Time Away

I've been lax in responding to comments this week - we've taken some time to visit my wife's family and internet access is a bit dicey here. It's been an interesting week - we took some time today to tour the American Museum of Natural History in NYC, which was fantastic, and of course it's been nice to spend time with family that we don't see very often. Lowlights include spending most of Monday making a batch of chicken stock only to have my mother-in-law wash a pot and empty the soapy water into the cooling stock. Also, NYC is a pain in the tail. Seriously. I don't know what it is about the place that prompts such overinflated prices, but there isn't a bacon cheeseburger on the planet that's worth the $15 I dropped on one today.

At any rate, I'll be back on Monday. Responses will be spotty until then. Best wishes for a fantastic New Year!

The Audacity of Belief

I'll confess that I had high hopes for Christmas this year. I intended to blog through Advent; I had wanted to set aside more time for deliberate reflection and prayer. I had even explored the possibility of working with some folks at our church to plan a reflective evening for the early part of the season so that we could deliberately focus on the coming of Christ through the whole season.

All of my hopes vanished like so much smoke when the realities of the season asserted themselves. Competing priorities at work and home left me without even the normal rhythms to which I am accustomed, and for me the Christmas season seemed to never arrive. Or, to be more precise, its arrival seemed to pass me by, and I have no sense that anything is different as a result.

Which does, actually, make me wonder a bit about that momentous birth so long ago and the celebration and fanfare that preceded and accompanied it. I wonder about the promise of a newborn King and the threat to the empires du jour. I wonder about the lofty language of the Magnificat and the hopes and dreams for freedom and liberation that Mary expressed - for justice and mercy and the downfall of oppressors. I wonder about the angelic visitation and the shepherds' amazement and wonder. Mostly, I wonder about these things in light of the realities after that momentous birth.

I wonder what Mary was singing as she dealt with the struggles of a newborn who, no matter what the carols might tell us, crying certainly did make. I wonder what the shepherds were thinking as they accompanied their flocks on the next night, and the next, and the next, watching sheep munch on vegetation. Outwardly, nothing had changed - Herod still ruled in the stead of his Roman masters, the corrupt temple regime still oppressed the people in the name of God, and the exile continued. At what point did the songs and the jubilation and the memories begin to fade, to be questioned, to be stifled?

I wonder about these things because we live, as Rollins has stated, in the aftermath of God. God arrives and withdraws, leaving us to wonder what, exactly, just happened. Belief is born in the attempt to struggle with God's revelation and, often, we believe in spite of ourselves. Belief is inconvenient, frustrating, painful, and often dangerous. The gospel that we bear is an affront to the Powers and, while the presence of the King sometimes seems far from us, the Powers are painfully near.

At Christmas, we celebrate the audacity of belief - the reality that what we believe is unlikely, inconvenient, and dangerous, and yet we cling to it tenaciously. We believe that a virgin conceived and gave birth to a babe that toppled empires and conquered the Powers, defeating even sin and death. What could be more audacious? What could be more improbable? What could be more beautiful and true?

Things I Wish I'd Written...

...include this fantastic gem by N.T. Wright:

Ever since the eighteenth century, western protestantism has been pulled more and more towards a denial, explicit or implicit, of the great central truths of Christian faith - sometimes, indeed, towards watering them down while still saying the words, sometimes actually to open mockery of the idea of the Trinity or the resurrection or the full meaning of the cross. And what has happened, exactly as the eighteenth-century Deists intended it should, is that God is no longer a player on the world scene; Jesus is Lord far away in heaven, or in the secret places of my heart, perhaps, but he can't tell me how to run my business or which way to vote. And when that happens Caesar smiles his grim smile and pulls in the rope, and the worlds of money and sex and power all dance to his tune, exhibiting that tell-tale imperial pattern, the pagan pattern, the pattern that says there is no resurrection, that Herod is King of the Jews and Caesar is Lord of the world, that Mammon, the money-god, is divine and rules our pockets, that Aphrodite, the goddess of erotic love, is divine and rules our loins, that Mars the god of war is divine and doesn't mind who wins as long as people keep fighting each other. My brothers and sisters, is it surprising that, if every doctrine from the Trinity to the divinity of Jesus to his saving death and bodily resurrection and ascension has been dismissed as outdated, disproved or irrelevant, the church should then have no means of protesting against massive economic injustice, against the erosion and inversion of sexual morality, against rampant militarism - in other words, against Caesar and all his weapons? Is it not time to be grasped once more by the real authority of scripture, which is not about quoting a verse here and a line there but about being reshaped by the full story, the whole narrative, the entire drama of a book like Acts until the picture becomes clear and we see who Caesar is and how he works, who Jesus is and how he rescues God's lovely world from corruption and slavery, and who we are called to be as his Spirit-led witnesses to the ends of the earth?
(entire text here)

Dude can write like nobody's business. Amazing, challenging stuff.

Technorati Tags: N.T. Wright

Problems with Commments?

Last week I installed a new anti-spam plugin after noticing that more and more spam comments had been making it through my filters. However, I received an email this weekend from someone who wasn't able to post a comment. If there are any others out there that have been receiving errors when trying to post comments, could you please send me an email? I'm trying to determine if I need to turn off the new plugin. Thanks!

UPDATE: Found the issue. I neglected to properly update the comment preview form, thus generating the error. In any event, if anyone continues to have difficulty, I'd absolutely appreciate an email to let me know. Thanks much!

Contextuality and Hermeneutic (p. 2)

One of the more challenging issues that is raised by viewing scripture through contextual lenses is the realization that we aren't dealing with just one context. Part of what makes scripture amazing and beautiful is that it was written over a period of roughly one thousand years by dozens of authors in different contexts with different perspectives. On the other hand, part of what makes it complicated and messy is that it was written over a period of roughly one thousand years by dozens of authors in different contexts with different perspectives.

That there is theological diversity in scripture is difficult (although not impossible) to ignore. What that diversity means, however, is another matter entirely. Is it possible to believe in an authoritative text that at times seems to disagree with itself? The short answer for many people of various theological persuasions seems to be that it isn't - and much blood and ink have been spilled in an effort to prove that the Bible does/doesn't "contradict" itself. The assumption seems to be that if the text says one thing here and another thing there that the whole book is rendered worthless and any belief in divine agency in its origin is made laughable.

I posted a few thoughts a while back on Pete Enns's book Inspiration and Incarnation - it's a fantastic book that tackles some of these kinds of questions in a wonderfully accessible way. In it, Enns makes the point that many assumptions that we make about scripture are based on preconceived notions of what it is that a sacred text must look like - in other words, we define our belief on the nature of scripture based not on how it is but on how we would like it to be. So, for instance, if we think that a document that says different things about the same subject can't be divinely inspired, then we'll expend enormous energy attempting to prove that the Bible always agrees with itself, no matter what is actually in the text. I think that he's exactly right on this point, and I think it's unfortunate - we've allowed other priorities to set the agenda for our interaction with our own sacred text, instead of doing so on our own terms.

I think part of the contextual, situated nature of the biblical text as revelation is that it contains diverse opinions. Exodus, for example, lays out an elaborate system of sacrifice and ritual; the prophets denounce that same system. Samuel/Kings portrays David in his unvarnished, sinful brokenness; Chronicles cleans him up significantly. Paul states that we are justified by faith; James suggests that we are also justified by works. It's as though, for any significant theme in the biblical text, we can find one voice that portrays it in a particular way, but if we'll continue reading, we'll find another that says, "Yes, but..." And what I think is unfortunate is that we, by and large, have not allowed that reality to inform how we think about what it means that we claim this text, this narrative, this story as scripture, as the true account of God's way-of-acting in the world, of the people that he's called together to demonstrate that way-of-acting to the rest of humanity.

Is it possible to live in the tension between diverse viewpoints on matters of theology, without attempting to resolve that tension? I suggest that, not only should it be possible, but that it is part of what it means to be followers of a God who has chosen to reveal himself through a text that contains such diverse viewpoints. I'd like to spend a few posts unpacking what such an approach might look like and suggest a few thoughts for further reflection.

Technorati Tags: contextual theology, hermeneutics

Contextuality and Hermeneutic

Anyone who's been reading along for any length of time knows that I can't seem to get through a month without posting about contextual theology. I discovered this discipline in seminary, although if you've been exposed to some of the defining concerns of the emerging church or the missional movement then you'll probably have at least an instinctive sense for what contextual theology is all about. In the words of Clemens Sedmak from his excellent book Doing Local Theology:

Theology that tries to do justice to its place in culture and history is contextual. Contextualization literally means "weaving together" and is "thus an interweaving of the gospel with every particular situation"...The process of contextualization includes the reflection on one's own place as a person within a wider horizon. (p. 95)

I threw out a thought late last week on the contextual nature of the gospel on which I'd been musing and received some positive comments. Nobody, though, picked up on what was at the heart of my thought - not that I was that specific, but I was a bit curious to see if anyone would head in the same direction. In truth, I was less reflecting on doing theology in our own context and more thinking of reading scripture as itself an exercise in contextual theology.

Here's what I mean: when I say that all articulations of the gospel are "contextual reflections on a hypercontextual reality", I'm actually talking about hermeneutics. In other words, I'm suggesting that what we read in scripture are local expressions of people in specific settings reflecting on what the gospel is and what it means to live in keeping with the reality towards which it points. I'm suggesting that, even in the New Testament, we do not encounter a "pure gospel" - we read instead of particular people who wrestle with the gospel's breaking into their world and messing up their lives. More importantly, we read over their shoulders as they wrestle together with the gospel and try to discern how to live in its aftermath.

Consider this: the word for gospel, euangelion, is a political term that was used in and around the first century to refer to the good news of Caesar and the celebration of his birth. (See this excellent article by Wright for reference.) Caesar was hailed as Lord, portrayed as the bringer of peace and justice. The people were encouraged (to state it mildly) to trust him - have "faith" in him - for salvation. Paul was nothing if not a masterful contextual theologian. That we miss his cultural resonances is only to our detriment - speaking personally, as I begin to understand more and more of his context, the text continues to come alive, and I begin to see depth and subtlety that I had before missed. Put simply, we can't even trade in the coin of gospel language without picking up some contextual theology in the deal.

So, what does this mean from a practical standpoint? For one, I find myself doing more work to understand the New Testament context. More and more of my reading is in New Testament theology - and it's not the systematic stuff either, but good historical, cultural studies that attempt to bring those insights to bear on the scriptures. It's begun to shape my understanding of what it means to read and understand the text. I mean this on more than just a surface level. I think that we do ourselves a disservice when we assume that anyone can pick up the scriptures and come to a clear understanding of their meaning. While I agree with this in principle - I certainly don't believe for a minute that only the "qualified" should read and interpret the text - I stumble with the realization that, frankly, there are a lot of folks who aren't interested in doing the work that's needed to understand the context. We approach the scriptures too often like we do any other book. We assume that the meaning should be plain and that the authors and their readers inhabited the same symbolic world that we do, when in fact we are separated by nearly two millennia, different languages, different methods of communication, different cultural narratives, etc, etc, etc. This is hard work, and I'm skeptical of those who glibly refer to the "clear teaching of scripture", because it seems to nearly always indicate that someone hasn't done his or her homework.

On the other hand, lest anyone think that I'm attempting to pat myself on the back in some self-congratulatory way and hold up my own reading as a better standard, I've also become more and more aware of my own deficiencies as a student of scripture. If nothing else, having so many of my cherished preconceptions shattered by my own ignorance of the first-century world has (hopefully) led to a bit more humility in how I hold my interpretation. I've begun to try to think more charitably of those with whom I disagree and to give their readings a more sympathetic review. This of course doesn't mean that I succeed at that task - I probably fail at being charitable more than I succeed - but at the least it's something on which I'm trying to improve.

In short - contextual theology, when seen as a means of interpreting scripture, can not only help us to better understand the text, but it can also help us to wrestle with it in a more charitable way.

Technorati Tags: contextual theology, hermeneutics

Random Thought

I was musing on something and didn't want to lose it, so I'm posting it here without comment. I'm also a bit interested to see what reactions (if any) you have.

A contextless gospel does not exist. Any articulation of the gospel is a contextual reflection on a hypercontextual reality.

Image-bearing Praxis: Equality

Previous entries in this series can be found here.

I've been sitting on this post for nearly a month, debating about how to proceed. It's not that I doubt my beliefs, my theology, or my understanding of Scripture on this - nothing could be further from the truth. It's not so much that I don't want to wade into controversial territory - that if anything I've never avoided. It's more a concern for how to approach a subject that is often contentious, sometimes destructively so, in such a way that I do justice to the subject and to those who come to read about it. It's a concern to avoid caricature or overstatement, and to honor those with whom I disagree by avoiding straw men, inflammatory rhetoric, and other such unproductive language. It's no small task; whether I succeed will be for the reader to judge.

I am, of course, thinking of the complex subject of gender in the body of Christ. What does it mean to be created male and female in the image of God; what does it mean to structure ourselves as an image-bearing community; what does it mean to serve God, one another, and the world in self-giving expressions of love - these are the questions with which I have been wrestling. My conclusion is no doubt as obvious as my title. That choice was itself the subject of no small amount of thought. Invariably the notion of "equality" will, rightly or wrongly, bring to mind thoughts of one's rights in a liberal democracy, of entitlements and such, and that isn't the point. But I've chosen it anyway, simply because I cannot think of a better way to say what I take to be the God-shaped way in which men and women are to function as followers of Jesus.

Michael Kruse has recently blogged his way through the book Discovering Biblical Equality - I heartily recommend a read through his posts on this subject for those who desire to understand some of the interpretive issues that I assume here but choose not to discuss directly. I'm heading in a different direction here, not because I think the interpretive issues commonly discussed are unimportant but rather because my interest is in something that doesn't seem to hit our radar as often or as forcefully when gender roles are considered. I'm interested in the nature of the gospel itself, in God's creation project in which we are called to participate as men and women, as ourselves a new creation together in Christ, as a people gathered in Christ to image God to a watching world.

I've said before that I think one of the great tragedies of much contemporary Protestant interpretation of the New Testament is that the gospel has by and large collapsed into the personal, spiritual, and eternal. It's fine to speak of the gospel as being about saving souls to live in heaven forever. It's less so to speak of the gospel as being about God's kingdom action here, presently, on earth - that's the pathway to liberalism. And to speak of it as being about God's creating a new community, an ekklesia, a Church - well, that's almost to become Catholic (said with tongue firmly in cheek). But that's precisely what I think the gospel is: an invitation to become a part of the people of God, to join an alternative community of those who live with their feet planted in both the temporal and eternal at the same time. In other words, I think that to deny the social dimensions of the gospel is to come dangerously close to denying the gospel itself, simply because I don't think there's any way to separate out the social and communal elements from the rest of it.

All of that to say that when Paul writes in Galatians 3 that there is now no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, I don't think he's at all talking about who gets into heaven at death, as some would interpret the passage. This isn't a discussion of soteriology - it's about ecclesiology. It's why Peter's choice to separate himself from his Gentile brothers and sisters at mealtime constituted something of a denial of the gospel:

When Peter came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he was clearly in the wrong. Before certain men came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group. The other Jews joined him in his hypocrisy, so that by their hypocrisy even Barnabas was led astray. When I saw that they were not acting in line with the truth of the gospel, I said to Peter... (Gal. 2:11-14, emphasis added)

The way that we structure ourselves as a community is absolutely significant. It's significant enough that Paul could accuse Peter of abandoning the gospel because of his table fellowship. And, in this same letter, Paul calls attention to not just ethnic divides - he also calls us to task on our economic and gender divisions as well. The implication is that failing to allow the gospel to remove the social effects of such divisions is to fail to hold to the gospel itself. This isn't a scenario where speaking of different "roles" will do - there's simply no hint or suggestion of that in the biblical text. "Equal in being, unequal in role" is extraordinarily hard to sustain, not least from scripture itself.

If imaging God is an authority-bearing, vocational concept as I've argued extensively throughout this series, then to image God in our communities means to approach the question of gender roles in a cruciform manner, empowering others for service. This is at the very heart of what it means to be created in the image of God, created male and female as the Genesis text relates. And the gospel, then, as God's invitation to enter into the renewed community of His people absolutely must inform the ways in which we structure ourselves. If, as Paul states so beautifully, there truly is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female in Christ, then let this be so - let us image God by opening our communities to the service of any who are gifted. Let me be more direct: a community that restricts women from exercising their gifts by limiting the roles that they can fill, like Peter and Barnabas does not act in line with the truth of the gospel. Only through equality, through mutual service and empowerment, can we fulfill our creational vocation and become communities in the image of God.

Technorati Tags: community, ecclesiology, image of God, imago dei, equality