that God’s creativity comes to give shape. This idea wasn’t seen as a threat to God’s goodness at all. In fact one wonders that if the insistence of Creation out of Nothing doesn’t itself bring more problems than it solves – namely the problem of evil. If God’s creative activity isn’t a relational one all the way down then is God not in some way the author of evil?

Since the middle of the second century those theologians who came to be seen in retrospect as ‘orthodox’ unquestionably adhered to Creation out of Nothing as if it were a necessary doctrine from scripture and for the Christian faith. There are of course a bunch of theological ways around the problems created by the doctrine, like Augustine’s insistence that evil doesn’t actually exist or that 2 Maccabees 7:28 is the (inter-testimental) affirmation of the doctrine. My concern is that fear of Marcion has led the church to overrate the importance of the doctrine and continuing to do so isn’t necessary…or Biblical!

If anyone is interested in pursuing the Biblical doctrine of Creation check out Jon Levenson’s Creation and the Persistence of Evil. For the early church development of the doctrine see Gerhard May’s Creatio ex Nihilo: The Doctrine of ‘Creation out of Nothing’ in Early Christian Thought. May actually affirms the doctrine but affirms the development I sketched briefly above. A brief summary of the theological side of the argument can be found by David Ray Griffin’s article “Creation out of Nothing, Creation out of Chaos, and the Problem of Evil” in Encountering Evil. All good Homebrewed Deacons will be familiar with John Caputo’s The Weakness of God and Catherine Keller’s The Face of the Deep.

One night around the fire, someone asked

“so you have learned a lot and changed a lot since you were our pastor, bring us up to speed. What has changed in your thinking in 4 years?”

It was a question that I hoped would come up and had given it a lot of thought as I flew across the country from LA to NY.

 I said that there were 3 big changes – that I had added 2 things and gotten rid of 1 thing. 

Directions: 

We had a saying that oriented us over those 11 years I was pastor: Upward – Inward – Outward: it must be all 3 – they must be in that order. I have learned that there is a 4th direction: downward. 

When we look downward, two things happen:

1. We see the earth. This awakens us to things like where our food comes from, ecology, and location – the importance of place. Christianity is an incarnational religion and it is a spirituality that is em-bodied. Location is central to the practices of christian community.
2. We see those less fortunate or less powerful. This awakens us to issues of justice. Cornel West is the one who has helped me see the importance of not just looking around (which is vital for awareness) and looking up (where our strength come from) but looking down for those who might need some help.

Adding this 4th direction brings in issues of environment, locatedness, and justice. It illustrates the importance of embodying the gospel in a place – none of us are from everywhere.

 Critique and Create:

One of the things that I have learned in my travels (from folks like Zizkek, Cornel West, Marc Ellis and Diana Butler Bass) is that there are 3 broad kinds of churches in North America:

• Prophetic – that critique the system
• Therapeutic – that help you adjust to the system
• Messianic – that look to escape the system

We were great at two of them. We had a natural Messianic element because our denomination is staunchly and passionately pre-millennial (the soon coming King! is one of our big 4 things). We also had a good dose of the Therapeutic and helped a lot of people be the best version of themselves within the existing structures.

If I got to do it again, I would add a Prophetic element and address the systems and structures that hold so much sway in our communities and in the lives of our congregations.

The example that I used was routinely praying for a guy with a limited skill set to get a job. “Jesus – please help ‘J’ to get a job”.  By not addressing the relationship of local government with factories and manufactures in our area … we were relegating the answer to our prayers to the ‘powers that be’ and J was perpetually disappointed with God and discouraged in his faith. We nearly set him up to fail.

 Those are the 2 things I have added: a 4th direction and 3rd element. But I have also gotten rid of something – I no longer believe in the supernatural. 

Why the Natural is super:

I am convinced that the church has made a major mistake in adopting the language of the super-natural. Since the epic flub with Galileo and Copernicus the church has allowed science to have the natural (things that make sense) and has been relegated to watching over things that increasingly don’t make sense and retreating into words like ‘mystery’ and ‘faith’ as cover for that which is just not reasonable.

I do not believe in a realm (the natural) that is without God. As a Christian, I believe that God’s work is the most natural thing in the world. I am unwilling to concede the natural-spiritual split and then leave less and less room for God as science is able to explain more and more. The church is foolish to accept the dualism (natural-supernatural) and then superintend only the spiritual part.

No wonder 85% of our kids walk away in their 20’s. This stuff is unbelievable. 

I would prefer to reclaim the language of the ‘miraculous’ (surprising to us or unexpected) and ‘signs’ from the Gospel of John (that point to a greater reality).

So that is what has changed since I was Senior Pastor four years ago. I look down now (at the earth, for location, and for issues of justice). I hear the Prophetic critiquing the system. And I have gotten rid of the super-natural while embracing the miraculous.

 It was so great to share these thoughts and hear the feedback from my friends as we share the week together. I would love to get your feedback or to hear how you have changed in the past few years.  -Bo 

Between President Obama’s evolution on gay marriage, North Carolina’s new Amendment banning gay marriage (again), and the United Methodist’s church decision to not admit disagreement on the issue this month’s ‘theology uncorked’ topic is rather timely.  Theology UnCokred is a theological discussion group hosted by Neighborhood Church UCC (where I serve) and Manhattan Beach Community Church UCC (where my friend Erin serves).  Any local people are welcome to join us Thursday May 24th at the Friends of the Vine in Redondo Beach from 7-9 for the conversation.  We will enjoy wine while sounding like Christians as we chat about a controversial topic.

In preparation for the conversation check out Erin and I’s podcast here where we discuss the Bible, the tradition, our own experiences, concerns, and story.  You may also want to check out some of these online resources.

* Biblical Scholar Walter Wink’s “Biblical Perspectives on Homosexuality“

* Theologian Michael Westmoreland Series on GLTB Persons and the Church

*4 different perspectives summarized 1)Rejection of God’s Design 2)Welcoming but not Affirming 3)Welcoming and Accommodating 4) Welcoming & Celebrating

* Ben Witherington gives the conservative perspective in summary

* Tony Jones 99c eBook on Same-Sex Marriage

* Clobber-Passage Bible info

Remember that those who are coming can send in your questions/topics/etc for discussion so that we make sure everyone’s interest and voice is part of the conversation.

I’d like to follow up on the claim of Žižek and others that the God revealed in Jesus is not a God of tidy prose logic but a God who celebrates reality’s “loose ends.” Last time I suggested that this lesson of so-called “Christian atheism” should dispossess us of the proverb that “everything happens for a reason,” a proverb that turns out to be more evasive of suffering than it is truly consoling.

This time I’d like to suggest that the appeal to a God of “reasons” is at work not only in common Christian responses to grief, but also in contemporary Christian objections to environmental ethics. One of the guiding questions here, then, is whether a shift away from the idea of a God who secures life’s “logic” can open us up to a properly ethical embrace of non-human nature.

Recently the Cornwall Alliance, a conservative Christian group, produced a DVD series urging their fellow Christians to object mightily to any agenda remotely smacking of environmentalism. Earth care, they argue in the videos, is fundamentally opposed to the Gospel of Christ, and the promotion of such care is a most insidious threat to our children, whose supple minds are especially susceptible to the temptations of idols. Not surprisingly, the Cornwall Alliance titled its series “Resisting the Green Dragon.”

Similar sentiments to those expressed in this series surfaced in a more broadly palatable form during Rick Santorum‘s recent campaign for the GOP presidential nomination. One of the things that made Santorum so attractive to evangelical Christians was the character of his opposition to government-enforced environmental protections. All the candidates shared this opposition, of course, but what Santorum added to the requisite I’ll-cut-all-government-agencies pitch was a theological justification. Barack Obama’s environmental policies, Santorum said, are not only fiscally unsound and politically overreaching, they are based on a “phony theology.”

Immediately Santorum came under fire for intimating that Obama is not really a Christian, and thus appearing to support those unfounded but still-popular claims that he is a secret Muslim. This, Santorum assured us, was far from his intention, whether such a suggestion played well with his base or not (it did). What he really meant, as he told CBS News the next morning, was that Obama doesn’t seem to have a Biblical understanding of human beings’ unique status in the universe. He meant that Obama’s policies don’t appear to respect the Biblical idea that human beings have “dominion” over the rest of creation.

What dominion means, Santorum stated confidently, is that human beings ought never to be “subservient” to non-human nature. In other words, in the (commonplace) event of a conflict between human economic goals and the continued thriving of non-human ecosystems (read: Alberta tar sands), the Bible says human considerations always hold the trump card. On this understanding, to “care” for the environment apart from the weighing of potential human costs and benefits is to subscribe to a “phony theology.”

On the surface, the shared concern in these examples of Christian resistance to environmentalism is that of avoiding idolatry (worshipping the creature instead of the creator). Yet their common effect is the aggrandizement of the human, to the point where their appeals to “dominion” seem out of step with any lordship discernibly modeled on Christ, who was among us “as one who serves.” What is at the root of this need to be so emphatic about human dominion that one all but ignores concrete Biblical models of authority? Is it possible that we try to assert a monarchical dominion over non-human nature because we have discovered something true but also troubling about creation? Have we perhaps discovered that creation is less tidily explicable than the human need for reasons can handle? By extension, do we dominate the non-human other because it’s our Biblically-justified, “God-given right,” or because we don’t like the idea that meeting God in his good creation might require developing a love for wilderness of all kinds?

Consider what Annie Dillard writes, in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, about what the “second book” of revelation (nature) reveals about its maker:

The point of the dragonfly’s terrible lip, the giant water bug, birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle and flash of sunlighted minnows, is not that it all fits together like clockwork—for it doesn’t, particularly, not even inside the goldfish bowl—but that it all flows so freely wild, like the creek, that it surges in such a free, fringed tangle. Freedom is the world’s water and weather, the world’s nourishment freely given, its soil and sap: and the creator loves pizzazz. (139)

The question is, do we love pizzazz? Is the world’s wild freedom, its extravagant perpetuation of the new, is all this given to us that we might “master” it? Does living up to our dominion mean straightening nature’s tangles, turning an apparently personal, albeit wild, power into something humanly profitable?

Francis Bacon certainly thought so. He justified the violence of his new scientific method by appealing to his contemporaries’ interest in dominion, rooted in fear of nature’s extravagance and “femininity” (which for patriarchy amount to the same thing):

For like as a man’s disposition is never well known or proved till he be crossed, nor Proteus ever changed shapes till he was straitened and held fast, so nature exhibits herself more clearly under the trials and vexations of art than when left to herself. (Bacon, “De Dignitate,” Works vol. 4, 298.)

In other words, if you want to relate to non-human nature in the way God intended, you cannot respect its (chaotic) agency, but must transform it, even violently, into an instrument of the human will. Thus do boreal forests become “oil reserves.”

Is there a warranted Christian response to the discovery that non-human nature is characterized more by extravagance than by efficiency which is not so Baconian? In other words, does Christianity encourage us toward a more sympathetic relationship with nature’s wildness than the fear which leads to oppressive dominion?

In Ecology at the Heart of Faith, Catholic theologian Denis Edwards offers a helpful summary of how Christian conceptions of the Holy Spirit have always pushed in the direction of hospitality toward creation’s extravagance, instead of fear of the same. The Spirit of God is depicted in the Bible as the life-giving breath which animates all creatures. Thus Edwards suggests that in the ongoing process of creation, the Spirit is the agent of the radical newness (the baffling pizzazz) that we can see all around us in an emergent universe. God as Trinity so loves communion among differences that in the person of the Spirit he creates ever more surprising differences to mediate in what amounts to a wildly extravagant love.

It seems appropriate, then, that in the Bible the Spirit is not given a human face: “the Biblical images for the Spirit tend to come from the natural world. . . . These images preserve the otherness of the Spirit of God and resist the human tendency to domesticate the Spirit” (45). And yet, Edwards goes on, this refusal of domestication, this critique of anthropocentrism, does not make God as Spirit remote, for “it points to the otherness of nonhuman creatures as a place of God.” The breath of God in the world is a wild wind, and yet this ought not to lead us to fearful tactics of domination, but instead “to a new respect for what is wild and beyond human domestication” (46).

The imperative resulting from this view seems to be this: don’t imagine you can love or serve only where you see a human face, or that you forsake your properly human role when you transgress that boundary. For the Trinitarian God’s creative love does not wish to establish you as a static sovereign, safe within your border as “human” against the “non-human.” Instead, the Spirit’s love seeks to form you according to the model of “ecstatic” personhood that is the very life of God. To prefer self-possessed anthropocentrism is to reject the personhood/life at the core of reality. If we seek our true dominion, if we seek to model the only truly “authoritative” form of life in the universe, then we must seek to be initiated into this way of personhood; we must seek to be inspired to hospitality rather than fear by the excesses of creaturely difference. This would not mean inviting tigers into our homes, but it should mean resisting political decisions whose preservation of human “benefits” at the expense of non-human nature is really to our detriment as persons being formed by the wildly hospitable Spirit.

Justin D. Klassen is Visiting Assistant Professor of Theology at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky. He is the
author of the recent book, The Paradox of Hope: Theology and the Problem of Nihilism (Cascade, 2011), and co-editor of a forthcoming volume on Charles Taylor’s account of modern secularity. He lives in Louisville with his wife, Melissa, their two daughters, Clara and Gracie, and their dog, Eloise.

This is straight up, real deal, John Cobb at his best.  John has written one of the best Christologies, Christ in a Pluralistic Age, and is here to unpack a bit of it for you.

Deacon Dan, thanks for the call.  Here’s John Cobb talking about Process and Prayer & here’s the Theology Nerd Throwdown episode on prayer.

Don’t forget to check out the first session from the Emergent Village Theological Conversation here and the Question & Answer session that followed this podcast.

John Cobb has been on the podcast a number of times; Prayer and Process, and the special 101st episode, earth day, and Incarnation-cast. Tom Oord visited on two previous occasions; The Open-Relational Gospel and the Science of Love!

Want more Process theology? Check out my video bibliography here! Tom Oord is a sweet blogger. Cobb will answer your questions.

Subscribe HERE to the Theology Nerd Throwdown podcast so you will continue to get the goodness like this, the upcoming Philip Clayton 3-D podcast, Bo and I Nerding Out! The iTunes subscription is below.

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

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Don’t forget to check out the first session from the Emergent Village Theological Conversation here.

John Cobb has been on the podcast a number of times; Prayer and Process, and the special 101st episode, earth day, and Incarnation-cast.  Tom Oord visited on two previous occasions; The Open-Relational Gospel and the Science of Love!

Want more Process theology?  Check out my video bibliography here! Tom Oord is a sweet blogger.  Cobb will answer your questions.

Subscribe HERE to the Theology Nerd Throwdown podcast so you will continue to get the goodness like this, the upcoming Philip Clayton 3-D podcast, Bo and I Nerding Out!  The iTunes subscription is below.

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

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

One Click to the Homebrewed Hotline!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why NOT the Avengers Case?

They are names of heroes, superheroes even. Superman, Wonderwoman, Lone Ranger, the Incredibles and even Captain Planet. They were all people who, though having normal lives in one moment, possessed the uncanny ability to transform into a different person when a need or opportunity to help emerged.

What all of these heroes have is common is not simply that they fought for justice, for what was right in the world, but that in their everyday lives they were open to the opportunities to do good where ever it was needed most, right then, in that moment; even if it meant flying across the city to make it happen or spending nights looking up at the sky.

"And heart!"

Look, it took me a long while to realize that many of gospel texts that seem to be about cosmic judgment aren’t really about some cosmic-epic judgment at all. They are really about how it is that we live our lives in the day to day. Stories like that of Christ the king who sits on throne and who draws a line between those who do good wherever they see it, and those who do good when they think others will see it, is not something that should startle us.

Rather, this parable really puts doing good for others back on us. Like many of the other stories that we read in our communities of faith throughout the calendar year, the feasts and festivals that the church holds as part of what it means to do life together shapes us to see the world with a different set of eyes and to hear with a different set of ears.

The parable of Christ the King, one often read as far more judging than calling, beckons us like the batman symbol cast across the Gotham skyline to see justice not as something that will get enacted out in the future, but rather as something that we enact every day, in every moment, with every choice. Or, as Tony Jones suggests at the intersection of our ongoing journey with others.

Look, in a sense, what our Christian readings, prayers, and our table fellowship call us to today, is to dress up in justice and to play our part in the reign of God that exists always before us. And this reign, is not something that happens in one place of creation and not in another. The rule of God always covers us all. The rule of God, the reign of God, is more like the ground of all being that gets glimpsed and tied into than simply put in place when the right people are in power. Rule of God is always happening though not always enacted.

What the church enacts through its readings, liturgies, and prayers, is a calling of  Christians (and all who participate in them) to be in the rule of God and to Look (for the good in others, for the good in self); to search for the opportunities and places where we can help the other, where we can do justice in the world, where can do unto others as we would have them do unto us.

When we do this, when we put on the eyes of faith, we come to see that Jesus doesn’t want us to do things in this world because he told us to. Jesus wants us do justice (to do good) in this world because as we do justice, as we do good in the world, we bring a little bit of hope to those that need it most. We bring a little more of that which is sacred to the forefront of people’s experience and vision.

And, if I’m guessing, as we do unto others as we would have done unto us, and as we share our talents with one another, as we gather rather than divide, bind those that are injured, see someone crying and offer a shoulder or help, see someone that is hungry and give them food, see the thirsty and give them water, see those that are cold and give them a jacket; as we imitate the saints living and present among us…we might just figure out that there are a few more heroes out there in the world, and in our communities of faith than we thought.

And that my friends, is pretty super.

Look.

Guest Post From…

Joshua Case is an Episcopal blogger, creative, and public theologian. He is a graduate of the University of Alabama and the Candler School of Theology at Emory University. Known as “Josh” of The Nick & Josh Podcast, Joshua currently works at Holy Innocent’s Episcopal Church in Atlanta. When not curating things religious and cultural Joshua works as a professional golf instructor.

Joshua on Twitter & Joshua on Facebook

This is the FIRST TNT episode NOT in the Homebrewed Podcast Feed!  Subscribe HERE to the Theology Nerd Throwdown podcast so you will continue to get the goodness like this, the upcoming Philip Clayton 3-D podcast, Bo and I Nerding Out!  The iTunes subscription is below.

Jack is Back… and this time we are discussing radical theology!  John Jack Caputo is a living legend and top notch philosopher of religion.  He comes with faith of Derrida and the Catholic mystical deferral.  Today you get to experience a live 3-D event, “Christianity UnCorked.”

This episode is sponsored by Dr. Laurel Schneider.  Thank You Laurel!  We appreciate the support!  If you missed Laurel’s visit to the podcast go check it out NOW!

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

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

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Both Caputo’s first,  second, and third visit rocked the podcast. Then we shared his main-stage fun from Soularize and the 3D event with Philip Clayton, Jay Bakker, and Peter Rollins.  Even more exciting are these class lectures Caputo is sharing here at HBC.  These lectures are free theological cat nip for theology nerds. Enjoy.

Here’s Elizabeth Johnson’s 1st and 2nd visit to the podcast.  She is the Catholic theologian Jack mentions as the one who got in trouble for attempting to counter the patriarchy in Classical theology.

1. School Debt is Vocational Slavery. When you have a student loan payment of 300 dollars a month a bunch of jobs are off the table. It shouldn’t be a surprise that working for and with ‘the least of these’ are rarely financially lucrative. For example, if you just finished law school and gotta start payments you don’t get to advocate for immigrants or work for environmental justice, you gotta pay the bills.
2. School Debt Kills Tithing. I know the math is obvious BUT if you are writing a big check every month for your student loans until you are 45 years old that is a bunch of money that previous generations had available to give to the church and its ministries. When fewer and fewer people have money available to give to a church certain people and their needs get priority and internally focused expenditures get priority over externally focused spending.
3. School Debt Tames Prophets. You can have a conviction, a calling, and a platform but if you don’t have economic security for you and your family you can stay quiet, vague, and distracted from your convictions. In this past year I have received over 20 emails from ministers who said “I wish I was in a situation financially where I could say and work towards X.” X = some social justice issue God says we should care about. What is their main burden? Student loans and health care.
4. School Debt Destroys Community. If you have to get a job that supports your family and your loans then you are more likely to have your check dictate where you move, when you work, and how long you work. This extra financial burden has led many of my friends to move away from their family and faith communities and take a job they hate at hours that eliminate growing new relationships in a new town. As a church this type of relational oppression is problematic and shouldn’t be accepted as part of the ‘game.’  The saddest part about this is our students are already indentured to the system before they are aware of what they are choosing.
5. Student Debt Squelches Ecclesial Entrepreneurship. What stops a gifted and called minister from taking the risk and planting a new missional community? Purchasing her own health insurance and having to write student loan checks. When taking the risk of starting a community that connects and serves the generations most impacted by student debt it doesn’t help the church for both the planters and the congregants to be riddled with exorbitant student loans. If you are deciding between a risky entrepreneurial move and jumping through the hoops of your denominational superstructure for a benefit secure job it’s easy to see how student debt could turn the tide away from ecclesial entrepreneurship.

 This is the LAST TNT episode in the Homebrewed Podcast Feed!  Subscribe HERE to the Theology Nerd Throwdown podcast so you will continue to get the goodness like next week’s episode with John Caputo!  The iTunes subscription is below.

Why are people leaving Church?  Rachel Held Evans blogged it, Bo shared it, and now we discuss it.  Andrew Sullivan’s post that got the conversation started ‘Christianity in Crisis.’  In this conversation Tripp discusses three good reasons people are leaving the church

1. Majoring in the Minors
2. Lack of Intellectual Integrity
3. Lack of Ethical Integrity

and then questions the impact of age programed ministry through college on the decline of the church.  Why does Tripp have gay friends at Acts 29 churches?

Then we move on to discussing Jesus and his disciples packing heat.  Bo previously blogged all the verses where Jesus mentions swords and then he ‘Walter Wink’s it’ by discussing turn the other cheek. Tripp then wonders about metaphysical violence and Process philosophy.  We concluded by getting a little sermonic about the Biblical logic for universalism!

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Monica A. Coleman is Assc. Professor of Constructive Theology and African American Religions at Claremont School of Theology and is your guide into Process Theology!

She is the author of Making a Way Out of No Way: A Womanist Theology (Innovations: African American Religious Thought), The Dinah Project: A Handbook for Congregational Response to Sexual Violence, and a contributor to the new Creating Women’s Theology: A Movement Engaging Process Thought.

There are a couple videos from the EVTC from Monica.  She discusses Life After Death & Creative Transformation.  Check them out and share them!

You can follow her blog and all the other media projects that she does at http://monicaacoleman.com/.

She is indeed a master tweeter and Patheos Progressive Christian Blogger.

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She is the author of Making a Way Out of No Way: A Womanist Theology (Innovations: African American Religious Thought), The Dinah Project: A Handbook for Congregational Response to Sexual Violence, and a contributor to the new Creating Women’s Theology: A Movement Engaging Process Thought.

There are a couple videos from the EVTC from Monica.  She discusses Life After Death & Creative Transformation.  Check them out and share them!

You can follow her blog and all the other media projects that she does at http://monicaacoleman.com/.

She is indeed a master tweeter and Patheos Progressive Christian Blogger.

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

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One Click to the Homebrewed Hotline!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They also cover Tripp’s post at PoMoMusings(@adamw)

In between, the topic of  Zombies (via the Walking Dead) and the Hunger Games is introduced by a call from Tripp’s brother, Steven Fuller

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In recent weeks Driscoll was awkwardly on The View and many of us watched painfully as he and his wife answered questions about “Christian sex”. Christian, that is, in his view of it (pun intended). And then there were the facial expressions of Whoppi Goldberg and other hosts: horrified, perplexed, and unsure if they could actually trust this man.

Then it happened, without a moments notice Driscoll parroted sections from his newest book (Real Marriage: The Truth About Sex, Friendship, & Life Together) where he claims that while the Bible says nothing bad about masturbation or oral sex, he is certain of what it says about homosexuality. Namely, that it is wrong. Godly sex, Driscoll holds, is meant to be performed only between a man and a woman, married. He also noted, and I’m not kidding, that the Biblical model for Christian marriage is all about friendship. He was, as he put it, “a Biblical Christian” and Christian sex means friends first (according to the Bible) and then becoming devoted husband and wife second (according to the New Testament). Verse? Passage? Seriously?

The quickest way for me to get to the point is to just say it: not only is Mark Driscoll’s reading of Scripture shallow and off point, he is not a Biblical Christian. Rather, like a child given a hand-me-down iphone to play with, Driscoll neither fully understands nor utilizes the technology of Scripture in ways that are consonant with its design or intent. In fact, in some ways, one might wonder if his use of Scripture is more a kin to giving a child a loaded gun rather than a iphone.

Biblical Christianity holds the capacity of the living Scriptures to shape the faith of the community at a higher value than the authority Scripture to normatively dictate moral behavior. While traditions model and even shape behavior, the stories of Scripture narrate values and open up faith beyond singular interpretations.

Biblical Christianity attempt to listen to the writers of the Bible in their local context and in our present one. Tradition, reason, science, and real time community must provide the context in which Scripture is read and lived today. For Driscoll, who believes that certain parts of the Bible are frozen in time like Han Solo in the chambers of Jabba the Hut, the narratives of Scripture are clear about some things more than others. My issue is, these narratives are neither stuck in time, nor seeking to speak normatively for all time. If they were, then Driscoll should not have been wearing the jacket that he wore any more than he should eat shrimp, or pork, or allow his wife to speak to with authority, head uncovered.

Biblical Christianity holds all the teachings and stories of Scripture, the good and bad, the random and silly, the bloody and romantic in the context of our story as a people of faith today. The Bible itself can not be reduced to a singular theme. As hard as ethicists, theologians, and scholars have tried to reduce the message of the book to that of a single nature, by its very design it resists the capacity to be reduced. As Adolf Harnack would have us to consider, you can not separate the corn from the husk. And, while even Andrew Sullivan has suggested that Thomas Jefferson’s Jesus is more worthy of following than that of the faith of the church, Biblical Christianity can not be abstracted from its practice in community (the Church) any more than Jesus can be followed outside the tension of the whole of his remembered words.

At the end of the day we need to be very clear: there is a difference between Biblical Christianity and Christianity that uses (or abuses) the Bible to its own ends by claiming that it has clear cut answers to very complex issues that Christians face. Biblical Christianity, indeed Biblical faith, is not concerned with whether or not answers are made simple or questions are ever answered. Biblical faith recognizes what Luke Timothy Johnson so often points out to his students: that by its very design, the Bible canonizes a diversity of voices, opinions, and perspectives on how to follow the Risen Lord.

Guest Post From…

Joshua Case is an Episcopal blogger, creative, and public theologian. He is a graduate of the University of Alabama and the Candler School of Theology at Emory University. Known as “Josh” of The Nick & Josh Podcast, Joshua currently works at Holy Innocent’s Episcopal Church in Atlanta. When not curating things religious and cultural Joshua works as a professional golf instructor.

Joshua on Twitter & Joshua on Facebook

Several of my mainline friends get to preach this coming weekend – as do I. The conversations have been great as we compared notes. The first question is usually “are you using the lectionary text?” (which I am not) and then the question of post-Easter themes as we round the corner toward Pentecost come up.

I was looking for something on my old blog and stumbled upon two posts from an Easter past. I thought it would be fun to edit them and put them up again.

The central question is “what do we do with this?” – also known as the so what question. People want to know because there are 3 key passages in the New Testament that say Jesus’ resurrection has consequences for what we as believers can expect after our death.

Here are the 4 layers of thought that seem to come out of the Resurrection conversation.

• Layer 1: The disciples experienced Jesus after his death and that indicated two major things A) death is not the end and B) the Roman empire was not the final authority.

I like this interpretation. If this were all that there was, it would be enough for me. I often hear that this is nothing more than a ‘ghost story’ and offers no hope. I don’t see it that way, and have written about it often.

Let me just add that North Americans are good at focusing on the first implication – that death is not the end – but often struggle with the second implication because, as I have learned, we assume that the as is structure of modern existence is the final ordering. Both the Nation State and Capitalism are given realities and so the best that can be hoped for is for the system to be tweaked in order to bring about a slightly kinder, gentler, more fair, and just version of the structures as it currently is configured [as Jeremy and Tripp outline in their TNT episode breakout session entitled "Occupy Theology"]

Christian implications of the resurrection should enable us to imagine a re-ordering of this world’s governors and empower us to dream of and participate in our ordering of life to display a different operating system and demonstrate a pronounce protest to the powers the be.

• Layer 2: At the end of our life, we are taken into (or absorbed back into) the life of God. This position holds that life after death is total and absolute communion with God and acknowledges that all the ‘streets of gold’ and ‘pearly gates’ stuff is a result prophetic language and poetic imagining- not a material (physical) rendering.

I like the language of this view. It also helps that I think the book of Revelation is a political critique of the Roman empire and has nothing to do with the end of the world and is therefor not instructive in the least about life after death. So I don’t have to worry about the personification stuff. It frees me to enjoy the thought of release and embrace: release from this life and embrace by the divine other.

The way we read the book of Revelation now is killing our political imagination. The lesson of Revelation is not what will happen in our lifetime or in history – but to model for us how to speak to our time like the author spoke to his time! We are faithful to the book of Revelation not when we take it literally (as if one even could) but when we critique our Imperial structures and imagine a different way of ordering the world in order to bring about different and better outcomes.

Critics of this view say that it is too spiritualized and not specific enough and doesn’t give dignity to the existence of the individual. I hear what they are saying, but it opens us up the to anthropomorphic critique again.

• Layer 3: Jesus was resurrected with a trans-physical body. So we can expect a glorified – bodily – spiritual/physical existence in kind.

This is the classic reading of the text. Jesus both interacted with the physical (making breakfast on the shore and letting Thomas touch his wounds) while also not being limited to the physical (walking through walls, etc.)

I am, of course, comfortable with this view as it is what I was raised with and ordained into. The only downside is that it desperately needs to humbly engage the gaps that emerge in Biblical scholarship instead of arrogantly raising it’s voice to anyone who dares question any aspect of the accounts that were written so much later and which vary from each other. We have to be honest about the literary aspect of the Gospel accounts.

• Layer 4: Some really thoughtful modern theologians have put forward some new theories or vocabularies with which to have this conversation. Notable are N.T. Wright, John Cobb, and the new book by Philip Clayton.

I was listening to an interview with John Polkinghorn and he said something that caught my attention.

“What is the real me? It is certainly more than the matter of my body, because that it changing all the time. The atoms are always changing – but in some sense it is the pattern of how the atoms are formed. That,I think, is what the soul is (agreeing with Thomas Aquinas).
It is an immensely rich pattern that doesn’t end at my skin. It involves my memories, my character, my personality. I think it involves all the relationships I take on. It is complex and we struggle to even say something about it. But I do not think that God will allow that pattern to be lost and I think that God will recreate that pattern after resurrection.
Faith and Science are in conversation about what could be the continuity between this world and world that has yet to come.”

I love this language. It gets away from the historical argument of only literal vs. merely spiritual and points to the possibilities of a preferable future – but does so without being dogmatic, wooden interpretation or concrete physics. It leaves the door open for faith and invites us into a conversation. In my mind, that is better than rote regurgitation repetition of old formulations. It encourages us to think biblically and explore theologically the possibilities of a new reality.

We just can’t afford for Christ’s resurrection to be a promise of escape from this present world and a subsequent passivity toward the as is structures of our existence.

Laurel Schneider is Professor of Theology, Ethics, and Culture at the Chicago School of Theology.  If you are wise you have surely gotten yourself a copy of Laurel’s edited volume Polydoxy: Theology of Multiplicity and Relation since both Catherine Keller and John Thatamanil have discussed it on previous episodes.  Now you just got check out Laurel’s Beyond Monotheism: A Theology of Multiplicity.

Check out Lauerl’s “It Gets Better” video here.

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Rachel’s post [link] and it’s follow up “15 Reasons I Returned to the Church” are wonderful.  Here is her initial post and then I was hoping to hear from the Homebrewed crowd. Why did you leave the church?  If you haven’t left,  Why have you stayed?  What would be the reason you leave? 

___

Eight million twenty-somethings have left the church, and it seems like everyone is trying to figure out why.

Last week, Christian Piatt offered seven reasons here, and four more reasons here. David Kinnaman recently authored a book entitled, You Lost Me, which details the findings of Barna researchers who interviewed hundreds of 18-29 year-olds about why they left the church.

I left the church when I was twenty-seven. I am now thirty, and after trying unsuccessfully to start a house church, my husband and I are struggling to find a faith community in which we feel we belong. I’ve been reluctant to write about this search in the past, but it seems like such a common experience, I think it’s time to open up, especially now that I’ve had some time to process. But let’s begin with fifteen reasons why I left:

1. I left the church because I’m better at planning Bible studies than baby showers…but they only wanted me to plan baby showers.

2. I left the church because when we talked about sin, we mostly talked about sex. 

3. I left the church because my questions were seen as liabilities.

4. I left the church because sometimes it felt like a cult, or a country club, and I wasn’t sure which was worse.

5. I left the church because I believe the earth is 4.5 billion years old and that humans share a common ancestor with apes, which I was told was incompatible with my faith.

6. I left the church because sometimes I doubt, and church can be the worst place to doubt.

7. I left the church because I didn’t want to be anyone’s “project.” 

8. I left the church because it was often assumed that everyone in the congregation voted for Republicans.

9. I left the church because I felt like I was the only one troubled by stories of violence and misogyny and genocide found in the Bible, and I was tired of people telling me not to worry about it because “God’s ways are higher than our ways.”

10. I left the church because of my own selfishness and pride.

11. I left the church because I knew I would never see a woman behind the pulpit, at least not in the congregation in which I grew up.

12. I left the church because I wanted to help people in my community without feeling pressure to convert them to Christianity.

13. I left the church because I had learned more from Oprah about addressing poverty and injustice than I had learned from 25 years of Sunday school.

14. I left the church because there are days when I’m not sure I believe in God, and no one told me that “dark nights of the soul” can be part of the faith experience.

15. I left the church because one day, they put signs out in the church lawn that said “Marriage = 1 Man + 1 Woman: Vote Yes on Prop 1,” and I knew the moment I saw them that I never wanted to come back. 

“I am convinced that what drives most people away from Christianity is not the cost of discipleship but rather the cost of false fundamentals.” – Evolving in Monkey Town, p. 207

“We aren’t looking for a faith that provides all the answers; we’re looking for one in which we are free to ask the questions.” – Evolving in Monkey Town, p. 204

In the weeks to come, I’ll be sharing more about why I stayed with the Church–with a capital-C-- and about our search for a local faith community.

Why did you leave the church? 

Why do you stay? 

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

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

AMAZING BOOK for $6.72 on KINDLE!!!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jesus was using a play on words.

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

John Caputo puts it this way:

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

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

_______________

Part 2:  

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

Let me throw out two things:

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

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

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

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

Oh, here we go: Hebrews 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

________

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

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

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

“Nothing,” they answered.

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

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

“That’s enough!” he replied.

Here are two readings you may want to consider: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Step One with James Cone

The finality of Jesus lies in the totality of his existence in complete freedom as the Oppressed One who reveals through his death and resurrection that God is present in all dimensions of human liberation…As long as Oppressors can be sure that the gospel does not threaten their social, economic, and political security, they can enslave others in the name of Jesus Christ (A Black Theology of Liberation, 117-118)

Why is it that I desired to cover up the blood of Jesus, to deny it theological power?  Mostly it had to do with the image of a blood requiring Father who fulfilled the requirement through Jesus.  I have no interest in articulating a theology where there is a dichotomy of character and intention between the Fatherly Mother and her eternal Son.  God was either as good as Jesus said God was or I could just as well join Jesus and Job’s protest.  IF Jesus was in fact the image of the invisible God, if the Son who was sent shared and communicated the heart of God, then it was theologically problematic to let a bad atonement theory introduce an ethical dichotomy between the two.  I believed that (and still do) so I got rid of the blood. But what if the blood needs to stay for another reason, one that coheres with the ministry and message of Jesus as well as God’s desire for more just creation?

It was James Cone who impressed that quest upon me.  During lent of 2009 I decided to take up reading only African American theologians and by the time I was done I began to see that in running away from the blood of Jesus I was running away from a symbolically powerful place for the Black church and, more importantly for a white-straight-middle class-dude like me, the ever-present reminder of God’s cross-bearing, blood spilling confrontation with with cross-building powers of this world.  In silencing the blood of Jesus I was not just avoiding a problematic atonement theory but God’s demand for justice that streamed from the body of my Lord.

Step Two with Paul Tillich

The sign bears no necessary relation to that to which it points, the symbol participates in the reality for which it stands.  The sign can be changed arbitrarily according to the demands of expediency, but the symbol grows and dies according to the correlation between that which is symbolized and the persons who receive the symbol.  Therefore, the religious symbol, the symbol which points to the divine, can be a true symbol only if it participates in the power of the divine to which it points…A symbol has truth: it is adequate to the revelation it expresses. A symbol is true: it is the expression of a true revelation. (Systematic Theology I:239-240)

Trying to figure out exactly how I could theologically reclaim the blood of Jesus wasn’t easy.  Paul Tillich’s differentiation between signs and symbols became an extremely helpful tool.   For Tillich religion expresses itself in symbols, they are contextual and finite.  A symbol lives where it serves to breakthrough the conditioned reality of the religious community and confront its inherited assumption about the world.  A symbol is a living symbol as long as it continues to participate in the Unconditioned and rupturous reality which gave it life.

For me the blood of Jesus became a sign, it didn’t participate in my own experience of God but pointed to a rather depressing image of a God I couldn’t worship, and so I let it go.  After engaging Cone, the blood of Jesus began to speak to me again – it confronted many of my own practices, my assumptions about the world, my unexamined privilege, and the coercive system that preserved them.  Cone had pricked my imagination and what use to be a sign pointing to a depraved atonement theory became a symbol for the power-threatening gospel of the crucified one.

Step Three with Andrew Sung Park (do yourself a favor and check out our discussion of this HERE on the podcast @44:40)

For the oppressed, Jesus’ blood as a symbol participates in the agony of their suffering under the unjust persecution, exploitation, oppression, and violence…his blood signifies the intermingling of God’s woundedness, sorrow, grief, and God’s never-ending hope for the downtrodden. Jesus’ blood represents God’s pierced heart for the sinned-against.

To the oppressors, Jesus’ blood symbolizes the protest, confrontation, and challenge of the oppressed and of God.  It participates in the outcries of the victims.  Like Abel’s blood, Jesus’ blood cries out from the ground until its voice is heard.  It has the extraordinary strength to open up the cruelty of injustice, violence, vice, and evil – to unlock oppressors’ hearts of stone.  (Triune Atonement: Christ’s Healing for Sinners, Victims, and the Whole Creation, 35-36)

It was Andrew Sung Park who helped me piece everything together, it was his work on atonement that took this retrieved and revived symbol and made it sing.  Park was able to expand the symbolic power of the blood to all creation, adding an ecological flare, but he was also rather brilliant at pointing out the conflicted nature of ourselves.

We are all both oppressed and oppressors.  Not in the same way or even symmetrically but it was Park who insisted that the blood of Jesus is for all creation’s wounds – including mine – and a protest to all of our wounding – including those I participate in structurally and those I inflict upon others.  The blood of Jesus insists on God’s Holy Justice, God’s participation and sharing in the wounds of all, God’s protest with and on behalf of the wounded, God’s promise but not yet accomplished healing, God’s insistence on a fleshly and material Gospel, and God’s decision to take the side of the wounded – the wounded in all of us.  The blood of Jesus is a symbol of the God who is for us, beside us, and working through us to bring healing.

Today is Good Friday & thanks to this little theological journey of mine I will sit down tonight after everyone is asleep, smoke a delicious cigar and listen to Gavin Bryars & Tom Waits ‘Jesus Blood Never Failed me Yet.’  Check out the story of the recording here.

Sketching an alternative proposal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be continued.

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

 The Predicament of Belief  by Philip Clayton and Steven Knapp is a first-rate book – both highly thought-provoking and courageous. Philip Clayton has consistently shown himself to be one of the Church’s most creative thinkers and is perhaps unequalled in offering imaginative tools for re-invigorating our approach to Christian faith ‘after Google’. For catalyzing and hosting constructive debate with a combination of intellectual vigour and graciousness there simply seems to be no-one better on the horizon of the contemporary theological landscape. So I’m a fan.

The first philosophical chapters of The Predicament of Belief, making a powerful case for the rationality of believing in a personal, benevolent Ultimate Reality, are ones with which I find myself agreeing without reservation. I start getting nervous when the authors’ ‘Christian minimalist’ position is taken as more than a pragmatic expression of what can be adduced without stepping beyond rational justifiability. When minimalism becomes a preferred option in the search not merely for human consensus but for truth about Ultimate Reality, my theological nerve-endings start jangling.

Adoptionism – the only solution ?

Here I would particularly like to focus on Christology. I’m torn between admiration for the authors’ brave attempt at a minimal ‘core Christian proposal’ that can function as a rallying-point for the contemporary Church and ambivalence towards their constructive suggestion. Is it a) the only viable truth-claim available in the present climate or b) a simple working hypothesis whose interest lies in its usefulness for stemming the decline in American mainline Protestantism, an attractive proposition to those alienated by traditional dogma? While I agree that sensitivity to those suspicious of doctrine in general is highly desirable, I find The Predicament overly pessimistic about rationally justifying anything approaching an orthodox theological viewpoint: their assumption that such a position cannot stand in the 21st century seems a little hasty. Especially as my experience is that the ‘spiritual but not religious’ constituency which minimalism hopes to attract is just as resistant to the ‘left-brain’ logical argumentation represented by The Predicament as to an insistence on literal adherence to ancient creeds.

In the book, adoptionism is presented as an option ‘that does not include the claim that the same person who became the man Jesus already existed in divine form before Jesus was born’.  Instead, ‘after Jesus’s death, God somehow took this individual’s subjectivity into the divine subjectivity, commingling them in such a way that they came to dwell within each other and even to become identical to each other.’ This supposedly offers a way out of the ‘dichotomy that either Jesus continues as the identical person within the godhead or Jesus is a merely human model for others to emulate.’ This ‘may be attractive to those contemporary Christians who can’t quite believe (even if they have no way of definitively denying) the complicated assertions of classical Trinitarian thought, but who nevertheless find themselves believing in Jesus’ continuing personal presence’.

Towards the end of his concise Emergent Village presentation of the book  (around the 30 minute mark on the HBC podcast), PC puts his theological hands up and admits that his preference goes to ‘adoptionist’ Christology because the alternative of an eternal preexistent Logos is not persuasive now that static Greek metaphysics have landed in the trash can of history. Not unless you believe in a ‘three bears with three chairs’ Trinity (don’t worry, you’ll understand if you listen to the audio…).

The pre-existent Logos: an obsolete accessory ?

For PC, the preexistent Logos simply has to go. But what takes its place? I find myself having mixed sentiments towards his constructive proposal. I can certainly understand his argument and agree as far as the utility of a Spirit Christology is concerned. I also very much find myself drawn to his view (shared by many of the participants in the Claremont discussion) that the resource of process thought makes a better bridge between theology and contemporary science than Greek metaphysical discourse. And I don’t want to exaggerate the extent to which Philip Clayton has taken a position that can’t be accommodated within an orthodox Christian framework given some judicious alterations in vocabulary.

It should be admitted

1.  that his welcome affirmation of the post-Resurrection unity of Jesus and God has bigger practical implications for the Church today than the issue of the pre-incarnate Logos and that
2.  it is historically undeniable that adoptionism was certainly a valid option within the very earliest Christian period. For those on the fringes of Christian belief who looking for an entry-point to Christian theology, an adoptionist Christology can perhaps be of value.

However, it must be said that Philip Clayton’s solution of his conundrum is not without cost, and that the price (exegetical, theological and ecumenical) is maybe higher than either The Predicament of Belief or the Emergent Village Theological Conversation seem to suggest.

Conclusion – Part 1: 

Firstly, an adoptionist position arguably leads to problems with Scripture which are difficult to solve even with a black belt in exegetical judo.

Secondly, the theological price. Get rid of the preexistent Logos and you also kiss farewell to the Immanent Trinity, Trinitarian theology of creation and Trinitarian theological anthropology. Hasta la vista to the Cappadocian Fathers – and Eastern Christian tradition more generally (as well as Celtic Christianity in the West), for which the threeness of God is as just as much theological bedrock as the Divine Unity. Philosophically, if God is not eternally Triune, then grounding otherness ontologically becomes impossible unless you go the route of ontologizing the God-world relationship (which creates other problems). If the Son is not eternal, then logically neither is the Father.

 Thirdly, the view that belief in the eternal Logos is just Greek metaphysical mumbo-jumbo has been challenged by recent research on Philo (identified in The Predicament as the conduit for Logos theology), not only by Christian scholars such as Larry Hurtado and Margaret Barker but also within Jewish studies on the part of Alan F Segal and more recently Daniel Boyarin. If their thesis of the pre-Christian incorporation of the Logos and other mediating concepts within a Jewish framework of salvation history is correct, then the notion that the Logos is a static concept derived purely from Hellenistic sources becomes questionable. If Judaism at the time of early Christianity proved capable of translating the Logos into its own conceptualities, thereby seriously tweaking the Greek concept, this raises the possibility that a creative theological appropriation of the Logos idea may equally be a way forward for us today. It’s not automatically a theological albatross.

 Fourthly, an overtly ‘adoptionist’ position risks alienating some theological constituencies (I’m thinking particularly of Social Trinitarians, admirers of Stanley Hauerwas, and ‘post-conservatives’ drawn to the work of figures such as Roger Olson or NT Wright) which might otherwise be attracted to this conversation and would certainly be welcome contributors to it. If PC wants a Big Tent approach, then prodding the roof with a sharp object may not be advisable. As even superstar theologians such as Hans Küng in the 1970s and more recently Elizabeth A Johnson have discovered to their cost, embracing an adoptionist Christology is not necessarily a way to win friends and influence people in certain circles: there are simply too many people out there willing to hit the ‘THIS IS HERESY!!!!’ button, and life is too short to have to deal with them.

in part 2: an alternative proposal. 

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

As Good Friday approaches more people will be thinking about ‘Why Jesus was killed?’  There are a bunch of reasons and probably more than one historical one too, but I think Woody Guthrie gets at least one of them right in his song ‘Jesus Christ’ so I decided to record it and share it with y’all.  Plus it might as well be the new American song for Occupy Wall Street Christians.  So Enjoy!

If you are wise then check out my favorite box set of Guthire.  It makes me smile.

Jesus Christ
Words and Music by Woody Guthrie

Jesus Christ was a man who traveled through the land
A hard-working man and brave
He said to the rich, “Give your money to the poor,”
But they laid Jesus Christ in His grave

Jesus was a man, a carpenter by hand
His followers true and brave
One dirty little coward called Judas Iscariot
Has laid Jesus Christ in His Grave

He went to the preacher, He went to the sheriff
He told them all the same
“Sell all of your jewelry and give it to the poor,”
And they laid Jesus Christ in His grave.

When Jesus come to town, all the working folks around
Believed what he did say
But the bankers and the preachers, they nailed Him on the cross,
And they laid Jesus Christ in his grave.

And the people held their breath when they heard about his death
Everybody wondered why
It was the big landlord and the soldiers that they hired
To nail Jesus Christ in the sky

This song was written in New York City
Of rich man, preacher, and slave
If Jesus was to preach what He preached in Galilee,
They would lay poor Jesus in His grave.

Off the top of my head I can think of at least four forms of ‘Christian’ resistance to the Resurrection. I would really enjoy your feed back and additional forms of ‘Christian’ resistance.  Send them and Daniel Kirk and I can discuss them in our LIVE STREAMING resurrection podcast Wednesday night!

1. The resurrection of Jesus is a denial of the one true democracy – death.  The only thing promised to all human beings is death and yet for many Christians the resurrection is the theological means by which the church evades death or denies it. BUT should one locate the resurrection as a metaphorical reality then perhaps the resurrection (deflated to an existential horizon) can be preserved.  By taking this move the resurrection becomes the means by which one faces their finitude with grace.

2. The resurrection of Jesus is a theological justification for turning our attention upwards towards a heavenly realm.  This kind of other-worldly notion of fulfillment is the best pacifier for a church called to act for justice and likely a projection by a community of people who know that they too may die.  The passion of Jesus that led him to the events of Passion week cannot be forsaken for a story about an eternal security blanket.  BUT should one locate the resurrection within the community of disciples then perhaps the resurrection can be preserved as the poetic way of articulating the death of the transcendent God and the resurrection discovery of the grassroots deity preserving and vitalizing the communal passion of Jesus.

3. The resurrection of Jesus is an enormous theological distraction and misguidedly attempts to tie up all truth’s loose ends.  Talk of ‘the resurrection of Christ’ ends up swallowing the attention as Christians we need to put towards other issues such as discipleship, ethics, community witness, the demands of love, mission of God, and so on.  In the end the resurrection is turned into a slogan that is substituted for genuine critical reflection about life, faith, love, and justice and needs to be dethroned from theological prominence.

4. The resurrection of Jesus reeks of triumphalism.  The proclamation of Jesus’ resurrection ends up reversing, denying, or trivializing the suffering of Jesus on the cross.  If Christ’s suffering is only behind him, overcome, and undone then its as if the cross has been displaced! It not only makes the event of crucifixion a passing and transitional moment of suffering yet to be conquered but the trivialization of Jesus’ cross trivializes all the crosses, real and metaphorical, throughout history.  If the resurrection of Jesus is the relegation of the moment he most identifies with world’s suffering and serves to hide its reality for so many then it needs to be dethroned theologically.

Don’t forget to check out Philip Clayton’s ‘resurrection’ podcast!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was a real pleasure to talk with Ehrman and we hope you enjoy it and share the Brew!

One Click to the Homebrewed Hotline!

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

I reviewed the book HERE as part of this blog-book tour. The other stops are….

Tuesday, March 20th: Shuck and Jive

Monday, March 26th: Broken Teepee

Tuesday, March 27th: Homebrewed Christianity

Wednesday, March 28th: Jeff Keuss

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

Tuesday, April 3rd: Crazy Liberals … and Conservatives

Wednesday, April 4th: The Liberal Spirit

Thursday, April 5th: Greg Laden’s Blog

Friday, April 6th: Butterflies and Wheels

Tuesday, April 10th: Fallen From Grace

Wednesday, April 11th: The Gods Are Bored

TBD: The X Blog

TBD: Richard Carrier Blogs

TBD: Exploring Our Matrix

Wednesday night the Theology Nerd Throwdown will live stream a special episode with New Testament Scholar Daniel Kirk!  @8pm pst we will start a Resurrection-cast and begin tackling the topic from a bunch of angles… history… Bible… philosophy… hermenutics… theology… and answering any questions y’all send in.  SO bookmark the Homebrewed Mixlr page where the audio will be LIVE and the message board open.

Send us your questions and we will answer them live (and post the audio later).  Sure you can leave them as a comment BUT it’s much cooler to use your real voice HERE.

YOU CAN BE THE STUDIO AUDIENCE! I have 5 seats in the Redondo Beach podcast studio for 5 local HBC Deacons.  If you want to reserve one of these 5 seats just email me tripp (at) homebrewedchristianity (dot) com and I will give you details.  Yes there will be plenty of brew for the podcast.  The resurrection goes down better lubricated!

PS…you should subscribe to the TNT iTunes podcast now & review it kindly! Why? It will be its own podcast in just a couple episodes so just subscribing to the Homebrewed Feed will NOT get you all the TNT awesomeness including the upcoming Jack Caputo 3-D experience!

eBooks

This March was the month of the eBook!  Over the course of the month I have plowed through some awesome eBooks so if you kindle you need to download at least one of these for your brain.  Personally I am thrilled about the advent of eBook theology.  It is sure to create a market that gets better theology to a wider audience. Bo and I discuss this with Tony Jones in the newest TNT podcast.  Now for some eBooks!

Brian McLaren‘s return to fiction in The Word of the Lord to Democrats ($2.99) is flat out AWESOME. Imagine God getting a new prophet to speak a word to the Democratic party in our present political situation…oh yeah…and God wants the Democrats to stop being wusses and be an actually Left party.  That’s what happens.  I laughed out loud, said AMEN, & remembered how much I like McLaren’s fictional conversations.

James McGrath gives an outstanding introduction to historical criticism and the Gospel in The Burial of Jesus: What Does History Have to Do with Faith? ($2.99)  Not only is the book easy to read given the density of the scholarship being presented, McGrath also demonstrates a genuine liberal Christian stance towards critical scholarship and faith.  A perfect way to get your foot in New Testament scholarship.

Tony Jones  discusses the cross in A Better Atonement: Beyond the Depraved Doctrine of Original Sin ($2.99) and Julie Clawson gets cinematic in The Hunger Games and the Gospel: Bread, Circuses, and the Kingdom of God ($4.99). For more on either book just check out our interviews with the authors on the TNT podcast.

Books with Pages

For something PRACTICAL and USEFUL check out Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip and Dan Heath.  These two brothers examine the traits of ideas that stick, those that have impactful staying power.  The book is perfect for those who have a stack of learning, a powerful idea, or a real big dream but wonder how best to communicate it for your audience then this book is a must read.  It is based on a bunch of social scientific research and full of great examples and stories.  So if you are a teacher, preacher, or communicator of any kind this book is worth checking out.

For something PHILOSOPHICAL that is a nerd’s personal LIBRARY NECESSITY click over to Anthony Kenny’s A New History of Western Philosophy.  It is the newest history of philosophy and after a couple interactions with it I have put it on the same shelf as W.T.Jones and Frederick Copleston…which is a big deal compliment. Kenny is not only a world famous philosopher but he is also a Knight…a real one via the Queen.  I bought the four volumes put in this single volume as they came out.  I love them.  They give a summary of the period of history where the big figures and movements are discussed.  Then the second half covers the major topics and their development. Get it and nerd out.

 For something BIBLICAL and PHILOSOPHICAL get on to Keith Ward‘s newest book The Philosopher and the Gospels: Jesus Through the Lens of Philosophy.  I love Keith Ward.  In this super sweet book Keith gets all philosophical on the Gospels.  If you are interested in what Open Theism would sound like if you got to open theism via idealist philosophy and conversations with science then this is it.

Tunes!

Best album of the year thus far…Ben Kweller’s Go Fly A Kite.  This is a real deal Rock & Roll record.  Amazing melodies, great arrangements, and Ben’s perfect pop sensibilities shine throughout.  The album covers a bunch of emotions, tells some awesome stories, and keeps you humming all day long.

Most anticipated album in my world…Counting Crows’ Underwater Sunshine (or What We Did On Our Summer Vacation).  This is the Counting Crows’ first indie release and on April 10th you can expect me to go old school and purchase the physical CD and listen to it repeatedly while smoking a fine cigar.  The most exciting thing about this album is the Crows are finally recording all the cover songs uber-fans like me have enjoyed live and never had on our iPods.  When the Crows cover a song they don’t just play it, they retell it and often they own it.  And if the album wasn’t enough on April 17th Alecia and I will be seeing them LIVE here in LA.  It shall be amazing!

In the sermon I tell the story of the painting.  Hope you enjoy it.  LISTEN HERE (right click & save as to download)

To be Christian is to be human in a new way – to be fully human -  and it requires a decision to give oneself to the way of Jesus.  This decision is something only the individual can make.  It can’t be done for us and it costs all of us.  It requires us to take our own existence as seriously as God does.

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Two of the podcast’s best friends have published E-books in last month and they are both here for a Theology Nerd Throwdown!

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

First up, Bo chats with Julie Clawson about the book she wrote about the Hunger Games. (you can find her first podcast appearance here)

Then Tripp and Bo skype with the self-appointed Sr. Deacon – the Doctor! – Tony Jones about a Better Atonement. (you can find his most recent visit here)

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

Tripp & Bo are really excited about reading Beyond the Spirit of Empire & Tony Jones is digging The Predicament of Belief by Philip Clayton.

Go check out my blog were I say….

The problem is that the world can’t take another 100 years where the followers of Jesus put more faith in the ‘as is’ political, economic, and ecological arrangement than our inherited religious beliefs. Yes there are many Christians who use their faith therapeutically as a security blanket and need to be honest about their genuine doubts; Yes too many leaders just say what everyone wants to hear, performing belief on the behalf of others, so that serious questions never get raised; Yes much religion has become a marketable means to comfort and console human beings looking to ignore suffering, responsibility and the absence of meaning. But underneath the hidden doubts the ‘postmodern’ and ‘progressive’ types are letting come up for air are some strong and unquestioned beliefs about the finality of our human and ecological relations. Perhaps the most problematic belief in Christianity isn’t the inerrancy of scripture, strict Calvinism, religious exclusivism or ‘open but not affirming.’ What if the future of life on our planet is most threatened by our unconscious blind faith to the ‘as is’ assumptions integral to therapeutic Christianity? More importantly, what if Christianity freed from its role atop the symbolic chain of Being can take another form that doesn’t assume the ‘as is’ structures of our suicidal machine are final and is even more Jesuanic (that is a nerdy form of Jesusy!)?

Go Read the Entire Post….and post comments there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you Bart for writing this book.

So if you were wondering….

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

Check out his personal webpage.

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

Tuesday, March 20th: Shuck and Jive

Monday, March 26th: Broken Teepee

Tuesday, March 27th: Homebrewed Christian

Wednesday, March 28th: Jeff Keuss

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

Tuesday, April 3rd: Crazy Liberals … and Conservatives

Wednesday, April 4th: The Liberal Spirit

Thursday, April 5th: Greg Laden’s Blog

Friday, April 6th: Butterflies and Wheels

Tuesday, April 10th: Fallen From Grace

Wednesday, April 11th: The Gods Are Bored

TBD: The X Blog

TBD: Richard Carrier Blogs

TBD: Exploring Our Matrix

As has frequently been noted, a major problem in many evangelical contexts continues to be the degree to which “the gospel” is equated with the penal substitutionary theory of atonement (PSA).  I’m becoming increasingly convinced that the future of the emergent church depends on its ability to articulately refute, and concisely recast, this reductive tendency amongst our more conservative friends.  No matter what kind of social justice projects (KONY 2012, etc.)  get tacked onto this message, and regardless of how much Relevant Magazine calls for “rejecting apathy,” so long as PSA is depicted as the full picture or main event of the good news, the church will always fall short of expressing Jesus’ vision for it.  (By the way, I’m talking to people who still care about preserving something like the Christian church that isn’t just Mainline version 2.0… if this isn’t you, that’s fine!).  An adequate response, however, might take more than just ignoring or only deconstructing the components of Bebbington’s evangelical quadrilateral (conversionism, Biblicism, crucicentrism and evangelism).

Because even if you’re convinced that PSA is the devil, and even if you revise it, the language is in the Bible, so it’s probably not going away.  Tony Jones knows this, and he also knows better than to flatly dismiss it.  Instead, as others have tried to do (e.g., Scot McKnight), he’s merely attempting to dethrone it, and I would like to join him.  I’m very appreciative of the various feminist criticisms of traditional atonement readings (especially that of Kathryn Tanner), but unless “emergent” is to become forever irrelevant even to the most open-minded evangelicals (does this matter?), then you can’t just throw out PSA.

At the same time, Tony is also careful to point out that, generally speaking, atonement theory (not christology) has never really been a dividing debate in church history and shouldn’t be now.  Compared to the Trinity and the divinity of Christ, atonement is secondary.  I’m not as sure about this, but he could be right.  I’m simply saying that, just as mainliners might need to meet emergents halfway, so too maybe emergents can be generous enough to “go to the middle” for evangelicals so to speak.  Or at least for those of us who are recovering, as I’ve heard Tripp say, it’s a good idea to be gracious to every version of our old selves.

Here are some things from the book:

• The first thing Jones does is to (convincingly, in my view, and biblically!) debunk original sin without neglecting the seriousness of sin as such.  Again, this is not new, but sin must be understood structurally and socially (war, violence, oppression, inequality, environmental degradation, etc) without forgetting about it individually.  This is crucial for an emergent church theological project.

• Secondly, in a respectful and fair way, Jones directly challenges Driscoll and Piper on this issue for their hyper and irresponsible, Calvinist PSA.  I am so glad he’s not ignoring them.  They are way too powerful and influential to ignore if we care about the North American church.  And they are way too wrong for us to be silent about it.  And here’s what we have to see: a lot of people who go to their churches aren’t even like them, because they don’t know any better!  The response: offer an alternative that isn’t reactionary and that doesn’t poison its own roots.

• Thirdly, after outlining the major theories of atonement throughout history and testifying to both their necessity and finitude, Jones turns to a better theory for our time, despite its shared limitation (see below).

Anyone who has studied 20^th century theology already knows what Jones is saying here.  Jon Sobrino and the liberation theologians said it.  Jurgen Moltmann and other political theologians have said it.  Andrew Sung Park has been on the podcast and is certainly influenced by Sobrino and Moltmann.  Scholars like Theodore Jennings, Miroslav Volf, and Joel Green have made cases along the same lines as Tony.  People who like the Girardian “Last Scapegoat” take will obviously appreciate Mark Heim or someone like Ingolf Dalferth.  This is one of the positions that Jones defends.  Most emphatically though, Jones follows Moltmann’s notion of atonement as solidarity through the Philippians 2 hymn and The Crucified God.  To be fair, the best proponents of PSA (e.g., von Balthasar) can say this too, but think substitution without the penal, or what Volf calls inclusive substitution, in which Christ is not a third party inserted between God and humanity, but the very God who was wronged:

“Jesus’s life, and particularly his death, show God’s ultimate solidarity with the marginalized and the poor,” Jones explains, “with those who most acutely experience godforsakenness . . . in his death, we are united with his suffering.  And in identifying with his resurrection, we are raised to new life.”

My interpretation of A Better Atonement goes something like this: The real hole in the gospel for conservatives is the failure to proclaim the saving significance that Jesus and therefore God participates fully in and understands human suffering, while for liberals it is that Jesus does this as Christ.  This means three things: we affirm incarnation, we affirm resurrection, and we declare the prophetic meaning of the crucifixion loud and clear.  Yes, we’ve read and written about this, and it might even be old news for some, but surprisingly enough, most people sitting in the pew as it were still haven’t really heard it preached or seen it in action, either because we’re too distracted as ministers with preaching salvation as a legal transaction on the one hand or using it as mere exemplary inspiration on the other.  The justice of God gets sidelined in both cases, as the parables about the reign of God are either overly eschatologized or mystically internalized.  The cross and the kingdom must be reconnected, and it can’t just be social.  It has to be soteriological.  This is what Jones is saying, I think.  Is this what emergents can and should claim? (for a better Scriptural understanding of how one could do this, I recommend N.T. Wright’s most recent book, How God Became King).

The book reads like a blog – very informal and straightforward, but still free from simplistic caricatures, which is a difficult balance to find.  This is reliable, timely, and bold theological leadership for the emergent church that is desperately needed.  I must confess that I wish it had come sooner, as I feel too many people have already moved away from the conversation before listening to what might be a tenable alternative to the monolithic PSA gospel.    Nonetheless, this should be a welcomed and appreciated little book for easy reference and for prompting discussion in an intelligent and accessible fashion.  What could be more appropriate as we approach Easter?  In my view, Jones highlights a most compelling theory of atonement for our situation, especially in light of the crises we face as a North American church that comes in the midst of what Walter Brueggemann has perceptively called a culture of therapeutic, technological consumer militarism.  I’m looking forward to the interview!

Other things I’m wondering:

1. Does talking about emergent “theology” even make sense?
2. I’m not saying that we have to have one “right” theology (or does it sound like I am? if so, call me out!), but can this kind of atonement be unifying for the mainline-evangelical divide?
3. Maybe it’s a worn out question, but is the word “emergent” still useful? (i.e., is it too insular, sub-cultured, taboo for evangelicals, etc.)
4. Finally, for those who will have listened to the Bass interview, I’m curious if anyone notices a relationship or contrast between what she’s talking about and what Tony is doing here…

(I wrote a more extended introduction to this topic that can be seen here).

Diana has an online home, blogs at Patheos, the Huffington Post and is a regular tweeter.

A bunch of different bloggers in my RSS reader are digging DBB’s book…you will too!

One Click to the Homebrewed Hotline!

This episode is brought to you by the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, a progressive, interdenominational graduate school that’s rooted in the integration of theology, psychology and culture. We value mission, relationality, praxis, and creativity and this is seen in the students training to be therapists, pastors, leaders and artists that innovate and excel in their calling and career.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. My theater is one block from UCLA and I appeared to be the oldest person in the theatre.
2. LA is wonderful for diversity. This was the most eclectic group of folks I have watched an opening night movie with since I watched the Waterboy in New York  (1998)
3. I have intentionally not watched a single preview or read anything about the movie whatsoever. I hate how previews ruin the narrative experience for me.

In short I will simply say this for the movie:

• It was better than advertised.
• The DeColonial themes in the first half of the movie were incredible (I will write more about this next week).
• If you are contemplating going, you should go.

That being said, I left the theatre with three quotes running though my head. The first relates to a scene where a young person (on the badteam) is killed and the crowd I was with … cheered. Now, up to that point violence had been a very bad thing and an unwanted/inevitable element of oppression and Imperial spectacle. I’m not even focusing on the violence against women angle here – just the violence alone. Chris Hedges talk of war movies the same way:

“They turn war into porn. Soldiers and Marines, especially those who have never seen war, buy cases of beer and watch movies like Platoon, movies meant to denounce war, and as they do, they revel in the destructive power of weaponry. The reality of violence is different. Everything formed by violence is senseless and useless. It exists without a future. It leaves behind nothing but death, grief, and destruction.” -  Death of the Liberal Class (p. 55).

As a Christian I am always amazed by an ever-present paradox.Often in my circles, folks who have air-tight orthodoxy cred and are in complete alignment with the Creedal formulations … have an openness to violence and a willingness for militarism the betrays the very story of the Jesus that they so passionately proclaim.  Then they run into somebody like John Caputo who’s orthodoxy & ontology are surely suspect by who gets Jesus right:

 “The kingdom of God is the rule of weak forces like patience and forgiveness, which, instead of forcibly exacting payment for an offense, release and let go. The kingdom is found whenever war and aggression are met with an offer of peace. The kingdom is a way of living, not in eternity, but in time, a way of living without why, living for the day, like the lilies of the field – figures of weak forces – as opposed to mastering and programming time, calculating the future, containing and managing risk. The kingdom reigns wherever the least and most undesirable are favored while the best and most powerful are put on the defensive. The powerless power of the kingdom prevails whenever the one is preferred to the ninety-nine, whenever one loves one’s enemies and hates one’s father and mother while the world, which believes in power, counsels us to fend off our enemies and keep the circle of kin and kind, of family and friends, fortified and tightly drawn.” -The Weakness of God, p. 15

I think I would rather be with Caputo and get Jesus right than to have the right Christology and miss the whole point with Jesus. The final quote comes from Franz Fannon in the Wretched of the Earth:

 ”The starving peasant, outside the class system, is the first among the exploited to discover that only violence pays. For him there is no compromise, no possible coming to terms; colonization and decolonization are simply a question of relative strength. The exploited man sees that his liberation implies the use of all means, and that of force first and foremost … (it) will only yield when confronted with greater violence.” (48)

I watched the movie tonight and drove home with these three quotes in my head. What do we do with movies meant to expose the Imperial spectacle of violence and end up glorifying it? Is this a case where the medium is the message and if violence is on a screen it can not communicate the badness of violence but exalts all violence? How do we as Christians navigate the spectacle of violence from our friends watching MMA to our congregants applauding war, electric chairs, drone attacks and torture? What if they have better Christology, Ontololgy, and Creedal subscription than we do … but get the violence question wrong and miss the whole point of Jesus’ life and death? And how do we who occupy the privileged place, the place of power, and the dominant  narrative recognize that violence in support of the hegemonic status quo is not the same as violence against and in revolt of it?  That what is good for the goose is not necessarily what is good for the gander if the goose is the only one armed to the teeth?

Post Script: I loved this conversation and am so grateful for the insightful and sincere responses. I am thankful for intelligent exchange without disrespectful or snarky dismissiveness.  As I have watched the conversation evolve, it has become clear that something else is needed in the post. So I want to add it for future clarity.

Empire is a particular formation of government and power and, given its pretence to be global, generates a ‘collective spirit’, an anthropological construction, that allows and approves of certain behaviours, reactions, feelings, and attitudes of the social and political actors, that shapes a certain logic and way of conceiving life, and that imposes and translates itself into values and a hegemonic Weltanschauung (ethos).[1]

To understand the profound impact of Liberalism’s demise, it helps to make sure one understands the difference between Classical Liberalism and it’s contemporary milquetoast descent that slinks around in straw-man form on our 24 hours news cycle.

Hedges explains (pp. 6-7) “Classical liberalism was formulated largely as a response to the dissolution of feudalism and church authoritarianism. … (It) has, the philosopher John Gray writes, four principle features, or perspectives, which give it a recognizable identity. It is :

• individualist, in that it asserts the moral primacy of the person against any collectivity;
• egalitarian, in that it confers on all human beings the same basic moral status;
• universalist, affirming the moral unity of the species;
• and meliorist, in that it asserts the openended improvability, by use of critical reason, of human life

Both John Cobb (Mainline)  and Clayton Crockett (Radical Political Theology) use very similar formulations in their recent Homebrewed  podcasts. Cobb, by focusing on the demise of the Mainline and Crocket, by focusing on the Evangelical and Religious Right, articulate the monumental shift in the religious-political landscape in the past century.

The Mainline denominations are in a collapse narrative and it makes perfect sense why when one examines both the way liberal thought partnered with power in the 20th Century and the way that conducted itself (largely) within the shifting landscape of post-war realities at home and globalization abroad.

“In a traditional democracy, the liberal class functions as a safety valve. It makes piecemeal and incremental reform possible. It offers hope for change and proposes gradual steps toward greater equality. It endows the state and the mechanisms of power with virtue. It also serves as an attack dog that discredits radical social movements, making the liberal class a useful component within the power elite. But the assault by the corporate state on the democratic state has claimed the liberal class as one of its victims…

The inability of the liberal class to acknowledge that corporations have wrested power from the hands of citizens, that the Constitution and its guarantees of personal liberty have become irrelevant, and that the phrase consent of the governed is meaningless, has left it speaking and acting in ways that no longer correspond to reality. It has lent its voice to hollow acts of political theater, and the pretense that democratic debate and choice continue to exist.”  (pp. 9-10)

We talked yesterday about the fictitious nature of the supposed Left-Right spectrum.  For those of us who participate in christ centered communities and organizations, what does this mean?  While incomplete, here is my little experiment to come up with a game-plan for a start.

1. We stop using the label ‘Liberal’ generically for anything that is not Conservative… especially to be dismissive.  Liberal is a very specific ethical  framework and it takes quite a commitment to liberal. It is not a default position.
2. We disavow the left-right , conservative-liberal split as farcical. It doesn’t exist. Obama is a Centrist Democrat. Romney is a Centrist Republican. Any idea that Obama is a radical is ridiculous.* We repent of lazy language & thought.
3. We wake up as the church that the role the Liberals used to play in the system does not function. There is no moderating or buffering presence to bring a corrective to the system. Thus, participating in the system as-it-now-exists will not fix the system. The corporate hold over every aspect of our political system is pervasive.
4. We step up as the church in the revelation that government is not going to fulfill the expectation to

• bring good news to the poor (Economy)
• restore sight to the blind (Medical)
• release to the captive  (Legal)
• lift up the broken hearted (Compassion)

The church can do these things! We have deferred to the political system for too long. We have outsourced our responsibility to society but now live with the remains of the bloated carcass Christendom. With the death of the liberal class resistance to corporate rule and unchecked consumerism is impotent. The Citizen’s United ruling is just one step on long trail … but we know where it leads.

There are churches in every community and there may be no greater existing potential than us! **  I know it sounds dreamy, but in the rest of this series I want to flesh it out. By the end, it might not seem as far-fetched as it does right now.

- Bo Sanders

*Wall Street campaign funding, legalizing assassination, and Guantanamo Bay are your first 3 hints.
**  The danger of course is that we keep voting based on two issues while turning a blind eye to  corporate rule, environmental deregulation, and perpetual war.

I read the book The Argument Culture by Deborah Tannen more than a decade ago and said out loud “Oh! So THAT is why I bristle at the either/or, Republican/Democrat, Right/Left dichotomy! – now it makes sense.”

I reject the spectrum at every turn … but recently I have begun to make an exception in regards to the spectrum. The spectrum is only applicable for someone who thinks that there is a spectrum. I will only try to get them to see that not everyone exists on a spectrum nor are they accounted for by a right-left binary. I no longer try to dislodge them of the notion as a whole – I only try to introduce that a spectrum is incomplete and insufficient.

Lately I have been overwhelmed – probably because it is an election year – by binary language and dualistic thinking. In these conversations I have discovered that it can be quite effective to introduce a simple word play. Spectrums are not straight lines – like light, they bend. 

You may think that this sounds overly simplistic but just think about the rise of the Tea-Party and the emergence of the Occupy movement coming in roughly the same window of time. Now those two groups would say that they stand for completely different things. To an outside observer, however, for all the minor distinctions they share a ‘Major’ concern: the system is broken and we can’t trust our leaders to fix it. 

This week, I am starting a series on my personal blog working though the Death of the Liberal Class by Chris Hedges. He begins the book with a 25 year old former Marine walking along a highway in Upstate NY that I driven. He is disillusioned with the economic and political systems and is getting ready to do something about it. At one point the young vet says:

“I could see there was no difference between the two main political parties. There is a false left/right paradigm which diverts the working class from the real reasons for their hardships.”

I am looking forward to the series in the exact inverse proportion to how much I am dreading this election cycle.* I have lots of Tea Party types in my life and many Occupy sympathizers as friends. I hear them both saying that the system is not working and that those in charge are not capable of fixing it, that we the people need to be more hands on.

Chris Hedges analyzes the crisis and articulates the root causes better than anyone I have found. The slant of the series will revolve around one simple question “If Hedges is right about the world – how then should we do theology? 

The Tea Party, the Occupy Movement, the global economic crisis and the ongoing wars are telling us something … and it is not about the End of Days. Doing theology in this environment will inherently have some continuity with historical approaches but it will require some tools that may not be familiar to us as well as some necessary innovations.

 The left and right think that they are far apart, but in a bent system they are closer than they would believe. At some point on an arc the far right and the far left almost touch. 

I end the way Hedges begins, with a quote from George Orwell:

At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is “not done” to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was “not done” to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.  “Freedom of the Press”

* Tavis Smiley has been saying for quite a while that this will be the ugliest and most racist election in modern times. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Guest post from…

Last winter, after a rather intense week-long bout with the flu that I was still struggling to overcome, I piled into a car with four friends and made the hour plus drive from Claremont to Malibu, where we were all registered to attend a two-day interfaith dialogue event that brought together students from Protestant, Catholic and Jewish schools throughout the Los Angeles area. In my current self-pitying state, still toting a box of Kleenex with me and feeling easily fatigued, traveling to this particular event was about the least fun way that I could envision spending my weekend. That evening, after the first set of dialogues and dinner had been completed, two friends and I bundled ourselves up and tromped down to a nearby beach.

We clambered over rocks until we reached the sand, where we took our shoes off and waded out into the clear, cold ocean water. In the darkness, as our feet slowly turned numb from the cold and we stood looking out, hypnotized by the horizon where the moon-lit sky bled into the water, my friend Nelda began to sing the first verse of the familiar hymn, “Amazing Grace.” Slowly, I found myself, unwittingly, perhaps mostly by habit, harmonizing alongside her. After we had finished singing, we fell silent, and Nelda began to pray, or rather to speak directly to God. “God, I have not felt you near in a damn long time. But just now, there you were again, creeping in.” She went on to pray a prayer of gratitude, but I was struck by her honesty with God, by the surroundings, and by the surprising places where an encounter with God becomes possible.

Too often, in these last few years at graduate school, where the academic “hermeneutic of suspicion” has grown stronger within me, I have found myself unable to attend church or read spiritual memoirs without feeling the inward desire to dissect the theological underpinnings and political correctness of each anecdote or example that is given. Is this feminist enough? Does it represent and acknowledge a diversity of opinions? And this list could go on. These are all good questions, but sometimes I have wondered whether or not it is time to begin cultivating my own hermeneutic of retrieval (as one of my professors so aptly named it) alongside all this deconstruction. So as I sat down to read Lauren Winner’s new book, Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis, I found within myself a fear that I would not be able to engage the material without feeling the need to turn this reading experience into an exegetical study.  
But Winner’s writing proved a pleasant surprise. Throughout her book, I found that Winner offered small glimpses of grace, without moving too far beyond these glimpses into a neat and tidy resolution. In the wake of a marriage that did not proceed or end as planned, Winner confronts her own crisis of faith, and struggles to sort out who and what she believes in. In a style that holds traces of Anne Lamott, Winner interweaves personal anecdotes, church history, spiritual practice, poetry, and myriad literary references into a meandering book about the journey with faith: whether one is in the joyful throes of a new conversion or stuck in the middle somewhere having somehow grown apart from God.

In my own experience, the journey with faith is messy, and not cleanly or easily resolved, and I appreciated Winner’s willingness to live with this mess.

In her short recommendation for the book, Phyllis Tickle suggests that Winner’s writing is “as breathtaking as it is rugged and beautiful.” I resonated with the simplicity with which Winner approached conversations about faith, resisting the temptation to intellectualize away the emotional elements of stories, while also pulling in source material ranging from Emily Dickinson to the desert monastics to more recent theologians like N.T. Wright. Winner spends much time exploring and unpacking the significance of the “middle” or the “in-between.” This is perhaps not a full-on “dark night of the soul” but rather a time marked by reinvention, distance, and perhaps even what Winner calls boredom with God and church. Although her book does show a movement from depression and crisis towards a new awareness of God, Winner does not suggest that the new openness she reaches is in any way an end, but suggests that perhaps this new openness is another middle phase, which will be reinvented or reimagined again.

Mennonite theologian Gordon Kaufman writes that, “…true faith in God is not living with a conviction that everything is going to be okay in the end because we know that our heavenly father is taking care of us. It is, rather, acknowledging and accepting the ultimate mystery of things, and precisely in the face of that mystery, going out like Abraham, not really knowing where we are going, but nevertheless moving forward creatively and with confidence…” Perhaps the challenge inherent in Winner’s book, and Kaufman’s thought, is to embrace and move forward within the nebulous middle, and to embrace the encounters with surprising creativity and grace when they come, along the way.

1. There is nothing better than  ’shuffle songs’ while driving
2. I could use any of these in a sermon – there is theology in all of them

So I got thinking about the top 5 albums that I love to do theology to/with?  Here is my list, I would love to hear yours

5. Alison Krauss  & Union Station: live

4. Five For Fighting: America Town 

3. Mumford & Sons: Sigh No More  

2. Blues Traveler: Four

1. OAR: In Between Now & Then  

You can see from my list that A) I like music with guitar & drums B) musicians who don’t dance while they sing C) rich lyrical tapestries

Honorable Mention goes to MeWithOutYou: Brother Sister 

This is a difficult era for those who find themselves committed to the values of scientific rationality and yet moved by the claims of a religious tradition.

That is how the preface to Philip Clayton’s new book The Predicament of Belief  begins.

I am always a little jealous of people who have a scientific background or who have a comprehension of philosophy. Don’t get me wrong, I read books like Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Green and dabble in Tillich or Moltmann. I love reading that stuff and get a lot out of it … but it is never comfortable or familiar. I was raised as a Billy Graham evangelical and have a Bachelor’s Degree in Biblical Studies. I have a Masters in Theology and in 20 years of ministry  I have preached over 1,000 sermons. I am a pastor. I adore the church. I think in community. It is both how I am built and how I have been groomed. This is part of why I wrote my thesis in Contextual Theology and am now pursuing a degree in Practical Theology.  I am obsessed with the church. 

“… It is hard to decide what parts of one’s tradition it makes sense to reject or retain.”

Here is the thing:

• I like when John Cobb calls into question the ousia of the Creeds and gets into the metaphysics of the hypostatic union.

But can I go with Philip’s brand of Adoptionism (in Christology)?

• I like when Philip talks about the origins of the universe including  the possibility of a multi-verse with Red Giant suns exploding and propelling their heaviest components out into the far reaches of the galaxy.

But can I go with him when he talks about the 5 layers of the Resurrection?

[Keep in mind that I said in a post last week that I could never imagine saying 3 things:  A) Paul didn't write that book B) Jesus probably didn't say that sentence and C) the Bible is wrong about that ]

It is interesting to me that Philip comes from much the same background as I do. It was because of his work that Claremont School of Theology first came onto my radar. I love his vision as the new Dean for the school and have gone on to read several of his books. His conversation with Tony Jones at an Emergent Theological cohort gathering is something I still reference monthly. I get what Philip is saying and I am down with what Philip is up to. Clayton speaks to me. I quote him often in sermons and coffee-shop conversations.

Anyone who knows me knows that I have no affection for tradition-for-tradition’s-sake and I don’t even have one conservative bone in my body. I have no affinity for ceremony, ritual, sacrament, or obligation apart from their narrative value. But as I read Clayton’s newest book, I am confronted on nearly every page with the question “do you know what this would mean?”  This is edgy stuff. His work is innovative and daring and would be well over the line for those that I report to for ordination and accreditation.

 So I am left with two questions:

• How does one preach this stuff?
• What would it look like to let go and fall all the way down the rabbit hole of this kind of thinking?

 I am saved from too much torment by two entirely different convictions.

• The world is changing.
• As people of truth, we need to deal in what is true.

 The first reminds me that the world has always changed – which is good and healthy and necessary. Some say that the only difference is that we have moved,in human civilization,  from incremental change to a period of exponential change.

The second reminds me that we can say things like “You shall know that truth…” or “All truth is God’s truth” and then act like they had it right in the 3rd century. No, if we are to be people of truth, then we need to pursue truth – wherever it leads.

Pursuing truth may lead us to conclusions that are different than our traditions have expressed. It may lead to us revisiting some things that we have held dear.  But what is the alternative?  To hang on to outdated and outmoded sentimentalities that have little to do with reality and the world as-it-is? Or to continue to play word games in our ecclesiastical silos that have little bearing on the real way people live outside our theological conclaves?

No. We need this. We must to do this. We have to take seriously the landscape that is in front of us and navigate the actual terrain that we occupy. Otherwise we risk living in the conceptual map and never walking on the land as it really is.

That is the predicament of believing Philip Clayton.

you can also check out this earlier post & video (and podcast)  for a great discussion 

Great Intro Text for $9.99 on Kindle!

spirituality?  Is it an asset to Christian Theology?

In this amazing video series Christian theologian and philosopher of science Philip Clayton tells scientific story of emergent evolution and invites the viewer into an evolutionary spirituality.  The video series was produced by Travis from The Work of the People \ Alter Video Magazine and recorded during the Emergent Village Theological Conversation at Claremont School of Theology.

Video #1 (Origins of the Universe)

It used to be that science was thought to have nothing to do with us. In this first of five videos
on “Emergent Evolution, Spirituality and God,” Philip Clayton explains how we are in fact part of the
grander story of the universe. This brief history of the cosmos shows how we belong to the narrative of
continual emergence that is the history of the cosmos. Understanding the physics of the universe’s birth
helps one to see how humanity fits into the universal story. (And what about life on other planets?)

Video #2 (Origins of Life)

Is life the result of a miraculous divine intervention, or is it an inevitable byproduct of the laws of physics
and chemistry — or both? In this second video of the series “Emergent Evolution, Spirituality and God,”
Philip Clayton describes current scientific thinking about the origins of life on earth. We see how life is
influenced from the beginning by natural selection, which produces increasingly complex organisms over
time. Can this process be seen as the means for generating increasing levels of spiritual possibility?

Video #3 (Symbiosis versus Competition)

We are often taught that evolution requires the concept of “competition” to be at its very core. In this
third video of the series “Emergent Evolution, Spirituality and God,” Philip Clayton talks about recent
scientific discoveries that show how organisms work together symbiotically to create ever new forms
of cooperation. More than just being “red in tooth and claw,” nature seems to act in powerful ways
through cooperation across a vast variety of ecosystems. It appears that some scientists have projected
their own (materialist, sexist, or atheist) values onto the data that they are seeking to interpret.

Video #4 (The Coevolution of Biology and Culture)

Could it be that more than just biology is involved in the evolutionary process? In this fourth video of
the series “Emergent Evolution, Spirituality and God,” Philip Clayton shares the concept of coevolution,
the idea that cultural and biological forces both play a role in determining the broader trajectory of
living organisms. Through the phenomenon of social learning—that is, being taught new skills by friends
and relatives that are not genetically programmed—we begin to see that evolution includes social and
cultural influences as well. Genes and cells are apparently not the only determiners of who we and the
other animals become; agency and intentions play central roles as well.

Video #5 (Evolution, Spirit, and Spirituality)

In the centuries after Newton, science was held not only to exclude “spirit” but also to disprove its
existence. In this final video of the series “Emergent Evolution, Spirituality and God,” Philip Clayton
argues that recent changes in the interpretation of science actually invite the non-material back into
the conversation. The question confronting us now becomes whether we think of the universe as
functioning only reductively—with all true explanations lying ultimately at the level of physics—or as
full of possibility, with newness emerging from sources all around us. If the universe is really “upwardly
open” in this way, science and religion may serve as partners in addressing life’s deepest questions:
what is the meaning of life? What matters; what is of value? And what does it all point to in the end?