Coffeehouse Theology: A Great Intro to Contextual Theology

A few years ago, I met a guy named Ed Cyzewski in an etrek course at Biblical. Ed was just starting work on a book that he hoped would take the emerging / missional church conversation and make it presentable and digestible to the people who would arguably most benefit from it but who were most certainly least represented: average churchgoing Christians. Now, almost four years later, I'm holding in my hands the fruits of his labor: Coffeehouse Theology.

Ed posted a few comments of his own in this article on the emergent village website:

Having participated in the broader emerging church conversation on reimagining faith, culture, and practice in today's context, I noticed a need during my seminary days for a book that provided a synthesis of mission, culture, theology, and Christian living accessible for just about everyone in the church. Not only did I want to bring the ideas of various thinkers together in one place, showing how they related to one another, I also wanted this book to be accessible for a reader who wouldn't know a metanarrative if it hit him in the face-or marginalized his perspective for that matter.

As you may know, if you've been reading this site for any length of time - do I still have any regular readers out there? ;) - I have a deep interest in contextual theology and a driving conviction that all theology is contextual. That's a contentious statement for some, but for me it's incontrovertible. However, contextual theology isn't exactly a household term, even if it's getting a certain degree of buzz lately. So, if one is convinced both that everyone does theology and that all theology is contextual, what's the best approach to taking this conversation to the next level with the people with whom we serve and worship and live?

Early in the book, Ed has this to say:

In Coffeehouse Theology, I want us to think about culture in the broadest of terms: the values, language, and customs of a nation or people group. Within each nation, culture evolves over time, customs change, and people adopt different values...While subcultures exist, examining the larger features of our times will help us most as we seek to understand God in a particular time and place. (p. 55)

I could say a lot of things about this book, but perhaps the thing I like most about it is that it takes a conversation that began largely within a protest movement and reframes it so that it becomes inviting rather than threatening. Let's be honest - as someone who's been around the emerging church movement for quite some time now, it can be intimidating, particularly for folks who are a part of the movements being protested. Let me put it this way - if one's understanding of the gospel is something along the lines of the four spiritual laws and another comes along and critiques that, the natural reaction is going to be to assume that the gospel is being attacked - even if the critiques are valid. Contextual theology provides a framework for discussing the difference between our understanding of the gospel and the gospel itself. When done properly, it can be an invitation - both to understand one's own perspective better, and to be open to constructive critique of that perspective. And Coffeehouse Theology does just that - invites the reader into a conversation about context and culture, and how they shape and frame our theology. It's unassuming, it's warm, it's personal, and it's full of stuff that opens the door to discussions that I think are hugely important.

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.

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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!

Technorati Tags: books

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.

Technorati Tags: books, emerging church, Heretic's Guide to Eternity, Spencer Burke

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.

Technorati Tags: books, emerging church, Heretic's Guide to Eternity, Spencer Burke

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.

Technorati Tags: emerging church, Heretic's Guide to Eternity, Spencer Burke

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.

Technorati Tags: books, emerging church, Heretic's Guide to Eternity, Spencer Burke

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.

Technorati Tags: books, Heretic's Guide to Eternity, language, Spencer Burke

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)

Technorati Tags: books, Inspiration and Incarnation, Peter Enns, scripture

Inspiration and Incarnation: The OT and Theological Diversity (p. 3)

Continuing my discussion of Pete Enns's book Inspiration and Incarnation, I want to pick up briefly a subject that I think is particularly challenging to the traditional evangelical perspective on scripture. In particular, Enns discusses the difficulty that the theological diversity of the Old Testament presents to that perspective. I think that it also bears repeating that Enns is approaching this question from firm evangelical commitments himself - his presentation of these issues isn't meant to undermine a high view of scripture, but rather to bring the nature of the written text itself into conversation with that perspective, resulting in a more robust understanding of what it means to claim that scripture is God's self-revelation. In his own words:

One way that critical biblical scholarship takes diversity into account is to say that the Old Testament is full of contradictions and, hence, a quaint record of conflicting human opinions. Such an approach will never be an acceptable option for Christian thinking. An evangelical counterattack, however, is to defend the Bible against accusations of diversity by showing that such diversity is not there, involves only minor issues, or can be resolved in theory at some future time. But this alternative creates tensions of its own, and it runs the risk of avoiding the difficult issues altogether. (p.73)

I'm tempted at this point to delve into some of the texts that Enns highlights. I've decided against doing that. Anyone who has read the Old Testament at any level beyond a surface reading has no doubt begun to encounter the issues that Enns is discussing. If you are unconvinced that such diversity exists, I would humbly suggest a reading to illustrate: compare 2 Sam 11 and 1 Chron 20. Notice the tiny slice of history that the Chronicler omits following 20:1. It's absolutely fascinating the way these two narratives are constructed. I could suggest a number of others; however, the point isn't at all about exegeting specific difficulties. In fact, that may be precisely not the point. Enns goes on to state the following:

What the diversity of the Bible tells us is that there is no superficial unity to the Bible. Portions of the Bible are in tension with each other, as we have seen. That these tensions exist is a matter of simple observation. A better question is why they exist and what this tells us about the nature of the Scriptures and, by extension, the nature of God. (p.108)

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Inspiration and Incarnation: The OT and Ancient Literature (p. 2)

The first "problem" that Enns tackles in Inspiration and Incarnation is that of the Old Testament's relationship to other Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) literature. Enns demonstrates the difficulty in three areas:

• Creation and the Flood: Is Genesis Myth or History?
• Customs, Laws, and Proverbs: Is Revelation Unique?
• Israel and its Kings: Is Good Historiography Objective or Biased?

Tackling each of these areas is far more than I can begin to attempt in the format of a blog post. Instead, I'll post a few excerpts and then offer some thoughts of my own.

To give a hint of where this discussion is going, it is worth asking what standards we can reasonably expect of the Bible, seeing that it is an ancient Near Eastern document and not a modern one. Are the early stories in the Old Testament to be judged on the basis of standards of modern historical inquiry and scientific precision, things that ancient peoples were not at all aware of? Is it not likely that God would have allowed his word to come to the ancient Israelites according to standards they understood, or are modern standards of truth and error so universal that we should expect premodern cultures to have understood them?(p. 41)

I question how much value there is in posing the choice of Genesis as either myth or history. This distinction seems to be a modern invention. It presupposes - without stating explicitly - that what is historical, in a modern sense of the word, is more real, of more value, more like something God would do, than myth.(p. 49)

I could go on - there is a wealth of information in this section. For anyone who has done any amount of reading in ANE literature, there isn't a lot of surprising information - I was familiar with most of the texts that he was referencing just from my seminary training alone. He draws on examples that are fairly common knowledge, such as Enuma Elish, Gilgamesh, and the code of Hammurabi. But the point that he makes is profound. Enns is proposing that evangelicals, by and large, have entered into the text with an assumption about what scripture is and does, and that our doctrine of scripture is shaped far more by those assumptions than it is by the text itself. This is most telling in his discussion of the ancient approach to historiography, and in particular the contrasts between Samuel-Kings and Chronicles. Enns uses the example of the differences in Nathan's challenge to David; I can just as easily see the same dynamic in the telling of the census of the fighting men. Evangelical exegesis has often bent over backwards to reconcile these passages. But the simple fact, on first reading, is that they contradict each other - the texts present different factual summaries of the same events. And this has caused no end of difficulty for evangelical interpretation - but the reason for this difficulty is found, not in the text itself, but in the approach to scripture that makes contradiction a problem! Put succinctly - the fact that the accounts in these books differ is only a problem because we make it a problem. We assume that God has the same epistemology as we do, and that his conception of truth is the same as ours. So, for example, when Samuel-Kings and Chronicles give different facts about the same events, the assumption is that both cannot be true as written - it must be explained as to how these accounts can both be true while saying different things.

But what if, for example, "true" historiography in the ancient sense isn't historiography that is factually accurate in the way that we would think of accuracy? What if "true" historiography is the telling of the tale that presents the desired perspective most compellingly? What if the interpretation of the event is more important than the event itself? And what if all of these things mean that two accounts can tell different facts about the same event and yet still both be "true"? The point that Enns is making is that the Bible isn't the word of God because it is completely different from its context. In fact, it speaks very compellingly in contextual forms, including the approach to history and interpretation of events. And evangelicals have not wrestled with the implications of that contextuality for a robust doctrine of scripture - in fact, by obscuring the difficulties, we have participated instead in a sort of docetic bibliolatry, a belief in a scripture that is so far removed from the human author that it only appears human but, in fact, is nothing of the sort.

Technorati Tags: books, Inspiration and Incarnation, Peter Enns, scripture

Scripture and Theological Diversity

Recently I began an absolutely fascinating book by Peter Enns called Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament. Pete Enns primarily teaches at Westminster, but he also teaches occasional courses at Biblical. I had the privilege of taking a course with him that dealt specifically with the New Testament authors' use of the Old Testament. It was absolutely fascinating - it put a lot of pieces together for me in terms of odd things about the NT, while simultaneously opening a whole different can of worms. More on that to come - I plan on sharing more from this book. It's one that I think everyone who's serious about theology, biblical studies, contextualization, and scripture should read.

One thing in particular that I've been pondering, though, is the nature of scripture. Enns makes the point, and I think rightly so, that although evangelicals claim to take scripture seriously, we often don't. In particular, we fail to do so when we don't allow scripture to speak for itself, but instead force it to conform to a predetermined standard of what we believe scripture should be. Generally speaking, evangelicals don't do well with the diversity of theological opinion that is present in the text. Often, these various perspectives that are obviously present in the text itself are smoothed over and made to say the same thing, not in the interest of hearing what it is that the text actually says, but in an attempt to protect it from contradiction. However, the idea that scripture cannot contain divergent opinions and remain scripture is an assumption, nothing more. Forcing the text to conform to this predefined standard, rather than protecting its integrity, may instead actually prevent us from hearing what it is that the text is actually trying to say.

There are plenty of examples that I could cite to demonstrate what I mean. A classic set of divergent opinions exists between Samuel-Kings and Chronicles, for example. However, I'll leave the examples for later posts. What I'm pondering at the moment is the fact that a diversity of interpretations is not necessarily a bad thing. Scripture itself, rather than being monophonic, contains a chorus of voices that all exist in dialog with each other. Often, different authors can be read as saying, "Yes, but..." to another part of the text. And what is significant is that these tensions are not resolved, but are left to stand in the text itself. This should communicate to us in a significant way that we should be open to alternate readings of the text, alternate interpretations and emphases. To do so is not to devalue scripture - it is to take it seriously enough to allow its form to influence the way we understand it.

More on this to come...

Technorati Tags: books, Inspiration and Incarnation, Peter Enns, scripture

Interview with Shane Hipps (p. 2)

Part 2 of my interview with Shane Hipps, author of The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture:

Interview with Shane Hipps (p. 1)

I've had the privilege of discussing a few thoughts from The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture with Shane Hipps. Shane's website, by the way, can be found here. The interview is full of great thoughts, so I'll be posting it in two parts.

Look for part two tomorrow evening!

Technorati Tags: books, emerging church, Shane Hipps

Media and Choice (The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture p. 3)

In my previous post, I discussed the Four Laws of Media that Shane Hipps presents in his book The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture. The underlying premise, of course, is that the forms of media that we use shape the way that we use information. I want to further those thoughts on the effects of media by considering something that I discussed some time ago about the nature of culture. I suggested then, following the lead of sociologist Edward Hall, that culture is simply the collection of semantic systems of a society - in other words, culture is communication. It's the aggregate of all of the meaning-making elements that allow us to transfer messages from one person to another.

This intersects, I think, squarely with the Four Laws of Media that Shane has discussed. Media are integral to our communication systems. Media shape the way in which we pass messages and, in many ways, frame the meanings that can be assigned to those messages. Take the clock, for instance. The clock is a medium that we utilize to communicate and measure time. It also shapes the way we think about time. For western cultures, time is linear and perishable. Each moment is unique and will never come again. Time, as a result, is seen as a commodity; we are obsessed with it. In some sense, time can even be seen as wealth - to have time for leisure is a mark of affluence. This view of time, however, is not at all ubiquitous. The clock is what enables western cultures' perception of time to even exist - without a means of measuring it and marking it, our view of time would likely be cyclical and seasonal, as it is for many cultures across the globe.

The complication, then, that this presents for our consideration of the effect of media on culture is simply this: we are faced with two different kinds of media choices. Some of these choices are explicit and controlled. For example, a decision to use PowerPoint (or whatever you Apple folks use ;) during worship gatherings is an explicit decision that can be evaluated as such. The use of the media is at the discretion of the community. However, other media choices are implicit and unconscious. Or, perhaps better stated, there are some media shifts that are so massive that they change an entire culture or cultures. The printing press was one such shift. Electronic media are another. We, as a culture, think differently at a foundational level as a result of the explosion of new media. This is not a choice that we can make - we can't opt into the Internet, for example. It's already pervasive and shifting the way in which we think and communicate as a culture. Our systems of meaning have already changed. These kinds of media choices are less about whether we will utilize the new media - frankly, those choices are irrelevant when the shift is significantly fundamental. The choice that we face instead is more about contextuality. We need to understand what the gospel that we present means in the new systems of meaning and thus begin the task of recontextualizing the message for a new world.

I don't like to talk about postmodernity. I think it's overdiscussed and misunderstood. And, on some level, it misses the point entirely. What we as a culture are currently facing is, at least in part, the result of more than a century of significant shifts in our cultural media. Our systems of meaning have shifted entirely, and far too few of the people who want to engage in discussions of epistemology and the nature of truth have even thought to ask the questions of the effects of new media on those systems.

Technorati Tags: books, emerging church, Shane Hipps

The Laws of Media (The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture p. 2)

As I mentioned previously, one of the central premises of The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture is that media are not value-neutral. Rather, they influence what and how we think about the message. This matter of shaping, however, isn't always apparent. McLuhan proposed four laws of media that describe the process by which media influence the way in which we give and receive messages. Shane summarizes these laws as follows:

• What does the medium extend?Media enhance some function of human existence. The telephone, for example, extends the voice by allowing us to communicate over great distances.
• What does the medium make obsolete?New media change the relationship between humans and previous media. At times, this means the previous media are eliminated; at others, their function changes. For example, email makes postal mail obsolete in that it changes the function of postal mail as a primary means of personal communication.
• What does the medium retrieve? There is a sense in which new media borrow from the past, retrieving a prior (sometimes ancient) media or experience. For example, radio retrieved oral storytelling.
• What does the medium reverse into? In Shane's words, "When pushed to the extreme, every medium will reverse into its oppposite intention." This is probably the most counterintuitive of the laws, but I think it makes sense if it's approached from the perspective of strengths which, when taken to extremes, can become weaknesses. For example, television extends the voice, but it reverses into a medium that silences by shutting down conversation and interaction.

It's helpful, I think, to look at this by example. Shane mentions the effect of the printing press on Christian thought (and culture in general) by applying the four laws to the printed book. I've added somewhat to his thoughts here:

• The printed book extends memory and intellectual reason. It extends the personal encounter of the individual and God.
• The printed book makes communal faith obsolete. It changes the role of the community from the place of encounter with God and memory of the Story to a dispenser of instruction.
• The printed book retrieves individual, personal knowledge of the scriptures. It retrieves the disciplines of study and the personal task of knowing and understanding the text.
• The printed book reverses into a lack of knowledge of the text. When the content is immediately available, there is less a need to know and remember the Story. The book, when taken to extremes, actually harms memory by making it unnecessary. It also harms synthetic, holistic thinking by reducing the ability to think in nonlinear, intuitive ways.

This framework is extraordinarily helpful in thinking through the question of how a given medium shapes our perspective. Next, I want to consider a tangent question that the book doesn't explicitly address: how much choice do we really have in the media that we employ?

Technorati Tags: books, emerging church, Shane Hipps

The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture

I mentioned previously in my posts about the Taxonomy of Emergence that I was reading The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture by Shane Hipps. I want to spend a few posts blogging about this book, because this is one of those fascinating reads that puts words to things that you've long suspected but couldn't articulate while also challenging you to significantly rethink some assumptions that you may not have realized that you've held.

The premise of the book follows largely Marshall McLuhan's famous dictum, The medium is the message. In other words, media are not value-neutral. The form in which we present a message influences the content and meaning of that message. In the author's own words:

To perceive media and technology with both eyes open, we cannot simply list the various benefits and liabilities of all new and existing media in hopes of understanding their power and meaning. Instead, the task before us requires an entirely different approach to analyzing media, recognizing them not simply as conduits or pipelines (i.e., neutral purveyors of information), but rather as dynamic forces with the power to shape us, regardless of content. Such an approach invites us to ask different questions, better questions, and moves us beyond the oversimplified but common belief that media forms can be deemed good or bad based on how they are used...It is imperative that we move beyond this paradigm and realize that our forms of media and technology are primary forces that cause changes in our philosophy, theology, culture, and ultimately the way we do church.

This is such a significant question for anyone wanting to approach our present context from a missional perspective. Over the next few posts, I want to discuss the basic framework that the author proposes in which such questions can be approached, examine some of the ways in which this framework can both encourage us and also help us to rethink some assumptions about ministry in a technologically saturated culture, and finally, offer a few additional thoughts that Shane has graciously provided on the subject.

Technorati Tags: books, emerging church, Shane Hipps

More from Stetzer

I've been taking one of Ed Stetzer's articles to task over the last few posts, so I wanted to also highlight some really great thoughts that he presented at the recent Reform and Resurge conference. A great quote: "Preaching against culture is like preaching against somebody's house. It's just where they live." Also this: "The stumbling block of the cross has too often been replaced by the stumbling block of the church." Excellent thoughts here. Read more at Reformissionary. I've had Stetzer's new book on my wishlist - this confirms that it's one I'll want to read.

On the Horizon

I received a wonderful present in the mail today... ;)

Review forthcoming. I've finished the first chapter, and I'm hooked already. Here's a teaser:

"When the early Christians told the story of Jesus - which they did in a number of ways to make a number of different points - they never actually said that he laughed, and mentioned only once that he burst into tears. But all the same, the stories they told of him constantly hinted at laughter and tears in fair measure...It isn't so much that Jesus laughed at the world, or wept at the world. He was celebrating with the new world that was beginning to be born, the world in which all that was good and lovely would triumph over evil and misery. He was sorrowing with the world the way it was, the world of violence and injustice and tragedy which he and the people he met knew so well."

Good Theology

I'm all over the map lately. I'm working on yet another book that's prompted a few thoughts. This one is Clemens Sedmak's book Doing Local Theology, which is a nice little volume talking about how this contextual theology stuff actually works in practice. (Anyone getting sick of this yet? My class is over in only four more weeks... ;) Anyway, Sedmak proposes three criteria for "good theology" that I thought were just fascinating. He writes this:

What is "good theology" according to Jesus? As we have seen, theology is not exclusively an academic endeavor. It is about personal and communal transformation, based on a relationship with God....Jesus emphasizes the practical consequences, the fruits. He emphasizes the spirit with which theology is done. He emphasizes the need to care for the people and to be with the people.

He goes on to discuss his three criteria for good theology:

• Realness - Realness means that the theology is true to life. Reality also serves as a check to our own thinking, to constructing systems that are intellectually coherent but practically unworkable.
• Fidelity to the founder - In his own words, this means being "faithful and honest to the mission and message and person of Jesus".
• Practical consequences - What is the fruit? What are the practices that naturally flow from the theology? Again, in Sedmak's words, "Theology is a way of following Jesus."

True to reality, true to Jesus, and resulting in true praxis - what more can we ask? I think that's as fine a definition of good theology as I've ever read. If what I write and dream and think and live could fit those three criteria, then I think I would count myself successful.

Technorati Tags: books, contextual theology, Sedmak

Culture as Meaning - p.2

One of the challenges of talking about culture is that it's so much a part of who we are that it's functionally invisible to us. We typically only notice a small part of what makes up our culture - much of our context only becomes apparent in contrast with another context, where the differences illustrate our own cultural patterns. A case in point that Hall discusses is the way in which many of us in western cultures approach time. The notion of time is completely contextual - even trying to define "time" is extraordinarily difficult. We can only grapple with its meaning by assigning context to it through the use of units and measurements. But even these are somewhat arbitrary, and the importance we place on those segmentations is a matter of context. Most of us in western cultures are used to dealing with time in a linear fashion. Each moment is perishable and unique - once it is past, it is unrecoverable. Consequently, we value our delineations of time and place a high priority on adhering to schedules and being mindful of days, hours, minutes, etc. But other cultures may not approach time in this same way - time might be viewed as cyclical rather than linear, and units of time as arbitrary. In some cultures, schedules carry far less weight than they do in mine - I have difficulty grappling with the implications of that, but it enlightens me to an aspect of my own culture which otherwise would be invisible.

Now, to get back to the question of meaning and its relation to context, let's consider this from a different angle that Hall also touches on: space. Spatial relationships and orientation is also a contextual concern - the use of space carries particular meanings in some contexts that it does not carry in others. The best way that I can think of to approach this is by way of example. A few years ago, a friend and I were discussing the arrangement of the worship gathering at our church with the pastor and another member of the church. At the time, we were meeting in a high school auditorium. The pastor was expressing concern that the worship team led from the stage, while he preached the sermon from the floor in front of the stage. Here is the significant point - the meaning that he assigned to the spatial location of worship and preaching was that we were demonstrating that we valued worship over scripture. I argued the opposite - by locating himself closer to the people, we were conveying that we valued scripture, and in particular that we valued it as a community.

In both arguments, the meaning that we assigned to the location of the preacher and the worship team was limited by our context. For the pastor, the meaning was a function of an unstated understanding that elevation conveys significance. For me, the understanding was different - proximity conveys significance. Now, bear in mind that neither meaning is inherently correct - both are contextual projections onto spatial arrangements. The question, though, that must be answered is this: which meaning is in play?

The pastor's decision was to move the preaching to the platform and to teach the reasons that we were doing so, to instill an understanding in the community that we were demonstrating significance through elevation. Here's the problem - the community didn't share that underlying assumption. The range of meanings that could be assigned to the spatial orientation was limited by context, and that meaning simply wasn't available. No amount of communicating would change this - instead, what happened was that a disconnect was created between what was said and what was done, with competing messages coming from word and deed. By distancing himself spatially from the people, he instead created a relational distancing as well - a very slight one, to be sure, but it was present nonetheless and exacerbated other concerns related to his exercise of authority.

The implications for this are huge. If we approach a context with forms already established, we risk actually damaging the message. This is why, on some level, describing the emerging church as concerned with "coffee, candles, and couches" is simultaneously both accurate and dead wrong. Forms in and of themselves are absolutely unimportant - that's why they are critically important. In other words, what is important about form is not the form itself, but what the form communicates, specifically in a given context. Forms should be seen as fluid and ad-hoc, able to change at need to convey the desired meaning in a given context.

Technorati Tags: contextual theology, Edward Hall, culture, meaning

Bevans's Models and the Emerging Church

I've put off posting this for a bit because I'm sorting through the implications of Bevans's categories as I think about the emerging church. I think I have a framework I'm comfortable with, so I'm going to throw out some thoughts and see where they land. Besides, I do my best thinking in process anyway. ;)

As I discussed in my earlier post, Bevans presents six models for approaching the question of contextual theology. I want to reiterate his thoughts that no model exists in isolation - all of the models are, to some degree or another, in play at all times. But by identifying a primary model that is in place in a given system, we can identify something of the shape of that particular model and also discuss its similarities and dissimilarities to other systems. In other words, this isn't meant to identify deficiencies in any particular system so much as it is to identify the distinctions and provide a framework for thinking through the differences. With that said, here are my thoughts: the emerging church is characterized, for the most part, by an approach that is rooted in praxis while many of the critics are more comfortable in a translation framework.

One of the common statements that seems to be heard when discussing critics like Carson (for example) is that the emerging church is primarily a movement of practitioners, not academics (and let's not have the movement/conversation discussion, k?). On the surface, I've always thought this sounded like a weak defense. On some level, practitioners are in just as much need of good theology as academics - more, in fact, given their close connection to the body-at-large. But I understand the concern that's being articulated, even if it could be framed better - practitioners have different concerns than academics, and, generally speaking, don't spend their time constructing airtight systems but rather look at theology from a rubber-meets-the-road perspective. And this, of course, is exactly what is described by the praxis model, as defined by Bevans - "acting reflectively and reflecting upon one's actions". Putting this into the context in which many of us serve, the movement (in a personal sense) towards an emerging theology was driven precisely by this reflection - reflection on the fact that the old formulations were inadequate, that they addressed concerns which no longer existed, and that they produced Christians who looked strangely unlike this Jesus who we claimed to follow. So we started to change our approach. I'm going to speak personally here, but the stories I've read lead me to believe that I'm far from alone in this. My context was youth ministry, and my problem was that the gospel I was preaching of what amounted to salvation through right doctrine failed to create followers of Jesus. So I began to change my approach. I swapped games for prayer, speaking for discussion, loud for quiet, spectating for participating, and entertainment for service. And I lost students in my ministry - but I gained Jesus-followers, a trade about which I have no regrets. And as I reflected on what had happened, I came to believe that somewhere along the line I had gotten the gospel wrong, and that what I thought was translation was actually something else, something distorting.

And there, I'd argue, is the rub. Many of our critics are firm believers in the translation model, assuming that all we do is take unchanging truth and translate it into the context. And there is a sense in which they're correct; the gospel doesn't change. But the question that I confronted was whether we ever encounter that gospel outside of the bounds of a culture - is there such a thing as a disembodied, uncontextual gospel? Can we simply translate what has come before, without doing the hard work to discern if what we received is accurate and in line with our Story as told in scripture? I think that the gospel, as we tell it and receive it and pass it along, always carries along contextual baggage - our tellings of the gospel are always a mix of participation in and critique of culture. And there, I think, is the second sore spot - both the emerging church and its critics hold to a countercultural model, and hold to it strongly. The distinction lies in defining in what way we are countercultural - but that is a subject for another post.

Technorati Tags: books, emerging church, contextual theology, Bevans, praxis, translation

Bevans's Six Models

So it's been over a month now since I decided to work through Bevans's Models of Contextual Theology and, while I've played around with the subject since then, I haven't actually gotten to the meat of the book yet or why I think it's significant for the emerging church. Hey - at least I've stuck with it this time! At any rate, I thought I'd post a brief description of each of the models that Bevans uses along with a few of his caveats and then, using this as a springboard, talk about why the emerging church rubs some folks the wrong way. And if I can do it without making anyone too angry, so much the better. ;)

Bevans says this about models:

[I]t is my contention that no one model can be used exclusively and an exclusive use will distort the theological enterprise. While every one of these models is in some sense a translation of a message, an adequate theology cannot be reduced to a mere application or adaptation of a changeless body of truths. Even the biblical message was developed in a dialogue with human experience, culture, and cultural and social change, and a theology that neither issues forth in action nor takes account of the way one lives one's life can hardly be theology that is worth very much. At the same time, any theology that is not in some sense countercultural cannot be a truly Christian theology. (p. 33)

So with that in mind, Bevans outlines the following models by which we can approach the question of contextual theology:

• The Translation Model - This model focuses on the gospel as an unchanging message, and seeks to translate that message into the verancular of the context in question. The context matters only insomuch as it sets the agenda for the translation.
• The Anthropological Model - This model sees cultures as the places of God's revelation, and approaches each context asking the question, "Where is God already at work here?" It emphasizes present experience moreso than received tradition.
• The Praxis Model - Bevans has a great quote here; I'm tempted to steal it for my tagline. He describes praxis as "acted-upon reflection and reflected-upon action" (p. 72). Theology arises from this interplay of reflection and action - it is a model in which thought and deed are linked.
• The Synthetic Model - Bevans describes this as sort of a middle-of-the-road model, one that tries to take seriously both the tradition that has been received while taking seriously the context in all ways, including, as he states, the fact that context sets the theological agenda in some sense. He goes on to further describe this as a dialectic in some sense between faith and culture, with each informing and correcting the other. (I think I'm doing justice to him here - this one was somewhat vague.)
• The Transcendental Model - Ok, I'm going to confess right away that I didn't particularly follow this one at all. What I gathered here is that this model is more concerned with how one goes about the theological task than it is about what is decided or understood. It seems to be rooted primarily in the experience of revelation as an event or happening instead of as something received or passed on. Bottom line - I wasn't experiencing much of anything except frustration here.
• The Counter-Cultural Model - This model focuses on the challenge that the gospel issues to every culture. But, Bevans notes (rightly, I believe), that while the gospel offends, we should take care that the offense is from the gospel itself and not from our own poor attempts at enculturation. This is an absolutely significant point, one that I'm going to return to eventually. Suffice for now to say that Newbigin and Hauerwas, two of my significant conversation partners in my own theological journey, were both mentioned here, as was the Gospel in Our Culture Network.

I'd be interested to hear of any thoughts that strike you immediately as you read through this list. My own personal excitement from reading this book was in finding language to express what I think is my own theological approach in some of these models - for me, it was sort of like a theological personality inventory, I suppose. At the least, I can talk about why I approach theology the way that I do.

Technorati Tags: books, emerging church, contextual theology, Bevans

N.T. Wright on Contextual Theology

Ok, not exactly - but I finished The Last Word over the weekend (thanks Jared!) and found a number of insights that are cogent for what I'm trying to think through:

To affirm "the authority of scripture" is precisely not to say, "We know what scripture means and we don't need to raise any more questions." It is always a way of saying that the church in each generation must make fresh and rejuvenated efforts to understand scripture more fully and live by it more thoroughly, even if that means cutting across cherished traditions.

Which is the bottom line: "proving the Bible to be true" (often with the effect of saying, "So we can go on thinking what we've always thought,") or taking it so seriously that we allow it to tell us things we'd never heard before and didn't particularly want to hear?

Fantastic little book - I read it in a few hours and found an incredibly helpful way of articulating some thoughts that I've had percolating under the surface for a while now. But to the point at hand - Wright reminds us of what I mentioned previously about the necessity of doing theology contextually. Critics of the emerging church (to take one example) often suggest that to consider context as a dialogue partner for theology subordinates doctrine to culture, or some such. But that's more a danger, I think, of theology that is unconsciously contextual. Our context always affects our theology. So what is better - to recognize context and attempt to consciously engage scripture from a recognized vantage point, or to ignore context and pretend to an objectivity that is impossible to realize? Isn't the one who is unconscious of culture at more risk of syncretism than one who is consciously attempting to engage scripture from a certain vantage point?

I would suggest, along with Wright (I believe), that approaching the theological task with context firmly in mind is to recognize the authority of scripture. It is to ask scripture to speak into a context, to challenge and redeem it. Failing to do so is to perhaps miss God's activity in the present and to instead seek for God's activity only in what has already been said, instead of what God is now saying.

Technorati Tags: books, emerging church, contextual theology, N.T. Wright

Why Contextual Theology?

I'm finally getting to my posts about Bevans's Models of Contextual Theology. I ran into a surprise at the end - my initial thoughts were that the emerging church tends to work out of a model of praxis while the traditions often critical of the emerging church work out of a countercultural model, leading to some (but not all) of the criticisms. When I finally read the chapter on the countercultural model, I changed my mind completely. I still think that some of the differences are rooted in these models, but I think it's significantly different than I first thought. But I'm getting way ahead of myself - first things first. I want to talk about why we should be thinking in terms of a contextual theology in the first place. I then plan to briefly review Bevans's six models, wrapping up with my thoughts on how this line of thought is helpful for engaging the approach of emerging churches.

Bevans describes contextual theology in this way:

We can say, then, that doing theology contextually means doing theology in a way that takes into account two things. First, it takes into account the faith experience of the past that is recorded in scriptures and kept alive, preserved, defended - and perhaps even neglected or suppressed - in tradition...Second, contextual theology takes into account the experience of the present, the context. While theology needs to be faithful to the full experience and contexts of the past, it is authentic theology only "when what has been received is appropriated, made our own."

This line of thought to me seems self-evident. But for many people - especially some critical of the emerging church - this is not only less than obvious, it's actually offensive. A favorite verse of these folks is Jude 3: "Dear friends, although I was very eager to write to you about the salvation we share, I felt I had to write and urge you to contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints." This actually makes me chuckle. Jude is one of the most self-consciously contextual books in the New Testament, making liberal use of such Second Temple era writings as the Assumption of Moses and the Book of Enoch.

So why do contextual theology? When we do contextual theology, we take the faith which has been passed down to us and make it our own. We preserve it, live it, believe it, treasure it, share it, and pass it down to those who come after us, encouraging them to do the same. We do so conscious of what we bring to the theological enterprise, and we do so with a mind to speak faithfully to a particular context. If this sounds unremarkable, that's because we do it all the time - the importance of thinking contextually about theology isn't because we have an option, but rather because it allows us to be conscious of the tools that we choose to bring to the task at hand.

Technorati Tags: books, emerging church, theology, contextual theology, Bevans

Check Out...

...a great interview with Miroslav Volf over at Jared's blog.

Technorati Tags: interview, Volf

Thoughts on Contextual Theology

One of the books that I've been working my way through is Models of Contextual Theology by Stephen Bevans. It's a fantastic little book that's very easy to read but packs a lot of content into the pages. Bevans's basic premise is that all theology is contextual - in other words, all theology is influenced by the "present human experience" of the person or community crafting the theology. As Bevans states:

There is no such thing as "theology"; there is only contextual theology...The contextualization of theology - the attempt to understand Christian faith in terms of a particular context - is really a theological imperative. As we have come to understand theology today, it is a process that is a part of the very nature of theology itself.

I wonder what it says for my faith journey that I take this premise to be simply a matter of course? He might just as well have said that the sky is blue. And yet, five years ago that statement would have set my teeth on edge... At any rate, I think this little volume is absolutely fascinating. Bevans sketches six models or approaches to contextual theology - or, in truth, theology as practiced in general, given that all theology is contextual - giving some positives and negatives to each approach, as well as several examples.

I'm going to follow Bevans here for a few posts. I'd like to briefly summarize the models he's suggesting and then discuss how I've seen them applied in emerging churches. One of the things that became clear to me almost immediately was that Bevans has provided some excellent language here to talk about some of the ways that emerging churches differ from more traditional bodies; some of the conflict and criticism, I think, can be traced to these distinctions. Having a language to talk about the how and why of theology is often as important as its content - I think that developing that language will be of immense benefit for those of us with connections to the emerging church.

Technorati Tags: books, emerging church, theology, contextual theology, Bevans

On My Bookshelf

I thought I'd post a quick look at my current in-process and up-and-coming reading list. Some of these I'd started a while back, but I haven't finished because of course work; others are new acquisitions. A few weeks ago I mentioned doing some reviews of books I've been reading - this is the list I'll be working from.

Body Prayer - Doug Pagitt
Models of Contextual Theology - Stephen Bevans
Body Politics - John Howard Yoder
The Liberating Image - Richard Middleton
The Character of Theology - John Franke
Jesus and the Victory of God - N.T. Wright
Velvet Elvis - Rob Bell
Religion and Empire - Richard Horsley
Texts that Linger, Words that Explode - Walter Brueggemann
Deep Memory, Exhuberant Hope - Walter Brueggemann
The Jesus Creed - Scot McKnight
Constructing Local Theologies - Robert J. Schreiter
Beyond Culture - Edward T. Hall
The Silent Language - Edward T. Hall
The Celtic Way of Prayer : The Recovery of the Religious Imagination - Esther De Waal

Technorati Tags: books, theology

Review: Colossians Remixed

Empires are totalizing by definition...Empires are built on systemic centralizations of power and secured by structures of socioeconomic and military control. They are religiously legitimated by powerful myths that are rooted in foundational assumptions, and they are sustained by a proliferation of imperial images that captivate the imagination of the population. (Walsh & Keesmaat, p. 31)

Colossians Remixed is not the sort of book that one can read comfortably, particularly from the vantage point of First World twenty-first century Christianity. In truth, I'm not entirely sure how to describe the book - it's part commentary, part targum, part prophetic discourse, part historical dramatization, part practical theology, and all challenging. Walsh and Keesmaat attempt to connect the historical context of Colossians with the present contexts of globalization, pluralism, consumerism, and skepticism and do so with impressive results.

For anyone familiar with the works of folks such as Wright or Horsley, some of this ground feels well-trod; Empire is the theme of the book, providing the interpretive theme on which the rest of the arguments hang as well as the bridge that spans the gulf between the first and twenty-first century contexts. For Paul, the identity of the empire is obvious - Rome held sway over every area in which he ministered. Today, Walsh and Keesmaat argue that the western forces of globalization backed by militarization and consumption fill the same role.

A concrete example would probably be helpful. For Rome, images served as a tool to shape the imaginations of the population. Images of Caesar were found in the market, the city square, the public baths, and the theater, at the gymnasium, and in the temples. Images of the empire were also found on every imaginable object for private use. The symbolism of the empire became part of daily furnishings, permeating the visual landscape and therefore the imaginations of the subjects of the empire. (p. 63) I think the parallels are striking - take a look around you, at this very moment, and count the number of corporate logos in your field of vision. It's terrifying, really - we don't even notice them anymore because they've become a part of the warp and woof of daily existence. But into this context, these twin contexts, Paul speaks an amazing Word: He is the image of the invisible God...

Colossians Remixed serves as the forum for Walsh and Keesmaat to play with this idea, this parallel theme into which God has spoken decisively. On the whole, they succeed admirably. At times, their interpretation of Colossians feels a bit stretched; I wondered at points if they would have been better served by an examination of the New Testament as a whole. At other points, their suggestions for current day interpretation felt either equally stretched or overly simplistic. Still, these are small quibbles - by and large, the book is both impressive and challenging. It will, at the least, force the reader to reconsider his or her location in a context of out-of-control consumption and militarization.

Preaching Re-Imagined

As I mentioned previously, I was given the opportunity to preview Doug Pagitt's new book Preaching Re-imagined. First, a few words about what this book is not. It is not a how-to manual. You will not find in this book the ten steps to a new preaching style, or how to start a sermon discussion group, or something of the sort. This is also not primarily a theology of preaching. You're not going to find a lot of biblical exposition of relevant preaching texts or anything like that. And, in truth, most attempts to construct a theology of preaching do little more than import assumptions about the typical form of preaching onto texts related to the proclamation of the gospel. More on this in a bit.

What you will find in this book is a discussion of what I'd think of as the philosophy of preaching - the what, the why, the who, the how. It's an extraordinary book, really. Anyone who has read theopraxis for any length of time probably knows of my convictions about imagination, or lack of it, in first world Christian thought. When Doug chose the term "re-imagine" for his books, I think he chose wisely, because this book truly displays the imagination that I think is needed to begin to recapture the life, the vibrancy, the community that should be a part of every local body.

Doug makes some assumptions in the book that I think are warranted but that perhaps not everyone would share. The basic assumption is that preaching as has been commonly practiced in first world Christian congregations is foundationally flawed, primarily in its reliance on a single voice to communicate truth in a congregational setting. The second assumption, which goes hand-in-hand with the first, is that preaching is primarily concerned with the spiritual formation of the congregation. Doug lays out what I think is an excellent philosophy for what he terms "progressional dialogue," which is an approach to preaching that includes the voices of the congregation. It's hard to distill his thoughts into a few short sentences, but perhaps a way to think of his approach is by way of contrast: if the preacher in a traditional approach is something of a solo artist, then the preacher engaged in progressional dialogue is more the conductor of a grand orchestra with many voices. This can happen in many ways, and impacts everything from preparation to room layout. The important component, I think, is to incorporate as many voices as possible in as many ways as possible, so that the sermon becomes a vehicle for articulating the journey of the congregation, rather than a speech directed at them.

An excellent book in all ways - the writing is both clear and vivid, the author is both passionate and rational, the content is both challenging and encouraging. I recommend it highly, and I'll be interacting with some of Doug's thoughts in more detail over the next few posts.

Doug Pagitt...

...is a capital fellow. About a month ago, he mentioned that he was looking for some folks to review his new book, Preaching Re-imagined. So I responded with a brief email, truly expecting to never hear another word - not that I thought Doug was insincere, but let's be real - my little site isn't exactly burning up Google or anything, fun that it may be. When I got home today, what did I find waiting for me but a nice little package from Zondervan (which prompted quick explanations to the wife, as I'm on Amazon probation ;). I started the book tonight, and although I'm only about forty pages in or so, I'm quite impressed. I think the question of the role of preaching is one of the areas where emerging churches vary significantly from more traditional approaches, especially those found in the Reformed tradition. Although that discussion hasn't really materialized yet (at least in an informed way as opposed to random sniping), I look for it to gain more prominence as the praxis of emerging churches comes into closer scrutiny. That won't happen, I think, until evangelicalism starts to get past its fetish with epistemology, but I think it's coming nonetheless. At any rate, more to come on this - I'm looking forward to digging further into this book. I want to finish my thoughts on war, but following that I think I'll take up some of these form-related questions for a bit, beginning with my thoughts on Doug's book.

Lots of Stuff in My Head...

...not ready to hit the page yet. I've been spending a lot of time this past week reflecting on what I've been writing for the past six months or so. I've been doing a bit of reading as well - I finished Colossians Remixed last week, which was a phenomenal book that really presented a lot of challenges along the lines of what I've been writing and thinking on lately. Now I'm working my way through Resident Aliens by Hauerwas and Willimon - great stuff there, particularly on Christian ethics. I'll have to do a bit of a review on both of these. Also on the list right now is some lighter fare in N.T. Wright's The New Testament and the People of God, which is almost as thick as anything by Robert Jordan, but with much smaller type. This one may take a few weeks.

This should give you a picture into my world - this is what I read between semesters. I think I need a hobby...