a quick follow up to the post earlier this week

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

Three clarifications:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 In summary: 

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

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

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

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

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

* previous results do not guarantee future success  

Omnipotence:  A Compliment Jesus Wants You to Take Back

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 So God is not omnipotent.

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

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

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

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

___

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Theology is no different.

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

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

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

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

Tim Tebow is a phenomenon is the media these days. His Denver Broncos football team is on a 6 game winning streak and he is 7-1 as their starting Quaterback. Despite his apparent limitations (skills) he has orchestrated a series of amazing comebacks during the winning streak.  That is a big deal! Any fan would love to have their team on this kind of a roller coaster – come from behind – frenzy.

That, however, is not what makes this news.

This past week the Broncos beat my beloved Chicago Bears in overtime after a miraculous set of circumstances turned the game around in the 4th quarter. The Tebow’s teammate picks up the story there: 

“Tebow came to me and said, ‘Don’t worry about a thing,’ because God has spoken to him,” Woodyard told The Denver Post this week.

It was Woodyard who then stripped Bears running back Marion Barber to hand the football — and the game — back to Denver.

For Tebow, just another day at the office.

“I believe in a big God and special things can happen,” he said, after he erased a 10-0 deficit against Chicago in the final 2:08 of regulation. “It’s not necessarily prophesying, but sometimes you can feel God has a big plan.”

Woodyard, for one, has no lingering doubts: “For all the Tebow haters: You better start believing.”

I want to be clear this before I say anything else: I am not hating Tebow. In fact, I like him. I like how he uses his summers to serve needy people in other countries. I like that he works so hard. I like that he is unorthodox in his throwing motion and scrabbling technique. I like that he is so sincere and transparent about his faith.

Some people get upset that he is always cramming his faith in their face. That is not what concerns me. It is his brand of faith that concerns me.

I have been very forthright that A) this is the camp of evangelical-charismatic zeal that I was raised in and emerged from B) that the epistemology behind ‘hearing from God’ … and the interventionist assumptions behind a ‘super’ natural worldview are antiquated relics of a pre-modern understanding and are untenable in the 21st century. If you want a more nuanced explanation, listen to “Pentecost for Progressives” [here] - starting in  minute 55 OR read the summary [here].  

This is the season of Advent and we do tell the story of God speaking to Mary. That is not what I am contesting. 

I try to never-ever play this next card… but the cards that I have been dealt has forced my hand:

Are you under the impression that God cares who wins a football game and intervenes to bring it about but doesn’t care enough about the thousands of children who are starving to do something about it?

Are you telling me that god knows but doesn’t care, or that God cares but doesn’t know, or that god could do something but won’t or that god would do something but can’t?

Look, I am not an either-or guy. I hate binaries, dualisms, and us vs. them mentalities. But when someone says that this is how God is… sometimes it forces you to say that I believe this God to be a false creation of human imagination – nothing more than an athropomophic projection.  

______

Three things for clarification:

1. I could be wrong. He keeps winning and people say ‘If Joel Osteen wasn’t doing something right, he wouldn’t have 37,000 people who go to his church.”  In America, success = correct.
2. The Calvinists could be right. God chooses whom ‘He’ wants to. I don’t want to be one of those people who say “If God is not the way I believe they-she-he  is, the I am not going to worship them-her-him.” I will worship God no matter what way God turns out to be… but I happen to really like the Jesus of the 4 canonical gospels… just sayin’.
3. Tim Tebow himself has hinted in the past that he does not believe in an interventionist god. Bob Costas alluded to this to in his amazing speech.  It’s not Tebow that concern me – its Tebow’s fans.

Let me first of all start off by admitting that I cannot defend the whole enterprise called systematic theology. That is, I cannot defend it as some absolute set of propositions each of which relate to another in an eternal unified whole. I think that this point stands in two important sense. First, for those who would defend such a view of systematics, I don’t believe that they’re defending systematics as a whole but, generally, their own systematic positions, which is a power move to the utmost degree (conscientiously advocated or not). Systematics is and must remain open both in terms of the fallibility of human knowing and in terms of the flow of being in its becoming. Our propositions and understandings of God do, will, and must change. Neither can I defend the general hubris by means of which systematic theologians have upheld this discipline in the past.  Systematic theology is not an end in itself, which it has too often been taken to be, but a means toward the proclamation of the Word in thought, word, and deed.

For now, I want to focus on the critique that I believe is taking place tonight that academic theology is “impractical,” unable to do anything about the contemporary situation. To that I say, precisely.

Let me be clear, here: we must act within our world and open paths in this world toward peace, justice, and love. I will never decry the importance of something like “action,” often expressed as “activism.” However, activism acts on a worldview that it believes to be true, if not absolutely, then certainly with a great degree of probability. This is where disciplines like systematic theology come in.

Systematics and other academic-theological disciplines are, for one, activities in their own right. They are analyses of the world or past worlds as the are and have been such that in these worlds. The difference is, however, between the activity of thinking in systematic or academic theological terms and other activities (or activisms)is that thought is a manner of activity that opens up new interpretive possibilities–new ways of understanding the complex web of beings-in-relation that forms our world.

In this regard, the focus of systematic theology is not found in ensconcing a particular actuality (a possibility come to fruition through, say, bodily activity); it is found in opening up ever greater interpretive possibilities–interpretive possibilities that expose the complexities of the world in which we live at least enough to yield some humility in the theologian and activist alike. Systematics, then, brings nuance to a world that we too often want to interpret in the blacks and whites of “absolutely right” and “absolutely wrong,” which usually yields the violent logic of “me against them.” Systematics, then, holds a critical function (in the strict sense of critical), positing space between a overriding desire to act directly and the need to think that action through.

In saying this, however, I would contend that the proof of my argument is in the pudding. Thus, I want, secondly, to challenge skeptics of this idea to a task. For 30 days, read someone–an op-ed columnist, perhaps–with whom you greatly disagree. (I make my critical thinking students do something like this, by the way.) Come to know their thought and be able to think their thought after them to such a degree that you’re able to predict how they would be able to approach specific questions. Get into the intelligibility of what they say. I believe that you will have a simultaneous experience. You will be freed not from your disagreement of the person but of your desire to belittle them. This is no small step as too often it is our desire to belittle that deprives from basic understandings of opposing positions. You will also become freed, however, to see through holes in your previous worldview such that, even if you’re still not open to this particular person’s thought in and of itself, you are open to new positions and new possibilities from other persons with competing worldviews.

Take all that and apply it to the attempt to illuminate a basic theological worldview, and you’ll hopefully see the importance of systematic theology and its practice. Systematic theology illuminates new possibilities for the expression of faith for the activist and theologian alike such that neithers’ expression could remain absolute in its contextuality.

Does this, by the way,  mean that the activist must stop her work? Absolutely not! It simply reminds the activist that it takes more than their work to open the possibility of their work in the first place. Her work will open up new grounds by means of which to think through world, for sure; but it also rests on the illumination of worldviews that both she and others have opened up through theological and philosophical exploration in the first place.

This is part 3/3  for Tripp and Bo sitting down to chat about the terms Evangelical, Progressive, Emergent and Liberal.

A number of authors come up. Here is a handy list of the books that get mentioned and any relevant Homebrewed podcast they appeared in.

Stanley Hauerwas who wrote The Peaceable Kingdom and Resident Aliens.

Marjorie Suchocki (episode 39 ) authored The Fall to Violence and In God’s Presence.

Peter Rollins appeared in episode 91 and wrote How (not) to Speak of God.

Brian McLaren (episode 93 )  has both Everything Must Change and a New Kind of Christianity.

John Dominic Crossan (episode 34) has written many book including God and Empire.

Stanley Grenz authored a list of amazing books including a Primer to Post-Modernism and Beyond Foundationalism.  My favorites is probaby  Theology for the Community of God and

• Why haven’t Emergent folks joined the mainline denominations?
• Why have the negatives of evangelicalism been so easy to describe and virulently rebuke, while the negatives of the mainline denominations have barely shown up in Emergent concerns?
• Why hasn’t the Emergent critique of evangelicalism’s involvement with the American nation-state and its tendency toward creating theologically exclusive boundaries not found root in a critique of mainline denominations, whose political interests also conflate the church with nation-state interests?

I do not need to recap Deacon Bo’s responses, but I’m especially fond of the way he answers the third question. I’d highly suggest reading it. That said, I’d like to respond to Deacon Bo and Brandon Morgan alike concerning the first question asked: Why haven’t Emergent folks joined the mainline denominations? I want to respond with another question: why would we mainliners want emergent folk to join our churches? I’ll proceed by proposing and rejecting a few possible answers. (Note the caveats at the end.)**

One reason for a mainliner to suggest this move is that, indeed, the mainline side of this debate is in material decline and has been for some time. (I want to be absolutely clear, here, I’m speaking hypothetically, here, not at all of Morgan’s intentions.)  As Deacon Bo rightly points this fact out, the mainline churches are dying. “Death,” however, is a subtle, spiritually loaded term thrown around by emergent folk too often (again, not by Bo in his post), and it signifies that, somehow, God has rejected us and our stubborn, recalcitrant ways. I doubt it—at least not the God to whom I pray. In fact, this death may be little more than the consolidation of over-extended parishes, which will occur over the next 7-15 years. After such a consolidation, there will probably be a critical mass able to sustain each parish, Diocese, and affiliated publishing companies.

But after such a consolidation, I would still want to ask, so what? Why would we want persons to come and join our parishes who do not value the same facets of the Christian faith that we value? This need not mean we reject anyone who does not want to be a part of the parishes that we currently run, nor does it mean that we ought to devalue their persons. However, I would certainly question the wisdom of making any overarching attempt at appeasing such persons and trying to get them to join this particular club. Indeed, there’s plenty of space in the US and, frankly, in the Kingdom of God for various expressions of Christ to co-exist (prayerful aside: Dear God help me for just quoting the corniest bumper-sticker ever made) through a variety of structures. Thus, I again ask in response to both emergent and mainline folk alike who want emergent folk to join mainliners: why does there need to be a hegemony of Christian values or structures, either mainline or emergent? Why must we two room together when, in fact, we could simply be friendly neighbors?

Of course, I also offer the same question to emergent folk who, at times, wrongly seem to believe that there is no room for mainliners within the Kingdom. Thus, I can put the above re-phrasal of the above question in another way, too, one more explicitly directed to emergent folk: other than what I perceive as valid critiques of the mainline church’s over-politicization of its institutional structures to the end of often forgetting the importance of the proclamation of the Gospel, when I hear critiques from emergent folk of the things that Mainline folk tend generally to value—tradition and historical lineage, liturgical and unvaried worship style, community-church orientation—I always think to myself that those are precisely the reasons that I attend, and live within, the Episcopal Church and its structures. I want mainline churches, in fact, to get out of their over-politicization (as Bo mentions) and remember their dedication to their traditions–theological and liturgical–as important out-flowings of the Spirit! That said, I think Bishops are important spiritually, historically, and functionally (with the Lutherans, however, I affirm the absolute equality of ALL believers and give Bishops no “ontological” priority); I want a liturgy that I know, and trust, that allows me to ground my week in the constancy of the God’s loving Spirit; I value the creedal expressions and interpretations of a faith that have outlasted any critique of them, that give voice in a way far more profound than they gain credit for these days in expressing  God as Emanuel; and I greatly value the communities who center themselves in service and worship around precisely these things. Indeed, were those things changed, I would go to a different church!

Let me offer up, however, what are perhaps the two most important reasons I would question any attempt at trying to draw emergent folk into the Mainline. First, and on a very critical note, there is for me a dangerous trend in emergent circles that I believe they have appropriated from their previous Evangelical circles–it is a trend, at any rate, I try to leave behind in my past life. They are far too reliant on big personalities to ensure their success as communities of worshippers for me to be comfortable with. I don’t want to be a part of a church that points to a person in the form of a pastor or a spiritual leader; I want a church whose leader deflects attention by pointing to Christ himself and the love he exuded. For whatever failures one can attribute to the mainline, including being anti-entrepreneurial (a critique that I often hear and very much agree with), its peoples do not rely on cults of personality. They rely on structures that, yes, are sometimes all too absent personality but nonetheless able to point toward God, through Christ and his proclamation, despite the person “in charge” of them. (Whether the will continue to do so is a different question.) Unless these facets of emergent life are left behind, I don’t actually want emergent folks in mainline churches, even if I’m happy to worship beside them and appreciate the fullness of their Christian faith despite them not existing within my structures.

Second, and on a far friendlier note, I ultimately think that Deacon Bo is right: generally, emergent folk don’t want to be here. They find spiritual fulfillment and divine love elsewhere. Why should I want to detract from their experience by trying to right them and bring them forcibly “for their own good” into my community? Despite even my harshest critique above, emergent folk are doing fine, and I have no wish to take away from what they have found.

**I completely understand that certain emergent folk do, in fact, reside within the mainline church structures and want to remain there. But, it seems to me, such emergent persons are often “ignored” within the emergent community itself. One questions that I have, then, is whether there are several “senses” to the word emergent, including who fits where and why. Those to whom I’m responding in this blog probably would not include emergent “sympathizers,” for lack of a better term, already within mainline church structures. It would be those who think mainline structure are either (a) meaningless or (b) pointless.

The New York Times just published a storyabout a cadre of Bishops  in Alabama suing the state over the passage of a new and tough immigration law. They (rightly) claim that this law is so ambiguously written that it could disallow them the right to act toward immigrants as they claim Christians are commanded: as good Samaritans. I don’t pretend to know what the right answer for immigration reform is in the US; I tend to think that the way that each side often looks at the current issue is, on the right, xenophobic and, on the left, unsustainable. However, I’m not trying to conjure another simplistic debate one way or the other in this post. (I’m implicating my above views in this st

atement.) What I would like to say is that I’m in complete solidarity with my own Episcopal Church, the Methodist Church, and the Roman Catholic Church of Alabama on this matter and that they and their suit will be in my prayers.

Perhaps more importantly from a theological-political level, however, the issue raises for me the importance of the separation of Church and State in the U.S. and the tension that exists between the ultimate allegences of each institution. On the one hand, the Church stands always and forever for a Kingdom that we cannot bring but must do our best to imitate in the here and now; they are right to see this as a “Kingdom issue,” for lack of a better term. In this Kingdom, there is neither Jew or Greek, man or woman. All tribalisms die. On the other hand, the State necessarily stands for the collective interests of its people, protecting them and their material and legal well-being first. (I’m not claiming that’s what the State of Alabama is actually doing, by the way; I’d probably believe just the opposite. I won’t doubt that the State is trying to protect its citizens, however.) This means the state is a tribal formation grounded in the idea of common-law and heritage.

However these tensions between Church and State ought to play themselves out within individuals and institutions, the beauty of this particular issue is how it exemplifies the impossibility of the situation: that these two institutions do and will butt heads. If they don’t, one of the two institutions is doing something wrong!

Carol Howard Merritt from Tribal Church.org did a god job clarifying her position here. She says:

I agree that progressive and liberal are theological terms as well as sociological ones.

I like “progressive” as a theological term, because the most vital aspect of my faith is a liberating one. As someone who moved from evangelicalism, a key to my spiritual evolution has been understanding the freedom of God and God’s continual liberating process. As we move from abolitionism, to the child-labor movement, to anti-poverty, to civil rights, to gender equality, to creation care, to affirming LGBTs, this has been an incredible, liberating time in our American theology. It’s exciting how our theology has often been at the forefront of making these changes. “Progressive” recognizes and celebrates God’s expanding freedom.

That said, I think that Tony’s right in wanting a new term. “Progressive” did seem to move directly from the political sphere to the theological one, so I’m a bit uncomfortable with that. Also, I believe in the *ideal* of progression and expanding freedom, but I’m afraid that the ideal does not always match with reality. For instance, our business practices no longer allow for child labor in the US, but we thoughtlessly employ children overseas. Is that true progress? When we use the term “progressive” are we feeding a modernist mindset and deluding ourselves into thinking that everything is getting better? Those are my concerns…

Daniel Kirk continues to be a blog worth reading and he has had a lot to contribute lately.

Greg Horton had a characteristically intelligent and … Horton-esqe take. Deep stuff at the Parish.

Austin Roberts, my close friend, focused on the Evangelical aspect , wanting to tighten it up a little bit. We disagree about that. But the conversation is vibrant.

Brian McLaren  made some predictions and pointed people to both Tony Jones’ and Roger Olson’s contributions.

Speaking of Roger Olson, he was a guest on Doug Pagitt’s radio show in hour 2 this week and took it up a WHOLE other notch. (it’s also available on I-tunes)

This has given me a lot to think about and I continue to flesh out the frameworks and philosophical underpinnings that drive this conversation.  Please feel free to point me to any resources or locations that may be appropriate.

As the old saying goes, “when it rains, it pours.” And somehow, the world has been pouring spirituality down on me as of late! I have to admit, I’ve rather enjoyed it.

Despite this pouring out of spirituality in my life, I’ve noticed a theme emerge in these spiritual formation courses and opportunities that need not be there. Often times, spiritual organizations “market” (for honest lack of a better term) themselves in such a way that they will help you to get “deeper” into the divine than any silly dogmatic, doctrinal, or intellectual statement could ever bring you; they’ll help you to enter into God more personally. While the latter clause certainly presents a good goal, I simply wonder whether the former method—getting beyond doctrinal statements and properly reflective thinking—is necessary to it.

The unfortunate view that we moderns and “post-moderns” have adopted with regard to intellectuality is that we tend to think of it as somehow “neutral,” “unaffected by the world around it,” “objective,” and after truths for which we have no feeling. (“Postmoderns,” if this word means anything in particular, would generally deny that we are neutral but tend to uphold neutrality as something like an ideal for perfected reason). So we conceive of the height of intellect in terms of calculative procedures: hypothesizing, experimenting, verifying, and tabulating. We’ve defined thinking, in other words, by the empirical method that emerges from the Enlightenment and its focus on the natural sciences. I actually don’t think this is such a bad view of intellect in certain situations, but I do think it constitutes a reduction of the intellect and its ideality such that, with this notion in mind, it is no wonder that talk of getting beyond intellect for getting deeper into the divine emerges in this context.

Yet, intellectualism has not always been thought of in this way. Take Plato. For Plato, the intellect is something like another desire. That is, in the same way that a hungry stomach desires food, the intellect desires truth. Indeed, for Plato, the intellect is given over to an erotic drive to reach the Truth, the entirety of which I need not get into. The point being thus: the intellect is far from a neutral observer of things that merely convey s ideas through words to a detached mind. The intellect is passionate, directed, and “in love.” The intellect is our movement through the real to God in God’s self, at least for Plato.

We can see this Platonic principle at work, too, in a myriad of Christian mystics and thinkers, namely, the idea that the intellect does not merely hinder our relationship with the divine, but is a properly spiritual avenue for expressing that relationship. Such an understanding has been generally called “faith seeking understanding.” One need not go any further than Anselm, the founder of this saying, to understand the true context of this saying. His Monologion especially is an intellectual appropriation of a prior faith given to him by the spirit and expressed in words. It is a prayer, or an intellectual reflection on his prayers, that grasps at doctrines such as the nature of God’s Trinitarian being and Goodness, among other things.

This isn’t to say that Anselm believes himself to understood or thought through his faith fully, which is why there is a sense in which “going beyond intellect” holds some sway in spirituality. Rather than “getting beyond” intellect, I think the better way to think through the issue is in the following ways. On the one hand, one cannot properly think through the being of God without being centered in God’s being pre-cognitively; on the other hand, if one is brought into the being of God pre-cognitively, then thinking is a perfect expression of one’s spirituality and one of the major means through which we come to, worship, and exist in relationship to God.

In other words, thinking through doctrine such as the nature of the being of the God-man, the Trinity, the idea of salvation, etc., is anything but a hindrance to entering into a deeper spiritual relationship with God. I would at least claim that, as a Christian, thoughtful reflection on precisely these doctrines allow us to draw ever nearer to the divine and the divine’s love for us, found for us on all sides of the cross. The key, then, is to simply not accept the statements dogmatically—as calculative beliefs that, should we ascent to them, allow us entrance into heaven or, should we reject them, send us straight to hell. Nor should we accept such doctrines as somehow objectively and empirically verifiable, able to be found without God bringing us specifically into God’s own being such that these become meaningful doctrines in the first place. Rather, these latter two types of thinking are the ones that today’s spirituality promises to get us beyond—and rightly so!

But let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Doctrinal statement is already a part of spirituality, for one can only write it and utter it with any form of seriousness by already being within the spirit.

All this said, I’m working through these spiritual disciplines and books, and I will definitely continue to do so. I’ve benefitted greatly from them. However, I would also like the chance to more deeply engage in a spirituality of the Cross, a spirituality of the Resurrection, a spirituality of Trinitarian relations or of the Spirit intimately involved with all these movements and events, even known only as such in and through them. Obviously, such spiritualities are out there, and it would probably, at most, take some light googling to find spiritual exercises focused in such doctrines. But it is worth noting that, however such spiritualities and spiritual formation courses would be put together with such an emphasis, they would need to retain a deep intellectual content to them—a content that neither takes one away from doctrinal formulation nor from spiritual depth but pushes one deeper into both.

Such spiritualities would require that we change our manner of thinking about what thinking is and is supposed to do. Rather, we would need to take seriously the statement found in the picture at the beginning of this post—a saying of Heidegger’s posted at the beginning of a trail in the Black Forest dedicated to him. The sign says something like, “in thinking is each thing long and slow.” That’s probably good spiritual advice.

(Semi-spoiler alert.) The movie started out as a series of semi-separate, boring stories that, out of nowhere, converge into a chaotic mess of (quirky) murder and mayhem. Amidst this mayhem, literally no one is in control and no one can take control. The CIA operatives in the movie don’t even know what to take from the chaos. Accordingly, a bunch of people die and no one has much to say about why.

I soon realized, however, that the reason the movie depressed me so much was because this “phenomenon” is far closer to real life and how we experience life than it’s often comfortable to admit. Not that people are constantly dying violent deaths in my world, but there are certainly places where this threat is very real even. More importantly, the movie drew out through its somewhat lighthearted approach to this chaos the blithely uncaring nature and meaninglessness of life itself when viewed in this manner. The Coen Brothers, in other words, would really make great French existentialists!

Having given the movie a couple days to sink in, what it has solidified in my mind is something very important: that, whether they mean to be or not, the Coen Brothers are two of the greatest modern interpreters of sin that I can think of. The reason I say this is because they constantly show, it seems, in each movie that they make that the conditions of the world are such that what I want to call “sin” is inevitable, built into our being, and lightheartedly uncaring about our involvement with it. Sin, in this regard, is not found in individual acts—though it is there, too—but in the very conditions of the world that allow us to act or force us to act. We can’t get out of it, around it, or through it because the conditions of the world are fundamentally skewed.  Of course, I have no clue whether they would or could express the insight as such (sin is, after all, an inherently religious concept), but certainly this is the interpretive possibility I take from it.

If I left the story here, I would need to go get some more ice-cream. However, I still think that Luther was correct when he posited that the recognition of sin also allows for the recognition of the Gospel: that, actually, things need not be how they currently are—no matter how strong the grips of sin in the world currently seem—and that, though we are powerless against the corrupting conditions of sin, God is not and does not stand idly by allowing sin a full rule of the world. God, rather, plunges into sin, taking up the chaos and nothingness of death into God’s self on the cross. So there’s that, too.

The main point, however, is that I still think “Burn after Reading” is one of the least enjoyable films I’ve ever seen. Then again, most philosophy and theology books are completely un-enjoyable, too, but I’ve learned to enjoy the fruits that come from reflecting on them. So it is with “Burn after Reading.” I never want to step near the film again, but the Coen Brothers, in this movie, pushed me into a series of thoughts that, while difficult, have allowed me to re-appropriate myself and my world in what I believe is a more fruitful mann

The first point to recognize is that, after the market crash of 2008, the economic situation around the world, including the US, has significantly changed. Fulltime jobs with benefits and retirements are becoming a long-lost reality to some of us. Rather, a host of persons are recognizing that the only way in which to make money during this dismal economic state is to work several jobs at once, some through traditional means and some through entrepreneurial means. In neither case, however, are health insurance benefits a built in provision. Individuals, rather, must be able to buy these benefits on their own. Herein lies the first rub.

One can really only gain access to health insurance right now if one has a job through which one can gain a bargaining position against insurance companies; this tends especially to be the case if one has a pre-existing conditions (which many, if not most, persons do according to insurance standards). My wife and I are fortunate; she has a good, fulltime, benefitted job, and I am able to buy into her insurance program through her work. Before that, however, I had no insurance. This was not for a lack of trying to gain insurance nor an unwillingness to pay an insurance premium. It so happens that I have a pre-existing condition called asthma, which means that I was rejected from several insurance packages, even the large-deductible, low-pay insurance plans called “catastrophic insurance.” In other words, hard-working, entrepeneurial people who are willing to pay for insurance packages cannot even gain access to such packages if they want to, not without a federal mandate forcing insurance companies to offer insurance packages to such persons.

Second, I must admit to personally seeing some benefits to the new economic situation outlined in the second paragraph. Old and dying institutions—their structures and their modes of compensation—may finally get a chance to do just that: rest in peace. Moreover, an entire order built around them and their demands may itself teeter. Why is this possibly a good thing (and one can only be hopeful without being dogmatic that things will turn out “better”)? When one works several jobs at once, entrepreneurially piecing together several partial jobs into a living, there is a certain amount of freedom one can gain, especially from the traditional demands of managers, work-weeks, and work-places. These demands will, of course, be replaced by other demands, but, with some luck, hopefully more based on the values and schedule of the entrepreneur, who can now choose to work mostly from home, set aside time to spend with one’s children, etc. In other words, there may be new economic opportunities that allow an entrepreneur to live a more fulfilling family life while still contributing to the overall economy.

I happen to know several persons who are thinking in precisely this way and want to take a chance and step out entrepreneurally into this new economy and stake a small claim. Presumably, too, this is the kind of creative self-expropriation that conservatives who despise Obamacare concern themselves. What, however, is the main reason that persons do not in fact jump out into this new economy and try to develop their nascent but burgeoning ideas? They don’t want to subject their children to the possibility of losing the health benefits attached to their current jobs—health benefits that, again, they can gain in no other way than through such jobs. Herein arises a concrete contradiction on the right: Obamacare would, for all its faults, encourage entrepreneurship by allowing persons who want to separate themselves from dying corporate institutions to do just that while retaining the main benefit of working at older institutions: access to health insurance.

With these points made, I don’t try to offer anything particularly new or innovative here, and readers probably have a myriad of other reasons for both accepting and rejecting the proposals. However, I’ve simply wanted to offer a couple of thoughts on why conservative opposition to Obamacare on economic grounds is absolutely misplaced. Just the opposite: Obamacare will help hard-working, entrepreneurial people to continue to add economic strength and vitality to a dying economy.

In my next political post, I’ll give you my reasons for deciphering my political positions not by party but by joint opposition to the US Chamber of Commerce and the AARP.

1. Socially-conscious but not reductionist: I generally affirm Christian progressivism’s forays into fights for gay-rights, its support of ecological responsibility, and its dedication to helping the underprivileged. After all, I find all of these issues of utmost contemporary social importance and believe that, to no small degree, the Gospel helps us to address social problems prophetically. There is a huge difficulty, however, when progressives confuse these principles of their social morality with the Gospel itself; they too often implicitly believe not that God came to save the world as a whole but to ensure that we drive hybrids and vote Democrat. The Gospel, however, is and must be grounded in something beyond social issues and progressive answers to them or else the Gospel would provide no means for actually assessing such issues; rather, the Gospel would become a piece of propaganda defined by these social issues and our answers to them. I personally would have no interest in such a Gospel.

2. Christianity is not a gateway religion: I’m afraid that I’m not onboard with my progressive, mystical buddies who think that, by affirming some ultimate reality beyond the Christian faith, they are engaging in some deeper and more coherent form of faith. I’m Christian, rather, in the sense that, as a Christian, I’ve found myself able to love because God has first loved me. God is, after all, love; and when I say this, I don’t mean that we can throw away the term God in its Christian form and retain the term love. I mean that love only makes sense in the prior and cross-bound form of God as Trinity. My desire to communicate with persons, for instance, of “other faiths” (for a total lack of a better term) does not reflect my desire to overcome old Christian dogmatic statements (pursuit of the truth allows me that luxury) but stems from the self-expropriations pushed for, and demanded by, the dynamic persons of the Godhead. God, as Trinity, is always moving toward “the other,” including us.

3. Yes, sin is social…and still original. The talk of original sin in the neo-Calvinistic forms gets old; but so, too, does the talk of something like the intrinsic goodness of humanity in progressive circles. The benefits of the latter group, however, is that it has rightly recognized something like a proper “ontology of sin”: the fact that sin is not simply a matter of whether I myself am good or bad but that my self—intrinsically relational as it is—is bound to sin because the cosmos (yes, even so-called nature) as a whole is bound to the violence of sin. However, there is a certain lack of recognition, sometimes, that Progressive solutions to the problem of sin are as bound to sin as the rest of the cosmos. Progressives too often think that they’ve found the right set of issues and answers .If the world as a whole, however, is bound to sin, so, too, are the progressives who try to contain it, and the benefit of admitting to this fact is twofold. First, we can recognize that there is only so much that we human person can do to set things right and that we ultimately need God, who comes to us on a cross, to set thing right. Second, we can recognize that even our attempts to set things right are bound to a certain amount of failure: they will advocate in some manner not God’s will and intentions for the world but our own as we try to re-orient that which we call “Good” to our own positions. Knowing this allows us to rightly settle for “better” rather than “best” with the full recognition that our own understanding of what is both “better” and “best” are, for now, intrinsically skewed.

“There is plenty if we share.”

Scripture: Acts 2:42-47

I dropped the mic and had one word left over. I was put on the spot, and would love to hear your thoughts and feedback about what you would have done. I think it should encapsulate the gospel, and I probably would have said something different if I had been given more time.

By the way, I won the preach-off contest! My victory dance could use some guidance. I decided to go with the Carlton dance from Fresh Prince.

If you could only say seven words, what sermon would you preach? You can also share a pic.

Me, after winning the preach-off and $100:

Better yet, call in your seven-word sermon to 678-590-BREW, and we’ll play it on an upcoming podcast episode.

Rachel & Tripp Talking 2 from tripp fuller on Vimeo.

Fitch cites Henri de Lubac asking this question: “Have we become a society of individuals bound together by a form of spectating?” (p. 156) – spectating that makes us invisible in the world . . . Our ability to gather is pretty impressive, Fitch says, and we are helped by video and podcast technologies.  The danger, obviously, is the church’s identity is formed prior to engagement with the world, and concentrically, which intensifies its concerns for it’s own subsistence.  Inevitably, Jesus is domesticated, and the church becomes imperialistic.  Instead, the church’s identity, Fitch argues, must always come into being in the event of mission, which is the encounter with the other through the outpouring of God’s love in Christ into the world (p. 159).  In so doing, we inhabit the posture of servants to the world and incarnate compassion while using our different gifts.  This is somewhat like Yoder’s on-the-ground politic, where loving the world and refusing conformity are two sides of the same coin (p. 163).

But Fitch stops short of suggesting that we can’t have a material church and agrees with de Lubac – namely, that we should be centered around the Eucharist (as opposed to, say, preaching).  This where a “mutual sharing of a new justice in Christ’s reigns – at the Eucharist table.  Here we become the justice of God as opposed to individuals who campaign for it as a slogan in the world” (p. 156).  Being sure to connect this with actual activity in society though, Fitch notes William Cavanaugh’s illustration of the Chilean base communities in the 1980’s.  He draws a line between their resistance to Pinochet’s regime and the potential for citizens of Western liberal democracies to similarly challenge the totalizing structure of capitalism – being “in but not of” – by creating alternative forms of local economics and leaving behind all fears of financial insecurity.  So with the emphasis on the renouncing of worldly power, not getting assimilated into the violence of the world, loving adversaries, etc., we are essentially left with an Anabaptist politic.

An objection can always be raised here by those with perhaps a hunger for significant change and justice for the poor and oppressed on this side of the fully realized Kingdom.  Should we not vigorously struggle to curtail institutional sin?  Indeed, the biggest weakness with this theo-political vision could be that it is either too vague or just not very political – that is unless the term is broadened to mean something less useful.  Of course, all worldly political schemes are fragmented and risk becoming ideological, but isn’t the risk still worth taking?  Or does this compromise our witness?  Which is more important?  This debate is not new, however, and the strong pacifist position is certainly a Christian option.

And obviously the more realistic, potential shift that people in the Christian Right camp could make is more likely to be toward something like “The Politics of Jesus” (Yoder) than anything resembling quasi-leftist activism, so this critique might not be completely fair in light of Fitch’s overall project.

The second minor criticism I have would be that Fitch does not consult Zizek’s most recent work where he interacts much more directly with Badiou, and then Christianity itself, with its “perverse core,” reached through a particular reading of St. Paul (The Puppet and the Dwarf, The Fragile Absolute, The Ticklish Subject).  Fitch acknowledges this though and confesses that it might be a weakness – and I don’t think this need take away from the merit of his conclusions.

There is much more here, including a good discussion of the missional and emergent church movements in the epilogue.  In sum, this book is rich and wise.  I think the timing of its release is interesting.  If it isn’t too bold to speculate, could we see Fitch as sharing the concerns with Rob Bell in Love Wins, at least in a complementary fashion, with evangelicalism as their common “mission field”? (despite some clear disparities in anticipated scope and size of their audiences).  And Fitch has provided excellent commentary on his blog in my view on the recent frenzy surrounding Bell’s book, as well as a penetrating diagnosis of the psychology and ideology of The Gospel Coalition. Fitch is careful and precise.  In this regard, I see him doing a great service to evangelicalism, in a sensitive, in-depth way – and with good leadership.

Let me be clear, here: there is a place where universalism can go wrong, a point that our buddy Tripp, through Steve Harmon, has already made. That is, when it takes a stance that turns into is something like a demand that God save all. We ought not and need not go there. Rather, God—his eating with tax-collectors and prostitutes—seems to speak enough to the possibility of universal salvation that we need not demand it of God. Let God be whom God is, and if the God reveals God’s self in Christ, I trust God fully with both my, and everyone else’, ultimate fate. So let universalism reject any demand that God fulfill our hopes and desires for such. Let it affirm, however, that God just may be the one who, in God’s love for the whole world as revealed in Christ, gave us such hopes and desires in faith.

On the other hand, let us universalists also take to the offense, lovingly reminding those who would sneer at this possibility both of God’s love and of God’s freedom. Indeed, those who a priori reject universalism, it seems, can only do so by denying God a possibility. To deny God a possibility, however, is to attempt force God’s hand in a way that it ought not be forced: in accordance with my demands and recognition of what I believe ought to be the case. In other words, it is to set up an idol not in the image of a calf but in the image of myself and my demands on how God ought to be. I might remind the reader, however, that this very move is what many , including Augustine and Luther, interpret original sin to be.

For instance, one of my favorite anti-universalist arguments in this regard is based in the notion of double-predestination. Because God has offered salvation to some, God must deny salvation to others; that is, a yes to some means a no to others. How absurd! Since when is a yes to some a no to others? If I bought one child an ice-cream cone am I denying another an ice-cream cone? I suppose it depends on how many ice-cream cones I have, and if I’m the God who creates out of nothing, I should have plenty. The notion of double-predestination is an attempt, then, to unleash a finite logic onto the infinite God, and it demands far more than a universalist, who only ever affirms the possibility of universal salvation, ever could.

I write this, then, only as a platform to give universalists some confidence. The position, when it does not demand of God something that we cannot demand, seems more in accordance to me with self-expression of God in Christ than the alternative. In other words, I want here to give a universalist call to arms. By a call to arms, however, I mean a call to open our arms to the degree that we can to all those whom God can, just may, and I hope will save, including those who would have us sent to hell for such a position.

February 10-11, 2011
Thursday: 9:00 AM-9:00 PM
Friday: 9:00 AM-5:00 PM

Marcus Borg
Carol Howard Merritt
Brian McLaren
Richard Rohr

in conversation with

Philip Clayton
David Felten
Shane Hipps
Brian Ammons
Nadia Bolz-Weber
Rachel Held Evans
Tripp Fuller
Gary Kinnaman
Eliacin Rosario-Cruz
Mark Scandrette
Anthony Smith
Spencer Burke
Derek Webb

Big Tent Christianity (BTX) is the convergence of new and old ways of being and becoming the Church:

Progressive and Emergent
Denominational and Non-denominational
Large and Small Faith Communities
Describable and Undescribable

BTX brings people together from across the country to proclaim what unites us as followers of Jesus in this modern world. More than a dozen leading Christian voices will break through boundaries to share new and innovative forms of ministry and renewal. You will be inspired by their visions of how we can speak even more powerfully in and to the world of the 21st century.
The gathering will include presentations, responses and discussion with speakers and with each other. There will be a Big Tent of music with creative versions of traditional music along with contemporary music–myriad ways that reflect our common ground.

Location
The Church of the Beatitudes
555 Glendale Ave., Phoenix, AZ 85021

Registration

$89 ($99 after 1/21/2011)
$59 students

To register online using credit card:
Big Tent Registration

Or send check with completed form to:
AzFCT
10187 E. Sundance Trail
Scottsdale, AZ 85262

Lodging
A block of rooms is being held at:
The Best Western InnSuites
$90 plus tax per night

Sorry, no time for commentary on each of these. All of them are well-worth checking out if you missed any. I’m off to ring in the new year on 6th Street in Austin. It was a great year and we look forward to 2011!

Posts:

1. John Caputo’s Fall 2010 Classes….in audio!

2. Philip Clayton invites Daniel Dennett to a debate: Will the New Atheist Accept or Hide (again!)?

3. What is wrong with ‘Progressive Theology?’

4. A megachurch pastor comes out of the closet, scandal free

5. Stuff Liberal Christians Like: #1 Saying, “I’m Not One of Those Christians.”

6. Stuff Liberal Christians Like: #2 Coexist Stickers

7. Disagree to Agree: Philip Clayton and Daniel Dennett

8. I Survived the Christian Right: Ten Lessons I Learned on My Journey Home

9. What Would Google Do? When a theology class reads it

10. Defining the Secular: Charles Taylor (pt. 3)

Podcasts:

1. Anne Rice on Quitting Christianity: Homebrewed Christianity 83

2. NT Wright! Homebrewed Christianity 79

3. Marcus Borg, a “Novel” Jesus Scholar: Homebrewed Christianity 84

4. The Fascinating Life and Music of Kevin Prosch: Homebrewed Christianity 77

5. The Teaching Company Legend Phillip Cary on Homebrewed Christianity!

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

Miracle Whip

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

Ipod Nano

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

Seasonique

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

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

I will not get into the messy process of trying to define the Emergent Church from a theological standpoint, which may or may not be possible.  But I will try to trace some out of its sociological conditions, namely, what has allowed the Emergent Church to emerge at all.  At a sociological level, I believe it is connected to the demise of denominationalism (a point that few will argue with in the Emergent circles), whose possibilities have been turned on their head through secularizing processes.

One of the main points for expressing this process is to trace out how and why denominationalism arose in the first place.  To some degree, I’ve already told this story.  As such, it can be said that a nascent version of denominationalism arose when the sacred/secular divide no longer functioned as the ordering point of western societies (see my second blog).  In the society ordered by the sacred/secular split, the Church was the pinnacle institution of human existence, claiming ultimate “rights” to the spiritual and temporal swords.  This no doubt meant that the church claimed ultimate religious and political power.  With the fall of this sacred/secular divide and the confluence of these two realms into one sphere (I will eventually have to tell this story, namely, that Luther envisioned a world where the mundane and secular activities of everyday life could be a hymn of praise to God, and therefore sacred), the Church steadily lost its political sword to that of the newly arising absolutist states.   With a loss of the political sword came a loss of direct legal power and the ordering of laws in such a way that they upheld the sacred/secular distinction.  And it is this loss of legal power that first gives rise, if not directly to denominationalism, then at least to its seeds.

The loss of legal power in the Church (now divided between Protestants and Catholics, and Protestants and Protestants) meant that the Church, which could not conceive of itself at this point as non-political, had to find another avenue into politics and the social ordering of nations.  From this emerged the state-church, which is what I believe to be the first form of a denomination. As state-churches, these various institutions were thought to be the glue that held together the social order; the spiritual practices of the people in these state-churches were ordered toward a mix of establishing whatever form of Protestant Orthodoxy the government thought true, and a link between this governing body(which was mostly monarchy in these early stages) and divinity.  God, it was claimed, imbued this government with power over the people (“God save the Queen”) through the orthodoxy of the creeds held true; the state-churches ensured that this orthodoxy and subsequent loyalty was taught.

Durkehim looks as awesome as his name sounds.

As such, churches came to be understood by means of what one of the earliest sociologists of religion, Emile Durkheim, called functionalism: that churches are not legal entities but nonetheless necessary for establishing social cohesion.  And it is this notion of functionalism, in all of its different forms, that has grounded denominationalism.

With this basic interrelationship between denominationalism and functionalism laid out, in the next blog, I will argue that when a functionalist understanding of the church breaks-down, so too does the denominational understanding.  In turn, this allows for more de-centered expressions of the Christian faith, one of which might be called the Emergent Church.

- Hesychius of Jerusalem’s Easter homily 5-6.

Taken from Ancient Christian Devotional (an awesome collection)