random

Seven-word sermon

June 21, 2011 by Chad Crawford 12 Comments

Last week, I was involved in a “preach off” at church and was asked to give a sermon in only seven words. I was given the internet and five minutes. I was allowed to share a pic and a scripture passage. This was the result.

“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.

Filed Under: latest, random

Sex, Salvation, Scripture, and the Slippery Slope!

April 25, 2011 by Tripp Fuller 3 Comments

Here’s the second RATT video! That’s right, “Rachel & Tripp Talking!” and this time we got sex, salvation, scripture, and the infamous ‘slippery slope’ on the docket.

Rachel & Tripp Talking 2 from tripp fuller on Vimeo.

Filed Under: engaging, media, random

Part III: Fitch’s New Evangelical Politic

April 21, 2011 by Deacon Bill Leave a Comment

The “Christian nation” concept is a the third “Master-Signifier” for evangelicals that has made God’s work something to be done and fought for “out there.” This is what has bread dispassion (see also Greg Boyd’s Myth of a Christian Nation). David Fitch wants to expose the Jouissance (Zizek’s term for the kind of enjoyment that holds a people together under the domination of an ideology).

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.

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A Universalist Call to (Open) Arms

March 25, 2011 by Deacon Hall 5 Comments

I’ve been vaguely following all the talk of universalism on the net lately and have found myself in a couple arguments with some persons concerning the nature and possibility of it. And what I’ve found more interesting than anything is just how defensive universalists are about the subject, namely, that they would have to be the ones to defend themselves against cries of heresy. Well, my universalist friends, it’s time to put down the shield and take up the sword because you, it seems to me, are far more in the right than those who demand something like hell.

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.

Filed Under: bible stuff, philosophy, random, thinking

Big Tent Christianity: Being and Becoming the Church

January 14, 2011 by Tripp Fuller Leave a Comment

Big Tent Christianity: Being and Becoming the Church

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

Filed Under: random

Ten popular posts and five podcasts you might have missed in 2010

December 31, 2010 by Chad Crawford Leave a Comment

This is based on a really complex algorithm I developed based on views, shares, and comments on Homebrewed. Actually, I just compared all of these things and threw this together rather arbitrarily. Let us know if I left out one of your favorites and what you want to see more of.

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!

Filed Under: random

Identity-Bound: Some Fun with Advertising

March 24, 2010 by Deacon Hall 6 Comments

I haven’t been blogging for a bit, now; I’ve been working on passing my Qualifying Exams. But I’m back for a while and will be presenting to you what are some hopefully thought-provoking posts! I won’t explain this post too much, now, (I’ll save that for a follow up post), but it’s connected to my dissertation. My dissertation is on authenticity and God, and the idea of authenticity is intimately bound up with the notion of identity-formation, which I’d like to explore with you in this post and some posts to come.

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.

Filed Under: media, philosophy, pomo, random, thinking

Defining the Secular: a Two-part Digression on the Emergent Church and Secularization

August 3, 2009 by Deacon Hall 6 Comments

After a long break from blogging…which included a camping trip and a mom-visit…I’m retaking up the issue of secularization. Because I’m out of scholar mode, though, I’d like to take a more interesting and creative stance toward the phenomenon today, one that will probably be near and dear to the hearts of those who attend to this website. In other words, I want to look, in a two-part series, at how secularizing processes may have contributed to the possibility of the rise of the Emergent Church.

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.

Durkheim looks as awesome as his name sounds..

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.

Filed Under: random, thinking

The Womb of the Earth gives Birth

April 11, 2009 by Tripp Fuller Leave a Comment

Hidden first in a womb of flesh, he sanctified human birth by his own birth. Hidden afterward in the womb of the earth, he gave life to the dead by his resurrection. Suffering, pain, and sighs have now fled away. For who has known the mind of God, or who has been his counselor, if not the Word made flesh who was nailed to the cross, who rose from the dead and who was taken up into heaven? This day brings a message of joy: it is the day of the Lord’s resurrection when, with himself, he raised up the race of Adam. Born for the sake of human beings, he rose from the dead with them. On this day paradise is opened up by the risen one. Adam is restored to life and Eve is consoled. On this day the divine call is heard, the kingdom is prepared, we are saved and Christ is adored. On this day, when he had trampled death underfoot, made the tyrant a prisoner and despoiled the underworld, Christ ascended into heaven as a king in victory, as a ruler in glory, as an invincible charioteer. He said to the Father, ‘Here I am, O God, with the children you have given me.’ And he heard the Father’s reply, ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.’ To him be the glory, now and forever, through endless ages. Amen!