Surprised by Hope

Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church

This book addresses two questions that have often been dealt with entirely separately but that, I passionately believe, belong tightly together. First, what is the ultimate Christian hope? Second, what hope is there for change, rescue, transformation, new possibilities within the world in the present? And the main answer can be put like this. As long as we see Christian hope in terms of "getting to heaven", of a salvation that is essentially away from this world, the two questions are bound to appear as unrelated. Indeed, some insist angrily that to ask the second one at all is to ignore the first one, which is the really important one. This in turn makes some others get angry when people talk of resurrection, as if this might draw attention away from the really important and pressing matters of contemporary social concern. But if the Christian hope is for God's new creation, for "new heavens and new earth," and if that hope has already come to life in Jesus of Nazareth, then there is every reason to join the two questions together. And if that is so, we find that answering the one is also answering the other. - N.T. Wright (p. 5)

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Everything Must Change: What's Wrong? p.2

I want to go back to McLaren's discussion of the major crises that face us globally at the dawn of the twenty first century. I was rather critical of him in my last post, and while I don't necessarily want to temper that criticism, I do want to pick up on the direction in which he's headed (instead of continuing to discuss the direction that I wish he had taken). McLaren identifies four crises, and spends most of the book discussing the first three (quotes from p. 5):

• The Prosperity Crisis - "Environmental breakdown caused by our unsustainable global economy, an economy that fails to respect environmental limits even as it succeeds in producing great wealth for about one-third of the world's population."
• The Equity Crisis - "The growing gap between the ultra-rich and the extremely poor, which prompts the poor majority to envy, resent, and even hate the rich minority - which in turn elicits fear and anger in the rich."
• The Security Crisis - "The danger of cataclysmic war arising from the intensifying resentment and fear among various groups at opposite ends of the economic spectrum.
• The Spirituality Crisis - "The failure of the world's religions, especially its two largest religions, to provide a framing story capable of healing or reducing the three previous crises."

I mentioned in my last post that I think his discussion of the fourth crisis, the spirituality crisis, is inadequate. In fact, I'm not sure that he really discusses it explicitly - I think instead that the book represents his attempt to answer the fourth crisis by providing a framing story that can address the first three, so I suppose one could say that the whole book is an implicit critique of and response to the spirituality crisis as well. Regardless, I want to go back to the first three crises, as they serve as the roadmap for the remainder of the book.

I was about to say that I think McLaren hits it out of the park in this area, that he's done a great job of identifying the major crises that face us and doing so in a way that is engaging and comprehensible. But something caused me to pause, and now I have a nagging thought that I think bears pondering: What of the woman in the Sudan who faces imprisonment for a misnamed teddy bear in the name of religion? And what about the continued oppression that we see in places like Iran, where people who have the courage to stand up to a repressive authority are imprisoned or worse? What about the same in Saudi Arabia, where a woman can get 200 lashes for speaking out about injustice in the judicial system? And what about our own dirty laundry in the United States - what can we say about the psychotic filth perpetrated by the likes of Westboro Baptist Church or the criminal actions of Eric Rudolph, both fueled by a twisted exegesis of the Christian scriptures (to cite merely two relatively recent examples)?

Well, that just undercut a large part of the appreciation that I have for the book, and I haven't had time to weigh its implications as it literally occurred to me in the middle of writing the post. Here is now the new challenge that I need to think through: I think it's fair to say that McLaren is viewing the global crises through an economic lens. And to be sure that approach can bear much fruit - I think that the crises that he identifies are real and pressing and in need of being addressed. But I think that they are also connected to other crises that are not so much economic - they are ethnic and nationalistic and religious and gender-related. To borrow from his own analogy - can we still power the suicide machine if everyone is well-fed? I think the answer is, unfortunately, yes.

I really didn't intend for this to be a critical post - I was hoping to offer some appreciative thoughts this time around. Unfortunately I keep finding gaps in his approach, and I think those gaps are going to limit his effectiveness in answering his own questions.

Technorati Tags: Everything Must Change, McLaren

Everything Must Change: What's Wrong?

I want to begin discussion of McLaren's Everything Must Change in the same place where he begins and assess the trajectory of the book in that light. I mentioned previously that I found myself underwhelmed with the book; upon further reflection, I think the problem that I have with it begins at the beginning and never fully resolves. McLaren asks two questions, which the rest of the book attempts to answer: What are the biggest problems in the world? and What does Jesus have to say about these global problems? In and of themselves, these are good questions, even if I have a bit of a quibble with the second that I'll discuss in a later post. I'm not convinced of his answers, however.

McLaren discusses four primary crises which he believes answer the first question (all quotes from p. 5):

• The Prosperity Crisis - "Environmental breakdown caused by our unsustainable global economy, an economy that fails to respect environmental limits even as it succeeds in producing great wealth for about one-third of the world's population."
• The Equity Crisis - "The growing gap between the ultra-rich and the extremely poor, which prompts the poor majority to envy, resent, and even hate the rich minority - which in turn elicits fear and anger in the rich."
• The Security Crisis - "The danger of cataclysmic war arising from the intensifying resentment and fear among various groups at opposite ends of the economic spectrum.
• The Spirituality Crisis - "The failure of the world's religions, especially its two largest religions, to provide a framing story capable of healing or reducing the three previous crises."

At this point, I'm somewhat torn. I think there's a lot to what he's saying here. I think he's done a fair job of summarizing a lot of complex dynamics that I think most of us would agree threaten our global civilization at the beginning of the twenty first century.

But I'm wrestling with this set of crises primarily because of the way that he's defined the last one, the spirituality crisis. I don't think that what he's saying is untrue - in fact, I think it's a great way to discuss some of the reasons that the American flavor of Christianity has been so ineffective in responding to social issues in the past century. But I don't think it's big enough. My problem is that he leaves out a fairly significant piece of the puzzle here, and without it the rest of the book feels like a chair with one leg too short - in other words, rather unstable and with a distracting tendency to lean to the side instead of remaining centered.

Let me take a step back and state what I think scripture presents as the answer to the first question. I think, if I were going to summarize the whole of scripture and give a concise way of talking about what's wrong, I'd say two things: idolatry and injustice. I've never attempted to do this, but I think it would be fascinating to walk through Leviticus or Deuteronomy and categorize each prescription in terms of these two headers, sort of a scriptural version of tags. (Side note - that's a damn fine idea. Someone who's smarter than me should put a tagging system together for the biblical text, sort of like a scripture wiki, and open it up for folks to tag texts in ways that they find meaningful. Wouldn't that be fascinating? There's a dissertation in there somewhere.) Anyway - I'm willing to bet that you won't find a part of the Law that doesn't fit in one of those two categories. Throughout the OT, the two seem to be linked, particularly so in the prophets. Zechariah, for example, says this:

Then the word of the LORD Almighty came to me: "Ask all the people of the land and the priests, 'When you fasted and mourned in the fifth and seventh months for the past seventy years, was it really for me that you fasted? And when you were eating and drinking, were you not just feasting for yourselves? Are these not the words the LORD proclaimed through the earlier prophets when Jerusalem and its surrounding towns were at rest and prosperous, and the Negev and the western foothills were settled?'" And the word of the LORD came again to Zechariah: "This is what the LORD Almighty says: 'Administer true justice; show mercy and compassion to one another. Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the alien or the poor. In your hearts do not think evil of each other.'" (Zech. 7:4-10)

I think that Jesus was thinking along these lines when he stated that the two greatest commands were love of God and love of one's neighbor - aren't those really just the opposite of idolatry and injustice?

The primary problem that I have with the book, and one of the reasons that I find it ultimately unsatisfying, is that it fails to identify idolatry as a significant part of the problem. That is what is at the root of the spirituality crisis, and it explains nicely why it is that American Christianity has been so remarkably silent on a number of these issues. I agree that the problem is one of framing stories, but what is needed is a framing story that is rooted in the worship of the One True God. Absent that, all of our attempts at solving the other crises will only perpetuate injustice - not correct it.

Technorati Tags: McLaren, Everything Must Change

Everything Must Change

I've run into another snag on my series about New Creation. It's conceptual more than anything - I know where I want to go but I want to make sure that I'm getting there in an honest way. I've been doing a bit of reading in the prophets, and I've decided that I don't think it's coincidence that we in American Christianity read so little of the prophets and also think so little about new creation. The prophets are rich with this theme, which makes it imperative that their voices are incorporated into my current project in the right way. So I'm doing more thinking right now, and its mostly along the lines of what role exile plays in the OT's theology of new creation (exile being the condition to which most of the prophets were speaking). Exile from the garden and exile from the land are parallels, I think, and I'm not quite sure how that changes my approach. And NT Wright's insights along these lines are helpful as well - if he's correct in asserting that Jesus' understanding of his own mission was to bring the exile to an end, then this is something that needs to be incorporated. In short - I have no shortage of data and what I think are some good categories, but it's a bit of work matching them up.

In the meantime, I recently received a review copy of McLaren's new book Everything Must Change that I've been working my way through. I have to confess that I'm having mixed feelings about it. I'm about two thirds of the way through it, and I think he's missing some significant pieces. I mention this here because I think those missing pieces would be filled quite nicely by a robust view of new creation, but I'm just not sure it's there. As a result, I'm not really finding the "third way" that this book is supposed to represent (as defined against the traditional conservative and liberal approaches). Don't get me wrong; there's a lot of good stuff in the book. But it's mixed with some not-so-good stuff, and it feels incomplete.

I'm also finding that I have a hard time taking some of his points seriously when he's attempting to argue from scripture. I don't really think (for example) that the feeding of the five thousand is a prophetic denunciation of consumerism, or that the parable of the landowner in Matt 20 is really about distributing wealth. It seems as though the farther I get into the book, the more the arguments sound canned and scripture interpreted to fit the arguments - a practice that he rightly critiques earlier in the book. I put the book down after lunch today and my most immediate thought was that Brian would benefit from teaming up with a really good biblical scholar, someone who knows how to exegete well. And I think this is particularly unfortunate given his context; he already knows that he's going to be critiqued, so why not do as much as possible to put his arguments in the most credible light? I think there are a lot of folks who will read this book looking for something to criticize, and those folks will be all over sloppy exegesis. That those folks are, generally speaking, often the ones who need to hear what he has to say makes it worse. He really doesn't say much that I find objectionable - I'd happily agree with many of the arguments that he advances, if he were more cautious about how he makes them and, specifically, what he does with scripture in order to get there.

To get things moving on the blog again, I'm going to attempt two posts a week - one from EMC, and one that continues my reflections on a theology of new creation. I'd like to take a shot at rearguing some of McLaren's thoughts in what I consider a way that's more true to the text, and I think that along the way we'll find that many of the holes can be filled by incorporating this theology into McLaren's arguments.

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The Children of Húrin

I had planned to post some thoughts on the Emergent event from last week (and I still intend to do so) - but I just finished the newest addition to the Tolkien canon today and felt compelled to offer some reflections on it. A bit of context - I consider myself to be a moderately hardcore Tolkien fan. I read the Hobbit, the LotR trilogy, and the Silmarillion each at least once a year, as a rule. I was one of the disgruntled fans who thought Peter Jackson massacred The Two Towers, and while he bought himself a bit of grace with the generally masterful telling that was Return of the King, I'll always hold a grudge against him for turning Aragorn into a pansy. I've read Unfinished Tales, which is worth owning for the Istari alone. I even used to own Roverandom until someone borrowed it but didn't return it - bet you didn't know Tolkien wrote a tale about a toy dog, did you? So when I discovered that Christopher Tolkien would be publishing a new work edited from his father's writings, I was suitably excited, if a bit nervous - the tale of Túrin is already a significant part of the Silmarillion, and I'll admit that it isn't my favorite. How would a book-length treatment hold up in comparison to the more established works?

A word about the plot is in order, for those who have never read the Silmarillion. If you're familiar with LotR (in either movie or book form), you know who Sauron is - he is the chief enemy of the Free Peoples of Middle Earth in the trilogy. But he is merely the servant of a greater enemy in the Elder Days, the former Valar known as Morgoth. Morgoth was one of the celestial beings who participated in the creation of the world, but he later rebelled in order to gain the mastery over all others. The Silmarillion is largely the tale of the Elves who resisted Morgoth and waged war against him to regain the Silmarils, precious jewels that he stole from Fëanor, one of their chief princes. Húrin was one of the men who joined the Elves in their war; he was captured by Morgoth and cursed for his defiance, forced to watch with Morgoth's sight as his children were drawn into Morgoth's curse and destroyed. The Children of Húrin is primarily about Túrin, Húrin's son and one of the mightiest men to ever live.

I shouldn't have worried - The Children of Húrin is an overwhelming success. I was amazed at the depth of story that the book brings, and my opinion of Túrin has forever been altered. I never found him to be a sympathetic character in the Silmarillion - it seemed that he deserved his fate in the end. This book, however, paints him in a much more sympathetic light, bringing more of his character and motivations to the fore. In truth, the Silmarillion doesn't really concern itself too much with such things, being more of an epic history than anything else. This book is pure narrative, and reads a lot more like LotR than the Silmarillion (although the similarities to the latter are evident as well). We read about Túrin's childhood, about his fostering in the kingdom of Doriath by Thingol, and about his journeys in the wild as the leader of a band of outlaws who he ultimately leads against the forces of Morgoth. The story is rich and full, and like all of Tolkien's work, dark and tragic. The editing is top-notch, and the narrative is almost entirely seamless (although I think it stumbles at the very end, which is most unfortunate - but forgivable).

Often people will try to connect Tolkien's faith to his writings, and they almost invariably end up doing so in what seems to me to be odd ways. Gandalf, for example, is not a Christ figure, no matter how many comparisons his return from death will draw. Sauron does much the same thing, after all. But one possible place to look for such a connection seems often to be missed - for Tolkien, the chief sin is pride, and it always leads to a fall. Morgoth, Sauron, Fëanor, Turgon, Thingol, the Númenóreans, Saruman, Denethor - I could go on and on. All significant characters brought down by their pride, some of good heart, others of evil, but all marred by hubris. Túrin's fate is, in the end, sealed by his pride, by his inability to listen to the council of others and to admit his own failings. In one of the chief ironies and tragedies of the book, he takes the name Turambar, which means Master of Doom - he believes he can conquer his fate, but finds himself only trapped further by his defiance. In the end, he is not (as the book says) master of his doom - he is mastered by it.

This is not a happy tale. It is dark and gritty. There is a sense in which all of Tolkien's work carries an undercurrent of lament - his is not the simplistic world where all is right in the end, nor is it a might-makes-right kind of world where only the strong survive. It is something else entirely, something of a good creation marred by unspeakable evil. He ends the Valaquenta (the chief tale of the Silmarillion) with these words:

Here ends The Valaquenta. If it has passed from the high and beautiful to darkness and ruin, that was of old the fate of Arda Marred; and if any change shall come and the Marring be amended, Manwë and Varda may know; but they have not revealed it, and it is not declared in the dooms of Mandos.

This theme runs deep through the works of Tolkien - the careful reader will pick it up even in something as light-hearted as the Hobbit, and it is present strongly in the conclusion of LotR, where Sauron is vanquished but in doing so the Elves have wrought their own demise. And it is present in a little way in the tale of Frodo, who will never be healed of the hurts that he has suffered as the bearer of the One Ring. The Children of Húrin carries this theme strongly - it is front and center, and as a result is a work of profound sorrow and lament. But there is something wholesome about the laments of Tolkien as well, something that mourns for what is lost. It is I believe this grief that makes his work so enduring.

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Speechless

April 18, 2007

Technorati Tags: Children of Hurin, Tolkien

Ontology, Incarnation, and Category Confusion

I mentioned in the comments on my last post that I'm not much of a fan of the term "incarnational" ministry. This is something that I've been pondering for a while - in fact, I used to love the term, but over the past year or so I've been rethinking. It's come to my thought again, in part, as a reaction to something that Frost says in Exiles that for some reason put a new spin on the question for me. Here is, to my mind, the crux of the issue: is the incarnation a model for our engagement with culture and, if so, in what way? Frost has this to say:

This one doctrine [the incarnation] alone seems to bother us more than any other. It reminds us of the radical capacity of Jesus the man to seamlessly embrace humanity and divinity equally and successfully. His example, though impossible to duplicate, is nonetheless a rallying point for us to seek to emulate his lifestyle. In the incarnation, God enters fully into close relational and physical proximity to humanity in the pursuit of reconciliation. Likewise, if exiles today are to model their lives and ministries on that of the exile Jesus, they must take a stance that promotes proximity between themselves and those among whom they live. (p. 54)

I again find myself in a position of appreciating where he arrives while disliking intensely the route that he takes to get there. Again, for some, my quibbles with his points may seem pedantic or even mere semantics - but I'm a big fan of keeping our terms unmuddled and our categories straight, and it is in these areas where I think this approach falls short.

The problem is one of ontology - an approach with which Frost has already taken issue. The creeds, if you recall, were in Frost's view too ontological and not narratival, thus robbing the early Church of its missional vitality. But now he wants to switch back to the ontological categories to ground his own model. That's, in my mind, a problem. The incarnation is nothing if not an ontological category - in other words, it has to do with the nature or identity of Christ. Let's leave aside for the moment the obvious methodological inconsistency. There is a glaring problem here that comes to the fore when we start thinking about exactly what it is that the incarnation represents. This is a category that can truly only be applied to Christ and is, in some way, connected to a particular space-time event. It would be improper to think of the incarnation in terms of the Father or the Spirit - in fact, to do so is dangerously close (if not outright capitulation) to a heresy known as modalism. So here's the catch - if the incarnation is our model for mission, then don't we run up against a different ontological problem? How can the Father and the Spirit be engaged in mission if mission is an incarnational category?

I prefer to think of mission as a vocational category that goes back to the imago dei. It's still ontological in the sense that it is a part of who we were made to be - but it's an ontological category that is based in God's very nature as one who goes. Creation is a missional act in this sense - it was God's gracious gift of being to a universe of things other-than-God to which he could show love. Mission is another way of describing the divine task that is represented by the image of God. As such, it's a part of who we are as human beings created in that image.

The incarnation was, in this sense, a missional event - it's a natural expression of the love of God for the other-than-God. God expresses his missional nature in Christ's setting aside his divine prerogatives and becoming human. It is also missional in that Christ is the perfect human, the perfect imago dei acting out his divine vocation as a human being. So in the person of Christ the two missional themes intertwine - God as the one who goes, and humans as those created in the image of that God. And the missional vocation is then passed clearly to the church: the Father sends the Son; the Father and the Son send the Spirit; the Father, Son, and Spirit send the church. Mission is the ongoing task to fulfill the divine creational mandate that has been entrusted to the community of those who follow the way of Jesus. It's a vocational category, and it's an ontological category in that it is a reflection of the church's identity - but I don't think it's an incarnational category. Rather, I think the incarnation is a missional category, and to swap the two, in my opinion, confuses what is happening in the narrative.

Technorati Tags: books, Exiles, Frost, incarnation, ontology

How (Not) to Speak of God: Revelation (p. 2)

After a hectic few weeks, things are starting to slow down again. Time to kick the dust off the old blog and get back to more regular posting. Although I still have more thoughts that I want to post on an image-bearing praxis, at the moment I want to pick up again with Peter Rollins's book How (Not) to Speak of God. I mentioned previously that Rollins is discussing orthodoxy from the standpoint of "believing in the right way". He goes on to unpack this perspective in more detail, focusing next on a discussion of the nature of revelation as concealment:

Hence revelation ought not be thought of either as that which makes God known or as that which leaves God unknown, but rather as the overpowering light that renders God known as unknown...Revelation can thus be described as bringing to light the secret of God in such a way that it remains secret.

Here, again, I'm forced to say that I didn't initially like his proposal. But as before, the more I think on it, the more I think that he's got it right. What is striking in the OT, and Rollins pulls numerous examples from that material, is that God's revelation never exhausts his being. The ones to whom the revelation is given seem to walk away from the encounter with less understanding than before - or, perhaps put better, with God having demolished the understanding that they thought they had. The revelation of God overwhelms and befuddles, leaving the one to whom it is given without rational categories but with awe and worship and no small amount of fear instead. And, interestingly enough, faith is the result of such encounters, in spite of (because of?) the reordering and disassembling of those rational categories.

And, of course, the NT is little different. For the Christian, the NT revelation of Jesus as the second person of the Trinity is the penultimate revelation of Godself. But no Christian that is intellectually honest would claim that the incarnation has exhausted all mystery of who God is - if anything, it has deepened the mystery by revealing another aspect of God's being that is beyond our ability to comprehend.

Rollins suggests that the reason for this dialectic of revealing/concealing is that in revelation God becomes "hyper-present":

Hyper-presence is a term that refers to a type of divine saturation that exists in the heart of God's presence. It means that God not only overflows and overwhelms our understanding but also overflows and overwhelms our experience...In the same way that the sun blinds the one who looks directly at its light, so God's incoming blinds our intellect. In this way the God who is testified to in the Judeo-Christian tradition saturates our understanding with a blinding presence. This type of transcendent-immanence can be described as 'hypernymity'. While anonymity offers too little information for our understanding to grasp..., hypernymity gives us far too much information. Instead of being limited by the poverty of absence we are short-circuited by the excess of presence.

That's a lot to ponder. If you're getting the impression that Rollins is something of a mystic, I think that would be an accurate characterization. I also catch echoes of Rudolph Otto here - I have to dig out my copy of The Idea of the Holy and see how this compares to Otto's discussion of the "numinous". Still, the obvious connection that I see here is that, contrary to theological approaches that lead to pride in one's ability to grasp God (intentional or unintentional), this approach cannot but help lead in a different direction - to worship.

Technorati Tags: books, emerging church, How (Not) to Speak About God, Peter Rollins

How (Not) to Speak of God: Faith (p. 1)

Rollins begins the book with a discussion of faith and theology:

Christian faith, it could be said, is born in the aftermath of God. Our fragile faith is fanned into life in the wake of what we believe to have been the incoming of a life giving encounter in which we feel connected with, and transformed by, the source of everything that is...For Christians testify to having been caught up in and engulfed by that which utterly transcends them. In short, the experience that gives birth to faith, at its most luminous, is analogous to the experience of an infant feeling the embrace and tender kiss of its mother.

On the other hand, theology could provisionally be described as that which attempts to come to grips with this life-giving experience, to describe the source from which everything is suspended and from which our faith is born. In faith God is experienced as the absolute subject who grasps us, while in theology we set about reflecting upon this subject...In faith we are held, in theology we hold...To take our ideas of the divine and hold them as if they correspond to the reality of God is thus to construct a conceptual idol built from the materials of our mind.

Two pages into the book, Rollins has already set my brain to spinning. He goes on to discuss a shift from a Greek understanding of orthodoxy as "right belief" to a Hebraic understanding of orthodoxy as "believing in the right way":

Thus orthodoxy is no longer (mis)understood as the opposite of heresy but rather is understood as a term that signals a way of being in the world rather than a means of believing things about the world.

I mentioned in my earlier post that I really didn't like this book the first time through. There seems something a bit Burke-ish in this statement, a device of a sort to redefine heresy and make it a wonderful and virtuous thing. But I've sat on this and thought about it long and hard, and I don't think that's what Rollins is after here at all.

Here's what I think he's saying, and the more I think about it, the more I'm forced to concede his point: we make a pretense of saying things like all theology is provisional and all interpretation is subject to critique and whatnot. But Rollins comes right out and incorporates that stance into the very heart of his project. He's basically conceding at the very beginning that everything that he says, indeed everything that we all say, about God is at least a little bit of crap. We can never come to the point where our theology grasps all that is God. In fact, much of the Christian tradition has long held that to do so is to create an idol. We try to grasp God, indeed we must try to grasp God, so as to understand the One who has grasped us. What marks out orthodoxy, in Rollins's terms, is not so much the content of that grasping but rather the way in which it is held. Love, openness, humility - these, I think, would characterize orthodoxy in Rollins's terms.

But I don't think he's saying that what we believe doesn't matter. I don't think that's in any way his point. Rather, I think this is an understanding that orthodoxy is a journey towards truth. It begins with an understanding that we don't have it right, and it sets off towards the truth, recognizing that we will never completely arrive this side of eternity. The theology that doesn't recognize it's own provisional and incomplete character - this theology is no longer a grasping towards God, but is rather the fashioning of an idol.

You know what? I think he's onto something here.

Technorati Tags: books, How (Not) to Speak About God, Peter Rollins, emerging church

How (Not) to Speak of God

I have a few more posts on the subject of community in the image of God - surprisingly, I haven't quite run that one into the ground yet. ;) I wanted to give a bit of thought to praxis and reflect on practices that I think flow from this approach. But I also just finished Pete Rollins's new book How (Not) to Speak of God and wanted to begin blogging my thoughts on it. It's starting to get a bit of attention - tsk blogged on it a few months ago, as did Scot. The Church and Postmodern Culture blog has also hosted several interactions with the book.

I have to say, this was one of the more challenging books I've read in a while. It's not the sort of thing that I'd hand out to the average person looking to get a sense of what the emerging church is all about. It's heavy on philosophy and is so abstract that it makes my stuff look like a how-to manual. That's not necessarily a criticism - Rollins is obviously a first-rate thinker who knows his stuff. But he makes the reader work for it.

I'll also say up front that, at first reading, I didn't really like it. I found it frustrating and, at times, it seemed that he was contradicting himself. But this is a book that benefits from a slow, thoughtful read, and at times a second reading as well. And, the more I mull on this, the more I think he's on to something. Rollins talks about all revelation as both a revealing and a concealing - I really wanted to argue with this, but, at the end of the day...I think he's right. This approach forms something of the backbone of the book; it's a thoughtful appropriation of postmodern philosophy laced with a heavy dose of irony, along with a chunk of liturgies from his community that demonstrate how his theological approach plays out in a practical setting.

I'm going to start working my way through some of Rollins's thoughts. I think that this book represents one of the first serious attempts to take some of the emphases of the emerging movement in a constructive (rather than deconstructive) direction, and the result is going to surprise, encourage, frustrate, and anger folks.

Technorati Tags: books, emergent, Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God, theology

Recommended Reading List

I finally got around to compiling a recommended reading list. I've been working on this for a while now but couldn't get my booklist plugin to play nicely. At any rate - if you're interested, check out my must-have reading list here. I'll no doubt be adding to this as I go and at some point would like to get notes on each of these posted, but one step at a time!

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Heretic's Guide - What's Good? (p. 5)

My head feels clearer and my thoughts more coherent, so I thought I'd jump back into things with a more positive note. Thus far, I've been rather critical of Spencer's book A Heretic's Guide to Eternity. But the book isn't all bad - Spencer does, I think, rightly identify some of the problem of the typical evangelical approach to the gospel, and that's a good thing. Spencer and I agree on at least one thing - the gospel is bigger than a transaction and means more than spending eternity in a really happy place.

I'm sympathetic to Spencer's underlying premise, even if I don't buy it wholesale. I'll speak specifically so as to avoid some of what I take to be problematic language on Spencer's part. Conservative Christian religion in the American context has often seen itself as God's power broker. To put it crassly, the way to God is through Jesus, and the way to Jesus is through "us" - whoever us may be. As a result, the Christian faith has been put to the service of all kinds of masters in the interests of power. Let me be blunt - conservative Christianity is not God's power broker. In fact, to the degree that it has failed to recognize its own stance in relation to power, it has also failed in its efforts to embody the gospel as demonstrated by the Cross. Let's not kid ourselves: doctrine is used for threat as well as for welcome, for control as well as for empowerment, for division as well as for cohesion. And that's not just regrettable - it's often simply sinful.

So here's the difficulty - if the gospel is a transaction on the premise of saying a prayer or participating in a liturgy or whatever, then the ones who control that transaction also control eternity. And, yes, that's a ridiculously crass way of putting it. But it's there; it's present in the conservative Christian subculture - a radical minority, to be sure, but at the same time, too many folks pay too much attention to what folks like Robertson and Falwell say for me to think that it's a minor issue. So foreign policy becomes doctrinal and the Pledge of Allegiance becomes liturgical and we all wonder why nobody pays attention to us anymore. When folks like Katherine Harris can campaign for their own election by saying things like to elect people who are not Christians to public office is to "legislate sin", then I have to cry foul. That's not the gospel - it's attempting to make the gospel serve two masters.

So, yes, to the degree that Christian "religion" prevents us from being good neighbors, then I'd say that it's bad. (But I'd also say that it's no longer Christian.) And focusing on a "decision" can, I think, contribute to that. Spencer is right to suggest that Christianity is far, far less about praying a prayer and far more about following Jesus. It's a commitment; it's a way of life. It's something into which we enter as participants and travelers, and not something that we complete. It's more a process and less a moment - although moments, such as decisions or conversions, are absolutely significant and should not be discounted. And it's far, far more about a new creation and God's actions to bring that about than it is about eternal bliss and comfort for the faithful few. It's about the Kingdom being near, and God being with us.

So, then, to the degree that Spencer is critiquing a kind of religion that doesn't represent the fullness of the gospel - then I'm in agreement, even if we may disagree on what to do about it.

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Heretic's Guide - What About Jesus? (p. 4)

I've said a number of times in the comments that I can't go along with Spencer's understanding of the Christian Story as described in his book A Heretic's Guide to Eternity. Up to now, though, I've just focused on some foundational concepts that I think are at odds in the book. It's time for me to dive in and lay out what I think is the fatal flaw in Spencer's book - his failure to deal with what the text actually says and the picture that it presents of who Jesus was and what he did. Spencer reads the text and finds a guide, a path, a messenger of love and inclusion. In his words:

It is not a question of making claims about Jesus as truth but rather one of experiencing the truth of who he is, outside the confines of a religious system. To claim that other religions are true only to the degree that their views of God are the same as Christian concepts is to make a claim that Jesus himself did not make.

This last claim Jesus made in this troublesome little verse in the book of John is perhaps the key to understanding the others [the way, the truth]. "I am the life." Jesus' life, not just his acts on our behalf but the life he lived on earth, is "the life". Living a life like Jesus' is what it truly means to live. Jesus declared his life to be the way to choose - not the way of zealotry or paganism or compromise, but a life committed to God, committed to God's ways, and committed to grace.

Jesus' vision of God is not for the exclusive use of one community. It is not just for Jews or Christians or any other group. It is for anyone and everyone - Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, whatever...The real story, the real scandal, is Jesus' promiscuous view of God. Whatever the role his religion expected him to play, Jesus ignored it and chose instead to forge a new path that included freedom for him to embrace everyone.

To be born again, according to Jesus, is to commit oneself to the kingdom of God's purposes. It is to begin a journey with God in order to make the world a place of grace. It doesn't mean "getting religion"; it means committing ourselves to Jesus' vision of God's kingdom. What did Jesus say that is? In a word, love, plain and simple.

Spencer, I'm sorry. I wish I could go along with you here. It would make my life a lot easier. It would make my task as a person of Christian faith much simpler. It would make my message as a missional believer much more palatable. It would be fun; I could be Tony Robbins or Mr. Rogers or Joel Osteen. (Oops, how'd that get in there? ;)

But I can't.

I can't go along with hippie Jesus who has smiles and lollipops for everyone. It's just not there. It's a painfully selective reading of the text. Yes, Jesus preached a gospel of love and inclusion. Yes, he broke boundaries and welcomed "all and sundry", as NT Wright would say. Yes, he broke the "rules" and did things that offended religious people. But he offended more than just the scribes and Pharisees. He didn't pull punches. He offered a choice: two ways, one of life and one of death. And, he said, most people don't really care to find the first one. (Matt 7:13-14, in case you're wondering.) He said that he didn't come to bring peace, but a sword. He said that judgment was barreling down on the nation, and yet they refused to repent. He said that, in the end, it would go better for Sodom than it would for the cities where he preached and did his miracles.

Was Jesus inclusive? He was - scandalously so. But he was also sharply exclusivistic, and no amount of polishing him up so that he won't offend our postmodern sensibilities can remove it. It's what a professor of mine has called the dark side of the gospel - the awful truth that rejecting his work has a cost, a price that we may find more than we can bear. It's painful and uncomfortable and ugly. But it's there - and to remove it or to ignore it is to do damage to who Jesus is and what he says.

The message of the kingdom isn't that everyone is in. Jesus never said that. It's the announcement of the world's true King and the coming of his Kingdom. Mark says it this way: "The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!" And good news it is - but it has a warning as well, lurking just between the syllables, a warning that we fail to heed to our own detriment.

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Heretic's Guide - Scandal of Grace (p. 3)

As I've mentioned previously, Spencer's categories in A Heretic's Guide to Eternity are religion and grace. I've already touched on his treatment of the term religion; now I want to tackle his definition of grace. In his words:

Could it be that love finds us no matter where we are and we don't have to do anything more to get it? Could it be that - beyond religion, reason, and conventional wisdom - grace is something to be opted out of rather than opted in to? Is it not something you get but something you already have?

What is grace? For me, it is a subversive and scandalous twist in human history - an unexpected and revolutionary turn of events that offered a new way of relating to the sacred and each other. Religion declares that we are separated from God, that we are "outsiders". Grace tells us the opposite, that we are already in unless we want to be out.

The problem, I think, at least in the Christian tradition, is that grace seems to have no meaning apart from sin. The two concepts are always linked. It's not that I think sin is a myth or that everyone is perfect; it's just that I believe linking grace to sin detracts from its beauty and intensity.

The problem with Spencer's definition here is precisely that last bit - the two concepts are linked in the Christian tradition because that's at the very heart of the Story. Wanting them to be disconnected does not make it so - grace, which I'd describe more in terms of favor or kindness that is unearned and undeserved, is subversive and scandalous precisely because of sin. This goes back to the very beginning of the narrative in Genesis. It's beautiful and intense because it is undeserved, because it is freely given, because it is unconventional and it smashes boundaries and breaks down the dividing walls that separate us from the love of God. But without that separation, where's the beauty? Where's the scandal?

Don't get me wrong - I know what Spencer's trying to say. But I don't like how he's saying it. I think what he's going after is what Scot McKnight has called "grace-grinding". But I think he fails somewhat by minimizing the problem of sin. As I mentioned in my last post, part of the role of a religious system is to define the problem - what's wrong with the world? (I'm borrowing that straight from Wright's NTPG, btw.) Grace is God's response to the problem - it's inextricably linked to sin in our experience, because that's how we describe what is wrong. Spencer would be well served here to reflect on a Christian description of the problem.

The concept of sin is meant to address the quality of our relationships, with each other and with the world in which we live, but the church has turned it into a "petty moralism that no longer speaks to...human persons in their complete intermingling."...Although the link between grace and sin has driven Christianity for centuries, it just doesn't resonate in our culture anymore. It repulses rather than attracts. People are becoming much less inclined to acknowledge themselves as "sinners in need of a Savior." It's not that people view themselves as perfect; it's that the language they use to describe themselves has changed. "Broken," "fragmented," and "lacking wholeness" - these are some of the new ways people describe their spiritual need.

Two thoughts to conclude. First, just because an idea is unpopular isn't an indication of whether or not it's true. And that's particularly true, I think, for those of us who claim the Christian faith as our own. Pacifism, for example, is unpopular - but I still hold it to be a true description of a Christian ethic. How much more, then, the core narrative that holds all Christian ethic together? Second, Spencer offers what I think is a better, more compelling definition of sin than "moral misdemeanors" - right before he abandons the concept almost entirely! Frankly, I don't get it - instead of advocating a disconnection of the ideas of grace and sin, why not simply rehabilitate the concept of sin so that the concept of grace means more of what it's supposed to mean in the first place? Then, Spencer, you can stand in a healthy place of tension between the scriptural narrative and common interpretations of it - as it is, you abandon a thoroughly useful concept that is absolutely central to the biblical text and that would lend support to your argument rather than detract from it, for what I can't see as a gain of much of anything.

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A Heretic's Guide: Picking Good Examples (p. 2)

One of the primary challenges I'm facing in reading A Heretic's Guide to Eternity is the suspicion that I'm being faced with a false dichotomy. Ok, that's an understatement - I don't buy the principle division of the book, namely that of religion vs. grace. I touched on this in my previous post, and I thought I'd be able to move on to the first part of the book. But I find that it's a difficulty that keeps hitting me in the face. I can't get past it. A few examples may help:

Admittedly, all religions probably have a fringe element, but just the same, what is it about traditional religion that breeds dogmatic, sometimes fanatical, and even violent responses to the rest of the world? Over the years, terrible things have been done and justified in the name of God. Just look at any history book. Is it any wonder the world's population is beginning to look for alternatives? Frankly, fundamentalists of all kinds are scaring people off. The more zealous and powerful these people become, the more potential followers they drive away.

We need to move past religion. I believe the time is right for another way of looking at the Christian message, freed from the confines of religion and open to the possibility of a radical new incarnation and manifestation. The message of Jesus needs to evolve for our times.

I believe that the next phase of faith is to move beyond religion. Nowhere does Jesus call his followers to start a religion. Jesus' invitation to his first disciples was to follow him. It was a call to journey, a process that leads us away from some things and toward others. It wasn't a call to adhere to a set of rules for all time. In fact, one of the most commonly heard critiques of the Christian message is that it is out of touch with what is really going on in the world around us.

I guess I'm just not really sure what all of this means. Spencer, I think this argument is beneath you - I'm being serious on that statement. You're pitting the worst of "religion" against the best of - well, whatever else there is, I suppose. Have atrocities been committed in the name of religion? Absolutely. Please find one person of religious belief that will deny that, because I don't think they exist. And, yes, fundamentalism can lead to oppression and violence. But "progressives" have committed their share of atrocities also - let's not forget that there's been just as much violence done against religion in the past century as there has been for it. Evil doesn't need to borrow the name of God - it does just fine in human guise.

My question, though, is whether religion is the problem in and of itself. Frankly, I don't see it. Religion has just as often offered a critique of power as it has misused it. Slavery, civil rights, terrorism - all are issues where the problem might be seen as religion, and yet the resources for resolving the problem also come from religion. Religion, at its best, serves as a voice for justice, for the oppressed, for peace, and for understanding. It's simply not tenable to lay all of society's ills at the feet of organized religion as though just removing the "external and dogmatic belief systems" will usher in an era of warm fuzzies and hugs all around.

Let me offer my definition of religion, or specifically, what I take to be the core of the Christian faith qua religion. Is religion - is faith - simply an "external and dogmatic belief system"? Frankly, I hate that definition. It sounds violent and coercive - it makes it seem as though, if I were more spiritual, I wouldn't hold to my belief system. But that's untenable. Religions - faiths, and the Christian faith in particular - offer a particular view of the world, a particular story about what it means to be human, what is wrong with us, and what the solution to our problems might be. It's that story, that narrative, that forms the basis for a religion - not dogmatism or rules. Religions exist because we as people need a way to explain our experience as humans. As a Christian, I hold to a particular telling of that story. Other religions, of course, tell the tale differently. And, yes, those differences sometimes lead to conflict. But I believe that we, as humans, are storied people - we simply can't help crafting narratives in which to live. In the absence of religion, other narratives will be told as well. One currently powerful narrative is that told by consumer capitalism - it's not a "religion" in the technical sense, but you'd better believe it has the power to shape the way we think and interact with one another in ways that are undeniably religious.

So, from the beginning of the book, I feel as though I'm being fitted for Procrustes' bed - I'm given the choice between fundamentalism or freeform spirituality, and I frankly think it's a false dichotomy. I'm quite convinced that one can hold to the historic Christian faith and still offer a critique of "power-based interpretations of foundational texts". In fact, I think that the Christian story by its very nature critiques such interpretations.

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Heretic's Guide: The Question of Language (p.1)

I'm about halfway through Spencer Burke's new book, A Heretic's Guide to Eternity. I thought I'd go ahead and start my interaction, because I'm finding that I have a lot to say and I don't want to lose my thoughts as I go forward. Before I begin, I want to reiterate my respect and appreciation of Spencer as someone I've had the opportunity to meet and get to know just a bit. I've said previously and will say again that he's one of the nicest and most winsome guys I've ever met, and his love for and appreciation of people is profoundly evident from the moment he walks into a room. I've struggled, consequently, with this review, because I have some challenging things to say as a result of the book thus far. I want, then, to be crystal clear that my differences are not with him as a person, but rather with his ideas as presented in AHGtE. Ultimately, though, I've come to two conclusions that I must hold in order to speak with integrity: first, when I'm asked for my opinion, I have a responsibility to present it honestly and fairly and to not cover it for the sake of maintaining an appearance of camaraderie; second, respect means not minimizing the differences between two positions, but recognizing them and speaking truly about them. With that said, Spencer, if you're ever in the Philadelphia area again, you have an open invitation to call me up for a beer or coffee or dinner. My treat. ;)

So, now that I've completely telegraphed where I'm headed with this, I want to begin by expressing something of why I find this book frustrating to read. Bob has already commented on this; so has Scot. But I want to reiterate what others have said: Spencer's use of terminology in this book is maddening. Maddening as in water torture maddening. Put briefly, Spencer is using language in unconventional ways in this book - and it makes digesting it difficult. The title is a case in point, although one that I won't belabor - what Spencer means by "heretic" is not what is normally meant by the term. Read Bob's post for further interaction with this point - I don't see a reason to restate what he's already done quite well. That's not the point of language that's a sticking point for me. The premise of the book, as I'm tracking it thus far, seems to be the contrast between "religion" and "grace". But here's where Spencer begins, I think, to invest these words with something of a different sense than what is commonly meant by them. For example:

To be honest, religion doesn't really work for me anymore. Being aligned with an institutional church or a particular system of worship seems increasingly irrelevant to my ongoing journey with God. In my experience, the customs, traditions, and even language of religion often seem to get in the way of honest dialogue about God. What's more, religion's airtight explanations and all-or-nothing theological arguments seem out of touch with the complexities of twenty-first-century life.

So, as Spencer continues through the book to engage this idea of religion vs. grace, I have to ask myself to what it is that he's exactly referring. The description that he gives doesn't seem to me to be religion per se; if that is, in fact, what he's saying, then I have to cautiously suggest that the entire book is based on a false dichotomy, and I think Spencer is no doubt smarter than that. Is he saying that all religion functions this way, or only some types of religious expression? I think the latter - but I'm not sure, because he never comes out and says it. As a result, I'm left with a choice that I have to make as a reader - is he being either frustratingly imprecise in his use of language, or harmfully stereotypical in his view of religion? I'm attempting to read generously here, so I'm opting for the former - but I concede that I might be wrong on that assumption. And I'm not going to begin to tackle the question of what he means by "grace" - that's for another post.

Some will no doubt say that I'm being needlessly pedantic about the meanings of words, that Spencer is merely being creative and pushing the language in a different direction, that it's helpful and challenging and stretching and all kinds of fun stuff like that. And I concede that I may have less patience for that sort of thing than I once did; I've become used to a certain level of technicality when reading theology, and Spencer is clearly not attempting to head in that direction (not a criticism, just an observation). But at it's most basic, language is about using shared symbols to communicate meaning. There is a sense in which it can be stretched and pushed, and then there is a point after which it looses its capacity to perform its intended function. In other words, stretch the meaning of a word too far and it looses its meaning altogether, like expired elastic that can no longer maintain its shape. And what is true of language is true of an intimately connected means of communication - that of story. But that's another post.

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Inspiration and Incarnation: The NT's Use of the OT (p. 4)

Jumping back to Inspiration and Incarnation, I want to briefly summarize Enns's third point of difficulty in understanding the nature of scripture. Enns contends that the NT authors' use of the OT is itself particularly challenging for evangelical hermeneutics, primarily because the NT authors didn't follow what is often portrayed as normative hermeneutical practices in interpreting the OT. This is something that, I think, often escapes contemporary readers - we are, unfortunately, sufficiently far removed from the OT narratives (generally speaking) that we don't catch the subtle oddities in the NT texts. As a result, when we run across something that we do recognize, we assume that the author is doing something that he may not in fact be doing. More on this in a second.

Enns supplies a wealth of information about both the actual uses of the NT by the OT. I simply can't begin to summarize it all - to be honest, I think the discussion of second Temple writings alone is worth the price of the book. An example will have to suffice. In 2 Tim 3:8, we find this statement: "And just as Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses..." Jannes and Jambres are the names that are assigned to the Egyptian magicians spoken of in Exodus 7. But even a cursory reading of the passage in Exodus will reveal that, not only are these names not mentioned anywhere in the narrative, the number of magicians in question isn't even provided. So where do the names originate? While we can't be certain of their origins, we do know that they also occur in the writings of Qumran, as well as one of the targums. What we see in this instance is that Paul is participating in an established interpretive tradition and incorporating its assumptions and conclusions into a writing that we hold as inspired. Other examples abound, some more troubling - Matthew uses Hosea in ways that, were I to emulate, would have resulted in my failing any number of theology assignments; Paul on a number of occasions quotes an OT passage, but actively alters the passage so that the quotation more adequately presents the perspective he is attempting to communicate; and Jesus himself takes passages out of context in order to prove a point, such as his use of Exodus 3:6 in his argument with the Sadducees in Luke 20.

I'm going to resist attempting to draw conclusions at this point. Instead, I want to quote something that Enns says that I think encapsulates the issue nicely, and summarize my thoughts in my next post.

Furthermore, it will not do to argue that Jesus and the apostles adopted such tainted exegetical techniques simply as an accommodation to the faulty thinking of their contemporaries. There simply is no indication of this anywhere in the New Testament...To argue in such a way reveals more about our own assumptions concerning the supposed universal validity of our own hermeneutical standards than it does about apostolic hermeneutics. But apostolic hermeneutics is not to be explained in such a way as to conform to our expectations, nor should we be embarrassed about it or make excuses for it. It is to be understood. (p. 132, emphasis added)

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