future

The Cross: meaning, redemption and the future

April 12, 2013 by Bo Sanders 4 Comments

Guest post by Renee Axtell –
one of the stars of the Easter Call-In Challenge has sent us her thoughts from the amber waves of Kansas.

Should we stop saying that God sent Jesus to die?

My answer is yes. We should stop saying that God sent Jesus to die, because that implies that God’s intention prior to Jesus’s birth was to send Him to die, and that would be mean. A loving God doesn’t do mean things.

But… if you accept the premise that God knows everything that’s knowable, and the future isn’t knowable (because it hasn’t happened yet), then God couldn’t have known for sure that Jesus would be crucified.

It doesn’t take a Divine Mind to figure out that a person doing and thinking the things that Jesus did and said in first century Palestine was going to get crucified. I think that explains Jesus’s predictions of his own death found in the gospels. But just because you can predict something is likely to happen doesn’t make it your will or your desire.

I’ve got teenagers. I know teenagers are going to do things that are going to have painful results. That doesn’t mean that it’s my will as a parent that they do those things and experience those painful results, but it’s highly predictable.

So the Father sends the Son into a dangerous situation, the worst case scenario happens, and Jesus ends up getting crucified. God sees this and says, “I can use this for something good. In fact, since this evil thing happened to my Son, I’m going to use this to do literally The Best Thing Ever and defeat death and redeem the world.”

That’s just what God does. “We know that all things work together for good to those who love God and are called according to His purpose.” (Romans 8:28) As the Messiah, Jesus had the ultimate calling and therefore God used His death to achieve the ultimate purpose, the redemption of the world.

It wasn’t merely the disciples that ascribed meaning to Jesus’s death after the fact, it was God. Your blog post makes it sound like the disciples were making stuff up and attributing meaning to something that wasn’t really there. The meaning was there because God put it there. The disciples were engaged in the discovery of that meaning, and we continue that process of discovery today.

Thoughts?
Questions?
Concerns?
Comments?

Tripp and I loved that THAT cross had a surplus of meaning from God – the disciples only brought it out and proclaimed it.

What do you think?

Filed Under: bible stuff, church history, engaging, latest, sermon, thinking Tagged With: Bible, call in, challenge, cross, crucifixion, Easter, future, God, jesus, open, redemptions, theology

That Sentence about Seminaries

November 20, 2012 by Bo Sanders 5 Comments

Once in a while you run into a sentence that hits you like a ton of bricks. You can read thousands of sentences in order to get to it.

Only rarely do you see it coming. Once in a while you are in a chapter that is so rich and nourishing that the sentence is just the Pièce de résistance.

Over the past 21 years, I have 5 sentences that have hit me like this. I can tell you exactly where I was when I first read them and why they hit me so hard. I say 21 years ago because that is essentially when I started reading. I was captain of the football and basketball teams in High School and didn’t so much … how do they say? … read.

It was after High School when I was no longer at my parents house – and I couldn’t make sense of my faith – that I picked up a copy of Josh McDowell’s apologetic classic: Evidence that Demands a Verdict. On that first page was sentence that stabbed my in the heart. That was the first of the 5 sentences.

Yesterday in the spirited exchange of comments on my blog post “You have to believe in Hell, Predestination, Election and the Book of Revelation” Nate Gilmore (you can hear his Georgia via Iowa drawl on last week’s TNT) was responding to a little bit of a fun rabbit trail we had going about seminaries and said:

At least in online encounters, I’ve seen far more appeals to authority, citing “Biblical scholarship” as if it were a monolith, from liberals than from right-wingers. In my own experience, the conservatives are much more interested in seeing the argument worked out than in “experts say that…” claims.

This is one of my favorite topics of discussion! I love this topic! Not because I agree with the binary between Conservative and Liberal (I don’t – I can’t after reading The Argument Culture by Deborah Tannen, which contains 1 of my 5 sentences) but because I have a story about it – a story that holds the last of my 5 sentences.

The Story:

I was writing my Master’s Thesis on Contextual Theology and I was utilizing a lot of material from a specific author – a real authority on the subject. In the midst of completing the Thesis I was accepted into the PhD program at a large Evangelical shool where he teaches and I was even appointed to study with him! It was an amazing honor.

After the Thesis was over, I was reading as much of his work as I could and I ran into a sentence from which I never recovered. He was talking about the need for innovation in the way we do Seminary – something that I am very passionate about – and he made a quick point about the difference between Liberal and more Evangelical seminaries in Africa.

He said that in Africa, Evangelical seminaries are much bigger, grow faster and produce more pastors because they are very method focused. They teach future pastors what to do.
Liberal seminaries, however, while being much smaller, are where almost all the innovation happens. His observation was that the difference came down to permission. His caution was that innovation can not become syncretism.

Its not that his point was especially earth-shattering or unique. There was just something in the way he said it … or perhaps it was the gravity he carried as my future PhD Advisor … but I put down the book, went for a walk, and decided that I needed to go a different direction. I turned down my appointment to the school and enrolled in a totally different program at a Liberal institution (Claremont School of Theology).

It was odd that someone I respected said something I agreed with, and the end result is that I knew I had to go a different direction than them.

This is the reason that I went into Practical Theology. It bridges the gap between these Liberal and Conservative approaches. It also attempts to bridge that gap between the Church and the Academy. It also addresses the false gap between theological theory and practice.

I’m so happy with my decision. Every time seminary education comes up, that sentence rushes to the front of my mind. My father (who was recently on the podcast) now runs the D.Min at his Evangelical seminary – so the topic of seminary education comes up a lot.

I don’t normally subscribe to the Conservative/Liberal binary, but in this case I concede the framing of the discussion because the institutions themselves identify this way and teach this way in a sort of self-reinforcing manner.

You may not like the split, but if those on the inside are telling you that there is a significant difference … you may just have to go with it for a while and see where the road takes you.

I just wanted to share my little story and see if anyone had any thoughts on the subject.

Filed Under: latest, thinking Tagged With: argument, author, book, books, change, conservative, Culture, evangelical, future, innovate, Liberal, reading, scholarship, Seminary

Diana Butler Bass in 3-D!

August 6, 2012 by Tripp Fuller 5 Comments

A podcast legend visits LA live! Listen in as Bo gets to ask the famed author about her new book Christianity After Religion, why Christianity isn’t a religion, the decline of the Mainline, the Methodist tradition as well as topics ranging from sexuality to other religions.

This event was hosted by a group getting ready to launch new conversation this Fall (visit theLoftLA.org for more) and Diana steps up for the Q&R to take on all comers! She doesn’t flinch at a single question that is thrown her way.

* SUPPORT the podcast by just getting anything on AMAZON through THIS LINK or you can get some Homespun Craftianity. We really appreciate your assistance in covering all the hosting fees which went up 30 bucks a month due to the growing Deaconate!

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One Click to the Homebrewed Hotline!

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Filed Under: emergent, features, podcast Tagged With: Anglican, Bible, care, church, creation, Diana Butler Bass, Episcopal, future, God, history, jesus, Mainline, Methodist, religion, sex, sexuality, tradition

A funny thing happened on the way to Pentecost

May 26, 2012 by Bo Sanders 26 Comments

Tomorrow is Pentecost Sunday in the liturgical calendar. As one who emerged from a charismatic evangelical background and is now employed at a mainline church, this is my favorite Sunday of the whole year!

Here are just 3 funny things about Pentecost Sunday:

Charismatics don’t celebrate it. Because the large majority of Pentecostal & Charismatic churches don’t follow the liturgical year, this Sunday goes unnoticed in any special way. It is just another rockin’ week of worship songs! I find that hilarious. When you exist in a context that does not observe Lent (or even Advent) then both Easter and Pentecost are just one more occasion for ‘feasting’. This is a glory theology and neither fasting nor waiting are on the menu (speaking in generalities).

It’s tough to be a Christian and get away from it. Reading the Bible as a white-westerner can cause disorientation and cognitive dissonance. In the Gospel of Mark, fully 65% of Jesus’ ministry was based around miracles, mostly healing and exorcism. If you are going to read the Bible, it is going to be tough to get around just how much time and effort the writers spend on this element of ministry. But if you are part of an educated (enlightenment) tradition that is primarily intellectual about faith … you may have never seen a miraculous healing, exorcism, or manifestation of God’s power. Most of things we call ‘answers to prayer’ are slightly amplified coincidence – like getting a job you applied for and were qualified for or finding it in your heart to forgive someone which brought about reconciliation.

Don’t get me wrong, I do think that those things are miraculous and answers to prayer. I just want to note that there might be a difference in intensity from what is recorded in the Book of Acts.

Africa, Asia and South America are foreign to us. We hear lots and lots of reports from the Southern Hemisphere about the explosion of Pentecostal and Charismatic (P&C) Signs and Wonders movements (S&W). Many are calling it ‘the Future of Christianity’. It is tough to argue with when you compare it to the decline in church attendance in Europe and N. America, the overly analytical and often paralyzed intellectual brand of church that is embarrassed at both the zeal and simplicity of the fundamentalist and evangelical branches of the family.

Here are my two hesitations about the southern hemisphere being the future of the church:

1) As many have noted, the latest turn in the P&C movement is one toward the ‘Prosperity Gospel’ and the wildly demonstrative ‘Signs & Wonders’ movement where the spectacular and the sensational are prized above all else! (including Biblical precedent). This is an ominous turn. I am deeply suspicious that with the rise of global capitalism, deregulated markets and multi-national corporations’ economic and environmental policies … the prosperity ‘blessing’ might be a one-generation phenomenon with a vicious cynical backlash waiting behind it. This bubble will burst and both the pain and disillusionment will be inconsolable.

2) ‘The weirder the better’ is an ugly mantra. I recently talked to a traveling Charismatic evangelist who was disappointed that his most recent rally did not have more pizzaz. Sure good things happened and people reported both salvations, significant personal growth (like forgiveness) and a couple of minor healing (anorexia, etc.) But nothing really demonstrative or spectacular. That is not the part that caught my attention (I am used to that). It was the reasoning behind it.

“ If you come from a background where you have never seen Signs & Wonders then you are less likely for it to happen to you. Seeing it happen creates something in you – a faith or an openness – that allows God to do it with you.”

I was stunned. Did he really just say that if you have never seen it, that it is less likely to happen? Well, actually that makes a lot of sense. If you have never seen someone be ‘slain in the Spirit’ then you may be less likely to go to the ground when prayed for (ever heard of ‘carpet time’?). This is where testimony and teaching are SO valuable.

Now the funny thing is that this dear minister has no idea that I have Lindbeck & MacIntyre ringing in my head like alarm bells at a fire station! I wanted to say ‘Language not only helps us interpret experience … our language helps create our experience.”

Those two things – the Prosperity turn in the South and the awareness of language/experience – are the two things that keep me from being 100% stoked about the future of Pentecost. – Bo Sanders

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If you would like to read an interesting book on the subject, check out Philip Jenkins’ The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South

Filed Under: engaging, latest, post-something, thinking Tagged With: Acts 2, Africa, Asia, book, books, Capitalism, church, future, Global South, God, Holy Spirit, jesus, Latin America, Pentecost, Philip Jenkins, prosperity, South American, theology

Worried about Worship

March 29, 2012 by Bo Sanders 27 Comments

In the past several week I have read three interesting blog posts about worship.

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:

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.
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?
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.

I would love to hear your thoughts. This space has become a wonderful place to compare notes, exchange resources and learn new things. I just have two requests:

A) Don’t give us a lesson about what worship meant in a different language or in the 4th or 11th century. That is not what any of us need. I want to engage this subject how the popular use is actually engaging this topic (like we did with ‘religion’)

B) Let us know if you don’t like songs like “Shout to the Lord” in general before you are critical of praise music categorically. I mean, if its not your style anyway … then it would just be good to know that so we can know how to read your perspective.

Filed Under: church history, emergent, engaging, latest, prayer, songs, thinking, worship Tagged With: book, books, church, future, James K.A. Smith, PoMo, praise, Relevant Magazine, songs, Tony Jones, Worship

Pentecostals & Progressives

November 11, 2011 by Bo Sanders 15 Comments

In the most recent podcast episode Mike Morrell interviews Leif Hetland, a charismatic signs & wonders Pastor. Afterward I get to talk to with Tripp about my thoughts on reconciling the best of Pentecostal practices with a Progressive Christianity.

Here are my two big points:

What Pentecostals have to say to Progressives

Jesus laid hands on people, the Disciples laid hands on people and the letters of the New Testament tell us to lay our hands on people. If you have bought into a brand of Christianity that does not have you laying your hands of people and praying in expectation that something would happen – you may want to revisit the reasons why.

If your faith is primarily intellectual, abstract, and conceptual … it may not be the religion that the writers of the New Testament called us to. The early church was a hands on movement and prayed with expectation.

What Progressives have to say to Pentecostals

Being delivered from personal demons is great and praying over whole cities to break or bind the ‘strong man’ that holds people in bondage is fine. There is a vital missing element that needs to be added. Its not just about the personal (mini) and the heavenly (meta) – that leaves a gap that must be filled. In the middle is the address of systems, structures and institutions (what Walter Wink calls ‘The Powers the Be“).

If you faith is primarily personal-congregational and supernatural-heavenly, then you might want to revisit some understandings of Scripture and the address of systemic sins (like injustice). Otherwise you are in danger of being so heavenly minded that you actually reinforce and empower that very structures that you say you are praying against.

The 21st Century

I think that it is important to have these two camps in conversation. Since the Azusa Street renewal of 1906 started, charismatic Christianity has swept the globe and become the largest branch of Christianity in the world. [see Philip Jenkins ‘The Next Christendom’ or 'New Faces'] But in the century that has passed we have come though the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and the internet age. Things have changed pretty radically. We think of the world differently and the remnants of the 3-tiered universe (pre-modern) are a real barrier to some. This is why I am favor of rethinking some of the vocabulary, conceptions, and constructed imaginations that go unquestioned (or assumed) by many.

The two best conversations I have these days are:

The future of the church is not to be found in Europe’s past. What is happening in the Global South (Asia, Africa, South and Central America) are the voices we need to engage with, learn from, and partner with.
I believe in the miraculous but I do not believe in the supernatural. The supernatural is a construct that come with too much baggage. God’s work is all around us and is the most natural thing in the world.

I would love to your thoughts on all of this. Plan on being at the 2012 Emergent Village Theological Conversation where there will be a breakout session on Pentecost and Process.

Filed Under: bible stuff, church history, emergent, engaging, latest, prayer, thinking Tagged With: Africa, Asia, books, Christianity, future, Global South, miracles, Pentecostal, powers, prayer, progressive, South America

The Weakness of John Caputo

September 27, 2011 by Bo Sanders 14 Comments

I love John Caputo. I have only read four of his book, but one of those was The Weakness of God – and that is a crowned jewel in my library. If you have not read it, you can just check out chapter 4 of What Would Jesus Deconstruct? where he summarizes it in about 7 pages.

I love when he says things like:

The kingdom of God is the rule of weak forces like patience and forgiveness, which, instead of forcibly exacting payment for 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 with out why, living for the day, like the lilies the field–figures of weak forces–as opposed to mastering and programming time, calculating the future, containing and managing risk. The kingdom reigns whenever the least and most undesirable our favor all the best and most powerful or put on the defensive. The powerless power of the kingdom prevails when ever 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

All of this has been on my mind lately because of two upcoming events:

At Soularize (October 18-20 in San Diago) I will get to meet and share the stage with John Caputo at our Homebrewed Christianity live 3-D event.
I have been editing both the Merold Westphal interview where Tripp asks about Wesphal’s good friend & sparring partner John Caputo as well as the Kevin Corcoran (Church in the Present Tense) interview for the following week. Both are not the biggest fans of what Caputo brings to the table.

In part two of the Westphal interview, Westphal asserts that he finds Caputo’s brand of ‘theology’ a bit like “thin soup”. His thinking (starts in minute 21 and goes to minute 28) is that if the promise of the future is just the logical possibility that the future will be better than the present, that is just wishing. What we need, he says, is a more active speech-act performing God.

He then goes on to say that he doesn’t understand why Caputo continues to call himself a Catholic and then takes it even further to ask why he even calls himself religious! What?

Is this where we are at in Christian theology these days? I hear this line of thinking all the time (albeit not often from someone as renowned as Westphal).

I think that the future is a tough thing to be too dogmatic about. I get Panneberg’s proleptic possibility in his eschatology of hope. But that is hope … which, in my mind, is like one degree removed from wishing. So the acceptable options are a) certianty or b) hope, but anything less confident than that is unacceptable?

I know that Westphal’s thinking is based on much bigger issues than just the future, but it is an odd one to focus on in my opinion.

Let me be clear so that we don’t get off topic. I love reading John Caputo. I don’t just mean on philosophy or about other thinkers. I mean when he talks about Christianity – as a Christian.

I find him both intellectually inspiring and spiritual nourishing. So when somebody calls what he brings to the table ‘thin soup’, I am a bit perplexed.

Normally, I am not one to get defensive – so is it enough to simply say that I disagree with the honorable guest of Episode 114 on this one?

Filed Under: books, emergent, engaging, latest, philosophy, post-something, thinking Tagged With: future, John Caputo, Merald Westphal, Onto-theology, theology, Weakness

Claremont School of Theology