Reflections on the Emergent Philosophical Conversation (p.2)

I mentioned in my previous post some of the highlights of the discussion at the recent Emergent event, but I also mentioned that I was left with some concerns and critiques as well. In the end, although I appreciated Caputo's and Kearney's approach, I simply couldn't go along with their conclusions. And, on some level, I don't think that their conclusions followed from their assumptions and method - in fact, I thought at some points that they were self-contradictory, or at the least inconsistent. But more on that in a moment.

To begin with, another word of appreciation is in order, because it frames my objections well. One of the themes of the discussion was particularity. On a side note, this is another thing that I've never heard carefully articulated by the critics: the reason that postmodern philosophy is critical of metanarratives is not because it does not believe in truth. Rather, it is because it holds that particular narratives reflect truth in different ways. And that isn't to say that truth can't be discussed, debated, or defended - we did a fair bit of that during the gathering, in fact. Rather, it is to say something about the personhood of the one with whom we converse. Caputo (if I recall correctly) put it something like this: if to be human is to be rational, and if to be wrong is to be irrational, then truth claims can be dehumanizing. In a general sense, I think there's something to that - not that we can't disagree, but rather that we must be careful how we disagree, because we're in a sense saying something about the humanity of our conversation partners in the manner of disagreement. Much, much more could be said here, but I'll leave it for another time. The point here is that the concern for particularity is really a statement about the personhood of the ones with whom we converse, and I think it's a valid (and necessary) concern.

However - and this is a big however - I felt like Caputo and Kearney in some sense violated their own rules here in how they approached particular Christian claims, specifically those about the uniqueness or exclusiveness of Christ. One of the things that became quite evident was that they both hold to some sort of universalistic deism, as I understood it - their approach at the end of the day was a fairly standard "all roads lead to God" sort of belief. God is ultimately unknowable by virtue of his transcendence, but all religions point towards something that might be called god, if we had to give a name to it. I had concerns with this on any number of levels, as anyone who's been around here for any length of time will no doubt guess. But one thing that bothered me in particular in this context was that they seemed to be violating their own rules.

Here, for me, is the problem: if postmodernity is in some sense about respecting personhood through recognition of particularities, didn't Caputo and Kearney just give every religion the finger? I mean, it is the particularities, after all, that make for the differences between religions. To try to make Christianity say the same thing as Islam or Judaism or Buddhism or Hinduism or any other religion that has something to say about spirit and being does violence to every single one of them. Each of these religions offers something different, something particular, something that makes it what it is - and in terms of the particularities, these offerings are by and large in disagreement with one another. To try to smooth over these differences, these particularities, is not only disrespectful to each of them - it is in some sense in contradiction to their own stated aims.

Furthermore, I discussed previously the critique that they offered of the "god of metaphysics". This, I thought, was particularly helpful. But I can't really see how this approach that they offered is any different. Instead of a metaphysic of rationality, aren't we just embracing a metaphysic of skepticism? To say that God is fundamentally unknowable is to create a principle before which God must bow - even should he choose to reveal himself to humanity in a way that is knowable. This to me is such a glaring flaw in their approach that I can't help but wonder how they navigate around it - unfortunately, it was never adequately addressed, even though it was apparent that many (although not all) folks in attendance were left with similar questions.

In all, it was a good event. I wish there had been more time for questions and discussion; I was a bit frustrated in that it seemed that we'd just get started on a topic of substance and time was up. That's not really a criticism of the event so much as it is just a recognition that I was ultimately left with more questions than answers from the perspective of the guests. Still, I found much in their approach to appreciate, even if I found their conclusions unsatisfying.

Technorati Tags: Caputo, deconstruction, emergent, emerging church, Kearney

Reflections on the Emergent Philosophical Conversation (p.1)

I had initially thought to interact with the major themes of the Emergent gathering while the event was underway, but I found two things very quickly: first, there were a lot of ideas running around, and I quickly found my head spinning; second, the time just flew by, primarily because of the great connections with various folks that I was able to renew or begin. By the end of the event, I was too far behind to begin and needed a bit of time to process. Now, about a week and a half later, I'm left with a few substantive thoughts that have sort of congealed around a couple of themes.

To begin with, the guests for the gathering were Jack Caputo and Richard Kearney, both of whom Tony Jones called "rock stars of philosophy". I was acquainted with Caputo's work before the event, although I hadn't read any of it personally; Kearney was an unknown to me. Both are a part of the philosophical tradition known as continental philosophy and have worked closely with Derrida, so it should be no surprise that deconstruction was the theme of the conversation. I'll admit that at times I felt out of my league - philosophy is extremely self-referential, meaning that if you don't know the thinkers with whom a person is interacting, you're likely going to feel as though you're overhearing half of a conversation. Still, they did a great job of remembering their audience, and I left with a few constructive ideas as well as some critiques.

The first discussion centered on what Caputo called the "god of metaphysics". (Metaphysics refers to the discussion of the nature of reality and being.) This was, for me, probably the most productive discussion. It began as a sort of whirlwind tour of western philosophy from the time of Plato, with some stops along the way to identify major landmarks. The significant contribution of this section was the discussion of the development of theological discourse in modernity. In brief, Caputo suggested that what happened after Descartes was the introduction of the metaphysical as a criteria for rational thought. In other words, as people in modernity began to define reality in a particular way, theology became subject to that definition of reality, a definition that was framed in terms of rationality. Reason became the standard by which all thought was judged - as Caputo said, God was made to pass before the court of reason to be examined for his suitability for entrance into civilized thought. For example, when Aquinas was describing God, he referred to him as (among other descriptions) the "first cause," the cause of everything else who is himself without a cause. In modernity, God was described as the cause of himself. Note the distinction - instead of God being uncaused, he now has a cause, even if that cause is himself. Why the change? Because everything has to have a cause - even God. God has to play by the rules.

This is the turn in theology that results in what Caputo called "the god of metaphysics". God is no longer seen as the ultimate reality; now he is merely reality's chief inhabitant who must conform to the nature of reality just like everything else. It's a fascinating thought, once you start to grasp it - it shows up in all sorts of places. A lot (but not all) of discussion of inerrancy, I think, has its roots in this sort of approach. The Scriptures just can't have errors or contradictions or even differing perspectives in them, or they wouldn't be scripture. The problem is that this definition is first assumed and then applied to the Christian texts, resulting in an odd sort of approach that has to go outside of scripture for its doctrine of scripture, while maintaining that the only source of doctrine is scripture. (I'm not trying to get into an argument about the nature of scripture - just using an illustration.)

Deconstruction is a means of getting beyond this enslavement to the god of metaphysics. Deconstruction is, as Caputo and Kearney described it, allowing truth to "break through" the layers of interpretation that have kept it bound. It isn't really about "tearing down", as many seem to like to use the term - they were emphatic about the phrase "breaking through" as a good way of getting at what deconstruction is attempting. Deconstruction is about unmasking those things which keep us from the truth, and so on some level it is more interested in truth than other systems which claim objective, absolute knowledge.

Besides being what I now consider the most helpful time of the event, what became apparent to me rather quickly was that many of the folks who have taken to attacking "postmodernism" in the name of God haven't the faintest clue what they are talking about. These were gentlemen who are schooled in postmodern thought, who are significant contributors to postmodern philosophy, and who have significant connections to many of the philosophers who are seen as sort of the "founding fathers" of postmodernity, so to speak, most significantly Derrida. And the primary theme of the first evening's discussion was, irony of ironies, how to defend the truth through deconstruction. It was a nuanced and intelligent discussion that I'll be considering for some time. At one point, they made the distinction between what they called Dionysian postmodernism, which is the nihilistic, relativistic stream of thought that is set up as the fundagelical bogeyman, and "prophetic" postmodernism - which is where they'd locate deconstruction. Their take was that Derrida himself was appalled at what some have tried to do in his name, although you'd never hear such from the critics. In truth, though, that's hardly surprising - such juvenile criticism, usually framed in militaristic metaphors, is itself in need of deconstruction, in need of motives being revealed and perspectives challenged.

Technorati Tags: Caputo, deconstruction, emergent, emerging church, Kearney

Philly Emergent Stuff

Just thought I'd pass on a reminder for anyone in the Philly area that the cohort meeting this month is being moved up a week - the gathering is this Thursday at the Well in Feasterville. Keith Matthews and Todd Littleton will be joining us for a conversation on spiritual formation - should be a good discussion. Details are at the cohort site.

On another Emergent note, is anyone else planning to attend the Conversation with Jack Caputo next week? It should be interesting - I didn't really connect with the reading overall but there were some interesting tidbits scattered about. I'm curious to see who will be in attendance.

Technorati Tags: emergent, emerging church

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

Great Conversations

I looked at my site yesterday and realized that I haven't posted anything this week. That feels odd, because I've written more than I have in a long time. But most of it is hidden in the comments of some of my earlier posts - I've been having a great conversation with Grace on my thoughts about power and structure in communities. Grace is an excellent thinker and writer, and my thoughts are more clear thanks to her questions and (gracefully spoken) corrections. So in lieu of a full post, take a read through the comments here and here - I think there are thoughts in there worth reading.

On another note, I had an opportunity to attend the Philly Emergent cohort again this week. John Franke came to discuss thoughts about mission and its origins in God's very being. What a great conversation - I won't get into the details here because it deserves a full post of its own, but you can check out the overview here if you're interested. It also, coincidentally, meshes quite well with my thoughts on image, so I certainly want to pull some of those insights into my current reflections on that subject.

One more note - this is a bit late, but I did want to post a link to an upcoming conference that I think sounds fantastic. Off the Map is hosting the Revolution conference in Seattle Nov 3-4. Sounds like a great lineup, including Barna, McLaren, and a host of other great folks. I attended an Off the Map event last year and was impressed. A few of us were able to hang out with the Off the Map folks after one of the evening sessions, and they're wonderful people. (And I don't just say that because Jim Henderson picked up the tab. ;) If I could make this event, I would definitely be there - Seattle is a bit of a hike for me, so I'll be reading about it and envying thinking of those who will be attending. You can get more info here; the blog is here with some interesting content, including an interview with Spencer Burke who is the nicest guy I've ever disagreed with. ;)

Technorati Tags: emergent, Off the Map, John Franke

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

Thoughts on Moving Forward

An interesting package arrived in the mail yesterday - an advance copy of Spencer Burke's new book, A Heretic's Guide to Eternity. It's already started to create some buzz; Scot McKnight shared his thoughts on the book, and some of the heretic watching sites have already begun to hammer away at it (about which I will refrain from commenting). I'm looking forward to reading the book - although, I must confess, I have some reservations about it, along the lines of Scot's critique (which, let it be noted, was a great model for how to handle differences constructively). I had the privilege of getting to know Spencer a bit during an etrek course that I took at Biblical a few years ago. Spencer is a great guy, one of the most winsome and personable folks I've ever met, and his comments on Scot's postings reflect exactly the spirit that I remember about him. Having said that, I remember at the time that he had begun to articulate some of the ideas that it appears have now developed into this book. It will be an interesting read, no doubt - I'm attempting to go into this with an open mind, but already I'm approaching with some concerns.

I think the thing that I'm wondering is the degree to which Spencer will be able to ground his thoughts in the narrative of scripture. I don't know what direction he's going to take, so I'm withholding judgment on this until I've finished the book. But I confess it doesn't look good from the back cover blurb. Perhaps I'll be pleasantly surprised - I hope that to be true. At the very least, though, he's going to have to present a very different reading than I think can be sustained in order to arrive at where the description says he's going.

Can I be honest here? My concerns aren't just about Spencer's book. Steve McCoy posted several quotes recently from a book that he's currently reading about church growth. There was some interesting conversation in the comments; I myself don't particularly care for the way the quotes are phrased, but without reading the book itself, who am I to say? Still, the conversation at some point shifted to a discussion about growth in general and whether congregations should be seeking to grow. And the more I reflect on this, the more astounded I am at the fact that we actually need to have this conversation.

What bothers me about this is that, at its most basic, the Christian faith is adherence to a story. It's about aligning oneself with a particular way of understanding what it means to be human, what has gone wrong with our existence, and what must be done to fix it. There are a number of ways to tell that story and remain faithful to the Story. But there are things that all tellings of that story must retain in order to remain the same story. My interest in the emerging church began with a suspicion that the evangelical version of the story that I knew was fundamentally flawed - and that suspicion has long since been transformed into conviction. However, I confess that I'm not hearing much of late that represents a better proposal.

And that's profoundly disappointing. It's, on one level, simply sloppy. It often represents a failure to integrate the basic elements of the story into a cohesive whole - so, for example, when I hear that particular understandings of the atonement described as "cosmic child abuse," I think it's a pile of crap. No serious trinitarian theology can ever say such a thing and remain trinitarian. It's simply not possible. It's sloppy. And, vice versa, when I hear others saying that God is some kind of macho uber-man who "crushes Jesus" for our sins, I think exactly the same thing. Where's the trinitarian theology in that statement? It's sloppy. It's an awful way to tell the story. It's nothing more than American machismo read back into what started as an articulation of the Christian faith.

I had more that I was going to say, but I'm stopping here. This is moving towards a rant, and I really didn't want it to head that way. So - here's what I'm thinking. I have a few more posts on Enns's book remaining, then I'll tackle Spencer's. After that, I want to write about something that I've been thinking about for over six months now. I want to share with you how I read the story - a reading that begins with the image of God in Genesis 1 and continues to New Creation. Hopefully along the way I can present something that might serve as the beginnings of a way forward.

Philly Cohort Gathering for July

One of the things I've been missing over this past year is the opportunity to be a part of the Philadelphia Emergent cohort.  I was able to attend several gatherings last summer before my fall semester began, and I was really impressed with the group.  I wrote about my first meeting here - Dr Joseph Mangina from Wycliffe College in Toronto spoke for nearly an hour on the book of Revelation.  It was phenomenal - and I found myself really impressed with a group of folks that were packed into Scott and Fairlight's living room, completely engaged and immersed in what was being discussed.

My first gathering in almost a year was interesting.  We talked for a bit about what we wanted to see happen in the cohort.  Personally, I didn't have a lot of stake in the conversation - I felt a bit out of my element given that I haven't attended for so long.  But it did prod my thinking for a bit - what is it that I enjoy so much about getting together with this group?  There are lots of things, really - everyone has always been incredibly hospitable and welcoming, which makes it easy for an introvert like myself to plug in.  And there's substantive discussion taking place.  Several of the folks present mentioned that they loved having a place to get together with other folks and talk theology.  Let's face it - we theology junkies don't have that many outlets, you know?  But Scott said something that has stuck with me, that I've been pondering all weekend.  He mentioned that the group is really fairly diverse, as far as cohorts go.  And I think that's true - it's not a group full of "angry young men", as I've often heard these things described.  So far, we haven't gotten together to sit around and rail against everything "modern" or "traditional" or any of the other descriptors that are commonly used to label things we don't like.  It's a group from many different traditions and denominations, some practitioners, some academics, and some (like myself) who are still searching for a niche.  But if you're interested in what God is doing in the Philadelphia area, and you want to get together with other folks who are likewise interested and engaged, then I have no doubt that you'd find yourself welcomed warmly.

Technorati Tags: emerging church, philly cohort

Removing the Label

Tonight I'm enjoying something that I've neglected for far too long. I'm sitting on my deck enjoying a little something that I picked up in London to commemorate my graduation - a new pipe, specifically a Butz Choquin Cybele, if you're interested in such things, a horn-shaped pipe with some really stunning hardwood inlay in front of the stem. This is my maiden voyage with this particular piece of briar, and it's doing quite admirably. It's smoking a bit hot, though, because I'm trying some Rattray's Hal o' the Wynd that's a bit too dry for my liking. It's an older tin that I should just pitch, but I can't seem to bring myself to do so. The problem, though, is that if I don't, I might damage the pipe - it's too dry to smoke at a safe temperature, instead burning hot which carries the risk of damaging the briar in the pipe.

 I've simultaneously been catching up on my blogosphere reading. I'm woefully behind thanks to my recent blog fast - I think I need to just hit reset on the reader and start fresh. But I'm glad I caught a post from James tonight, because it echoes a lot of what I've been thinking of late. James writes this:

It was one of those moments like the first time you look in the mirror and realize that you are no longer 18 years old and in shape. Your mind may try to convince you that you are still in your prime but the mirror reveals that uncomfortable reality. Similarly, I have always seen myself as somewhat "conservative." But during the conversation with Balmer I realized that I have convictions and beliefs that are firmly outside the conservative label. It was like scales fell off my eyes and I began to see for the first time that there is a large group of self identified Christians who would exclude me from their camp because of the views I have of the Christian faith. In fact, there are some who would not even think my views are Christian at all.

This, I think, describes exactly how I've begun to feel over the past year or so. I've come a long way, in my opinion, in my understanding of many things - the gospel, the nature of scripture, the nature of the church, and the way in which my theology informs my politics. And, on so many of these items, I find myself in an awkward position. Because of my commitment to some quite conservative positions, such as the authority of scripture and the confession of Christ as Lord, I can no longer hold to many of the conclusions that conservative theology advances. I take seriously, for example, that Jesus actually intends for us to love our enemies and, consequently, I've become convinced that I can no longer support conservative positions on war. I take seriously, likewise, the authority of scripture and, consequently, I'm left dissatisfied with many conservative articulations of what I take to be extra-biblical statements about those same scriptures. I could go on - my point, however, is less the particular doctrines and more that a commitment to certain conservative positions results in undermining much of the remaining structure. This, at the end of the day, is what troubles me the most.

I mentioned in my previous post that I was reading a book by Peter Enns called Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament. My initial thought was that I was surprised that it hasn't garnered more attention in the blogosphere - it's a fantastic read thus far that I think many who identify with the emerging church would profit from reading. However, as I began to dig a bit, I found that I'm simply not reading the blogs that have discussed it. There's actually been a fair amount of interaction with it, and not all of it supportive, to put things mildly. Mark, a fellow contributor to meremission.org (where I need to actually contribute, I've been thinking ;) has interacted with some of the criticism, much of which has been rather disappointing, to say the least. But I mention this because one thing that I keep reading is that Enns's proposals are not "conservative" - which, I suppose, is to label him as one of those evil "liberals" and thus avoid interacting with what he actually says. Ironically, his book is based on premises with which no conservative would ever argue - the authority and inspiration of scripture. But because the conclusions that he reaches based precisely on those premises are not in keeping with what the gatekeepers of orthodoxy have deemed acceptable, his book is maligned and condemned.

So I find myself in a position where I've been trying to wear a label that really has begun to chafe. I can't stand having to apologize for it or nuance it enough that it fits who I find that I've become. My friend Scott wrote some time ago about something similar - I find that, like him, like James, perhaps it's time to remove the label.

I've put my pipe down for this evening. The pipe performed excellently; however, if I continue, the bad tobacco will ruin it. I'm reminded of an old adage about old tobacco and new pipes - or was that old wine and new wineskins? I think either serves to make the point. Perhaps it's time to move on.

Thinking About Success

One of the things that struck me rather forcefully on our trip was the way in which the missionaries who hosted us thought about success. Because of the nature of their work, they have a different perspective than, I think, we've come to embrace here in the States. They're working in a context where the people among whom they're ministering are highly resistant to the gospel. One of them commented that they may have to share the gospel hundreds of times before the person with whom they're talking starts to grasp it. As a result, they're simply not seeing large numbers of converts. They're seeing, instead, one here, one there - a small trickle compared to the overwhelming need. Much of their work is building trust, building friendships - slower work that doesn't show immediate results.

I wonder what we'd do here if we were faced with that sort of context. Americans, I think, idolize efficiency - we want everything to be as fast as possible, as cheap as possible, and produce the best possible result. And those aren't necessarily bad things, to be sure. But I don't think we've necessarily come to grips with exactly how much that mindset defines how we approach the work of the Kingdom. Even among emerging church folks, I hear / read a lot of stuff that says, "We don't care about numbers," followed by a statistic detailing how much a community has grown in its first year or some such. We are addicted to numbers, to fast growth, to impressive statistics. And it's one thing to recognize that, to say it and to think we believe it. But would we really work for a whole year to perhaps see one person come to the faith? I'm not convinced we've really begun to think through whether we're serious about that claim yet.

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

A Taxonomy of Emergence: A Damaging Outcome

In my final post on Stetzer's categories for emerging churches, I want to comment on the end result of this framework. Ultimately, what bothers me about the framework is the end to which the categories are applied. In the few months since the article was published, a pattern has begun to emerge. Instead of being used for positive engagement, Stetzer's categories are being employed for dismissal, rejection, and worse on the part of critics of the emerging church.

Now, I want to be cautious here. I don't want to say that Stetzer's purpose in writing the article was to dismiss the thoughts of those with whom he disagrees. I certainly don't want to say that he is attempting to exclude those he terms Revisionists from the body of Christ. As I read the article, Stetzer seems to be attempting to draw lines of engagement and not disengagement. He's attempting to say that there are some writers, thinkers, and practitioners in the emerging church with whom he disagrees substantively, and he's attempting to identify some of those areas of disagreement for the purposes of defining the issues. This, in and of itself, is not unhelpful - in fact, clarifying the points of disagreement can serve to advance discussion between folks, if done from an initial position of respect and embrace (which I take Stetzer's to be).

However, Stetzer's stance (assuming that I'm reading him correctly) is not that of all critics. Instead, there seems to be a growing trend towards using the categories as a means of disengagement and dismissal. "Revisionist", in this approach, is the new "liberal" - a label that represents judgment of a person. Labels are convenient things, really. They simplify matters immensely. All I need to do is apply the label, and my difficulties go away. I don't need to engage with ideas or discuss differences or even embrace another as a brother or sister in Christ. All I need is that label. In one word - Revisionist - a person's entire belief system is ostensibly summarized, critiqued, dismissed, and discarded. There is no opportunity for growth, for the proverbial sharpening of iron on iron that comes from substantive discussion of weighty things. There is only the comfort of familiar ideas and safe thoughts, and the damaging testimony of an ever greater fracturing of the unity of the body of Christ.

Ultimately, though, the failure of such an approach is that it leads to stagnation and decay. Even while critics believe that they hold to an unchanging message and divinely inspired forms, the context in which the message and the forms are both heard and experienced continues to change. The unchanging message changes simply by virtue of standing still as culture passes by. Like some odd form of Doppler effect, distortion creeps into the message and, eventually, it is unrecognizable. Only through active engagement and conscious recontextualization can we hope to continue to bear witness to the Kingdom in a changing world. Dismissal of those who are pursuing this task is unhelpful and, ultimately, damaging - it serves none, not even the one practicing the dismissal.

Technorati Tags: emerging church, Stetzer

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.

A Taxonomy of Emergence: A Flawed Premise

The second issue that confronts Stetzer's categories is that the categories themselves are based upon what I believe to be an unsustainable premise. Stetzer states in the article:

I believe that some are taking the same Gospel in the historic form of church but seeking to make it understandable to emerging culture; some are taking the same Gospel but questioning and reconstructing much of the form of church; some are questioning and revising the Gospel and the church.

To paraphrase, then, Stetzer seems to be saying that the desired outcome of contextual ministry is that the message remains the same, while the form can change (within scriptural bounds). It is this separation of content from form that I think is largely flawed. Is it possible to change the form while leaving intact the message?

One of the books on my (ever-growing, it seems) stack is The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture by Shane Hipps. This is an excellent book - in fact, I intend to blog more extensively on it in the next few weeks. The basic premise follows Marshall McLuhan's famous dictum, "The medium is the message." While I don't want to enter an extended discussion of the book itself at this point, I am going to agree with Hipps' conclusions - form and content are inextricably linked.

Take, for example, the shift in understanding of the gospel that was brought about by the Reformation. There are very good reasons why the Protestant Reformation happened after the invention of Gutenberg's printing press and not before. Sola scriptura is a premise that is only sustainable in a literate society. To encounter God in the written scriptures in the Middle Ages was simply not possible for the vast majority of Christians - even if they were able to read, the expense of books would have prevented all but the most affluent from ever owning one. The introduction of the printing press, combined with translations of the scriptures into the vernacular languages of Europe, placed the scriptural text into the hands of the laity in a way that hadn't been possible before. The medium - in this case, the printed text - transformed the message into a gospel for individuals, shifting the course of church history.

Is it any wonder, then, that we encounter a shift in the understanding of the gospel now, at the beginnings of the twenty first century, when the last hundred years have brought about incredible transformations in the way that we store, transmit, access, understand, and use information? Hipps discusses, for one, the return of images as a conveyor of meaning. Images surround us - sitting here at my computer, I am struck by the number of images within my field of view that are attempting to communicate something to me, from the corporate logo on my laptop to the news feeds flickering on the television screen. Practically speaking, this represents a shift from sequential, linear, abstract thought to holistic, concrete, and intuitive thought. The media have shaped the way we process information - in other words, the messages we receive.

To Stetzer's categories, then, it's reductionistic to suggest that we can present the gospel using different media and not in some sense shift the way in which the message is heard. A change in form represents a change in message, even if that's only a shift in emphasis. Even for those communities that are in Stetzer's "Relevants" category - I'd assume he's thinking here of what I've heard called "candles and couches" - something changes with the form. This shouldn't be surprising upon reflection - if the form doesn't communicate anything, why change it? At the least, the use of visual media, with their inherent ambiguity of meaning, introduces the element of mystery and metaphor. Even if, at its worst, the form only suggests, "Jesus is cool and hip," the meaning has changed.

All of this, then, only points to an underlying reality - there is no such thing as an acontextual gospel. The gospel only exists as inculturated, incarnated truth - it's never an abstract concept floating in nowhereland for us to apprehend and import into our context. Stetzer's categories fail in assuming this acontextual state, resulting in a framework that is structurally unsound.

Technorati Tags: emerging church, Stetzer

A Taxonomy of Emergence: The Challenge of Categories

In my last post I mentioned that I wanted to spend a few posts discussing why I think Stetzer's categories for emerging churches are unhelpful and, in some sense, foundationally flawed. I have three primary criticisms of the framework that Stetzer has proposed: first, his criteria for assigning a person or group to a given category are suspect; second, the categories themselves are based on a flawed premise; and third, the use to which the categories are put is ultimately damaging (which may, in fairness, go beyond Stetzer's original intent). I do want to say at the outset that, of anyone that I would expect to be able to provide a helpful and friendly criticism of emerging churches, it would be Stetzer. His own work has much in common with emerging churches - although I've never heard him described as "emerging" (for whatever that's worth), he writes extensively on missional engagement with culture. His books, no doubt, would be found on many of the bookshelves of those of us who identify with the emerging church. In other words, this is a critic to whom we should pay heed - he knows his stuff. On the other hand, this also contributes somewhat to my own disappointment with what has been offered thus far.

My primary disappointment, then, is Stetzer's stated criteria for categorizing a person or group. It's self-evident that his categories are intended to move on a reactionary scale from benign to cautious to alarmed, with the Relevants being the first and the Revisionists being the last. But it's interesting what it is that causes Stetzer to move along that continuum. It's fairly clear that, at the end of the day, he's looking for consistency in content. This, in and of itself, isn't bad - if, for example, we were looking for consistency with the Apostles' Creed, then we would quite naturally be concerned with deviation from or denial of its claims. But Stetzer's field of vision here starts to narrow rather quickly. What causes alarm in his framework? Forms of church governance, egalitarianism, and atonement models, for a start. I'm not going to delve into exegesis here, because that's not my point. Suffice to say, though, that on each of these particular questions, the arguments that are being advanced on all sides are being done so primarily on the basis of Scripture. Many of us are reading the text and coming to different conclusions than those which have been handed down to us. So when Stetzer says that those who he identifies as Reconstructionists - on the basis of things like what I've mentioned above - "fail to take into account the full teaching of the Word of God", I have to cry foul. This isn't a simple matter of selective proof-texting on the part of emerging churches. This is a matter of being actively engaged with the biblical text and coming away from that encounter with a different understanding of those issues.

And nowhere could this be more evident than the question of the nature of the gospel - another issue which Stetzer sees as dangerous. Is it fair to ask questions about the nature of the gospel? I believe - and quite strongly - that it is not only fair, but it is also imperative. We absolutely should be asking questions about the gospel. Is the gospel primarily about how to get to heaven when we die, or is it about something more? Is the gospel primarily about my personal relationship with Jesus, or is it about his formation of a new people who together learn to love God and love each other? Is the gospel primarily good news about the future, or is it the revelation that God's Kingdom has broken into the present? Is it about escaping this world to live in a spiritual state of bliss, or is it about the restoration of this world to its original God-shaped purposes?

At its core, then, the framework that Stetzer proposes begs the question of the role of theology. Is theology only about restating the lessons of the past, or is it about entering the biblical narrative to find answers to the questions that a new context brings? To go further, are the lessons of the past deemed off-limits to further questions, and if so, which ones? And how would this framework have functioned in other eras of church history? The Reformation also raised many of these same questions - and for those of us indebted to a Protestant heritage, we would do well to remember that returning to scripture to reframe our understanding of what it is, exactly, that we believe is a hallmark of precisely that heritage.

Personally, I would rather see matters of historical orthodoxy - those answered in the great creeds, for example - be elevated to this status as the demarcation between faithfulness and heresy. This, then, is the first area where Stetzer's framework falls short. It fails to identify appropriately the ways in which emerging churches are wrestling with scripture and, instead, imposes bounds that are more restrictive than those required of historical orthodoxy.

Technorati Tags: emerging church, Stetzer

Ed Stetzer's Emerging Church Categories

Ed Stetzer's article on the emerging church caused some ripples a few months ago when it was first released. If you haven't read it, the main thrust of the article is an attempt to categorize emerging churches and practitioners into three categories, which he terms Relevants, Reconstructionists, and Revisionists. At the time, I thought it was an interesting, if somewhat narrowly defined, attempt to both commend and critique different facets of the emerging church. I think there's something to be said for his approach, and I think he correctly identifies the diversity present among those who would self-identify as being emerging, but I was unhappy with his definition of categories then, and I'm becoming less so as his framework begins to become adopted by the critics of the emerging church in what seems to me a weak attempt at fending off objections that the critics are painting with too broad a brush.

Stetzer's categories are as follows:

• Relevants are those who are "just trying to make their worship, music and outreach more contextual to emerging culture."
• Reconstructionists "think that the current form of church is frequently irrelevant and the structure is unhelpful." He seems to use this category to refer to churches that don't follow the standard institutional pattern, such as house churches.
• Revisionists are the third category. Stetzer writes, "They are not [evangelical] -- at least according to our evangelical understanding of Scripture. We significantly differ from them regarding what the Bible is, what it teaches and how we should live it in our churches."

But Stetzer goes beyond this to state the following:

Revisionists are questioning (and in some cases denying) issues like the nature of the substitutionary atonement, the reality of hell, the complementarian nature of gender, and the nature of the Gospel itself. This is not new -- some mainline theologians quietly abandoned these doctrines a generation ago. The revisionist emerging church leaders should be treated, appreciated and read as we read mainline theologians -- they often have good descriptions, but their prescriptions fail to take into account the full teaching of the Word of God...Every group that left these basics has ended up walking away from the faith and then, in a great twist of irony, is soon seen as irrelevant to the world they tried to reach.

My next post is going to be a full engagement with Stetzer's categories. First, though, I'm interested in getting some feedback. What do you folks think? Do Stetzer's categories clarify the discussion or do they fall short?

Technorati Tags: emerging church, Stetzer

MereMission

I've joined a bunch of other folks over at the group blog at MereMission.org. Todd has done a great job of putting everything together, and there's still an opportunity for more contributors to jump in, so if you're interested or if you just want to read some good thoughts about missional theology, head over and check it out. Should be fun!

Technorati Tags: contextual theology, missional theology, MereMission.org

Church and Power

Scott L asked in the comments on my post on The Boy's Club, "Is the Church, and any authority within the Church, about power? Should it be a discussion of power? Should our discussions of male and female roles and any differentiation that should or should not be therein center around the issue of power?" It's an excellent question, one that deserves a full post of its own. First, though, we should no doubt define our terms. When we talk of "power", what do we mean?

Power, at its most basic level of meaning, is simply the ability to act or to produce a desired effect (Webster). On the surface, this tells us very little. But juxtaposed with the idea of community, the idea becomes much more robust. Power in a group setting is the ability to act within the group. Sometimes, of course, this is defined as influence or authority, but that's nuancing the definition a bit more than our present purposes require. Suffice to say that at its most basic level every social structure is in some way about power, about the ability to act in the context of the group, about defining what uses of power are permitted or not permitted and then enforcing those boundaries.

The gospel, by its very nature, is about power, in the sense that it is a call to a new social reality. What I mean by that is that the gospel is the message of the coming of the Kingdom and about the call to enter that Kingdom and become a part of the people of God. It's less about personal, eternal salvation (although it includes that) and more about the formation of a new people, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, to borrow from 1 Peter. And what is significant about this new people is less ideological (although it includes that) and more a new social dynamic that is rooted in the love of God poured out in Christ.

As the burden of proof is on me to demonstrate that I'm not just making this stuff up, let's think through Jesus' interactions with his followers in the gospels. Over and over again we see the normal social patterns turned upside-down in the Kingdom. Jesus' followers are to love their enemies and are not to seek vengeance. In the Kingdom, the first are last, and the last first. Those who are in need, who are oppressed, who are powerless, are the ones who are honored in the Kingdom. The rich and the powerful, on the other hand, are the ones who find it hard to enter the Kingdom. And, in the Kingdom, the greatest are those who are the servants of all, as exemplified by the God of all Creation who stooped to honor children and washed the feet of his disciples. In short, Jesus' life was full of the use of power in the way of the Kingdom - giving it away, empowering others, offering dignity and grace and hope where there is none.

This is, I'd argue, the framework that we must first enter before we can discuss questions such as gender roles. If we can't approach the question with the humility of Christ and the stance of a servant, then I think we have no business taking part in the discussion. Too much of this discussion revolves around the question of who gets to call the shots - and, frankly, I mostly see men focusing on those questions. But the way of the Kingdom is the way of empowerment and of service. To be sure, that's not to say that anything goes - I'm not an advocate of some sort of spiritual anarchy! But what I am saying is that power - the ability to act - is used, in the Kingdom, in the service of others and not in the interests of oneself.

Technorati Tags: emerging church, power, Kingdom, gospel

The Boy's Club

Rachelle has a challenging, troubling post here about her experiences as a woman attempting to minister in Seattle in the shadow of Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill. I'm not going to attempt to summarize it - go and read it. It's deeply moving and deeply troubling.

I'm a day late on this, but I hope I can still chip in. There are many things I want to say about this. I could talk about bringing the resources of contextual theology to bear on this question. I think it needs to happen; I think it is happening. I think that it's naive, incredibly naive, to say that the complementarian position is just a straightforward reading of the text, as I mentioned in the comments over at Bob's blog. The bottom line is that all theology is as much a product of its context as it is a product of its content. I think that the challenging thing is to be able to hear what the Spirit is saying to the churches, to do the hard work to determine what scripture meant and what it means. Culture is so much a part of meaning that simply extracting any of the texts about women and men and who can do what, where and when, and assuming that those texts say the same thing now as they did back then is, frankly, more than naive - it's dangerous. And besides, we don't do that anyway, except when it's convenient. I mean, when was the last time that you heard a sermon on circumcision? But for Paul in Galatians, it was the very antithesis of the gospel. For some reason, we don't really wrestle with that issue so much anymore. If I were a cynical man, I'd ask why that is. And I'm cynical, so I'm asking.

But I don't really want to talk about contextual theology.

I also could talk about a biblical view of gender, about what it means to be created female and male, about why it's significant that we're created in the image of God. I could recommend Middleton's excellent book The Liberating Image and suggest that we absolutely need to begin with image when we talk about this - but I'm going to save that one for when I get around to Middleton. I could talk about how hierarchy and patriarchy are a pattern rooted in the fall, as I've done here. I could also talk about how the gospel is at its core a call to a new social reality, to be a new people practicing new ways of being people together, and that as a result Paul isn't just talking about getting into heaven when he says that in Christ there is neither male nor female. Which is, I hasten to add, not to diminish the fact that we are gendered persons - rather, it's to recognize that we contribute to the Kingdom precisely as gendered persons, and that those of us who are of one gender should not hinder those who are of the other from being full persons in Christ. That is, after all, the gospel, and part of what it means to be "in Christ" in the first place.

But I don't really want to talk about biblical theology.

What I want to say is this: first, as a male, I want to offer my apologies to my sisters on behalf of my brothers. We have not treated you like sisters. We have not done what is necessary. For this, I am sorry. There are a few of us who have things together, but most of us live oblivious to our own privilege. And theologies of privilege must be torn down, like all idols. The fact is that, while a lot of us express sympathy and support for you, it's not tangible. It isn't a matter of constant prayer. It isn't something that we actively struggle against by your sides. We've casually participated in the systems that exclude you, and offer our condolences from inside the circle. It's something that I think we rarely consider, and even more rarely act to change.

Second, I want to say this to my brothers in Christ: if we have been complicit in this, it must end. We need to renounce our membership in the Boy's Club. We need to walk away, and to not do so quietly. A friend of mine who is intelligent, articulate, and deeply spiritual once told me that, as a woman, there were things that she could say that would never be heard. She can struggle against this system from the outside and be quietly ignored. Things will only change when we stop lending our tacit support and speak out as men on behalf of our sisters in Christ. Not because they are unable to do so for themselves - far from it! The women I know are overwhelmingly more than capable of speaking out eloquently, intelligently, and coherently. But, unfortunately, their voices will never be heard by some, simply because they are women. That is, frankly, appalling. It's a denial of the gospel, and we need to recognize it as such.

I can't do much. But I can do small things. I can, for one, begin asking seminaries that I consider if they support ordination of women, and refusing to attend if they do not. It's a small thing; it feels minuscule. But it's what I can offer.

I can lend my small voice.

Grid blog for International Women's Day: Find the posts here

Technorati Tags: Grid blog for International Women's Day, egalitarianism

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

Prayer Needed

Some of you may have heard about Bob Robinson, a fellow blogger who had emergency heart surgery over the weekend. Scot McKnight has reported that Bob has taken a turn for the worse. Please pray for his full recovery, as well as for his family and friends in this extraordinarily difficult time.

Father, you are the architect of life. You knit our bodies together from the dust of the earth. We ask that you would remember your son Bob, that you would remember his body and hold it together with your strong hands. Remember his family and friends; send your Comforter to speak peace and hope to them. Author of faith, grant that they would have faith to trust in this difficult time.

UPDATE: Lorna reminded me that I needed to link to Scot's updates here and here. Things are apparently improving, but Bob still needs our prayers. Thank God for what he has done so far and what he continues to do.

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

On Walls and Emergence

Brian's response. Fascinating discussion going on in the comments - there are clearly two perspectives represented, one of which is ultimately concerned with doctrine while the other is more concerned with praxis (imho). That's not meant to be pejorative of either perspective - just attempting to describe what is clearly a differentiation of approaches. If you want to see why there is this thing called the emerging church, take a look at the thread. Absolutely fascinating.

Robert Frost is one of my favorite poets. I've long thought his poem Mending Wall is a striking illustration of these two perspectives:

There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors".
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me -
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."
- Robert Frost, Mending Wall

Go read the rest of it - it's a great poem. There's a parable in there, for those with ears to hear.

Technorati Tags: emerging church, Robert Frost, Brian McLaren

Taking Things Personally

I'm in the habit of taking small breaks from the blogosphere. It helps me to keep perspective on the whole thing. This time was different than most, though - I had a lot to say on a particular topic, none of which I would have been proud to have written. Practicing a discipline of silence for a few days hasn't really cooled my emotions much on the subject but has, perhaps, brought something of temperance to my thoughts. I'm frustrated as ever, but perhaps I've found a way to discuss it - we shall see, I suppose, if that proves to be true.

So here's the deal:
Brian wrote something. People didn't like it. Mark stepped into the mix.

And at that point things got ugly. You should be able to follow the links from there, if you missed it.

Here's what bothers me about the whole affair: at what point did sin cease to be personal and simply become a discussion of issues? Say what you will about Brian's initial post - one thing he absolutely nails is that sin is never abstract. Pause and think about that for a second - there is no such thing as an abstract sin. It is always, always, always personal and embodied. It's never a discussion of ideas held in isolation - it is always a discussion of people and their struggles and hurts and fears and anger and rebellion and failing to live up to the standards of a God who is beyond the reach of any of us.

At some point, we decided that we can talk about sin without discussing those who suffer from it.

I'm deliberately avoiding discussion of the particular topic in question. I realize that at least part of the tension is some questions about ethics, about whether a particular way of being is appropriate or not, about whether it pleases God or not. And I realize that some folks might want to have that conversation, and it absolutely needs to happen. But it can't happen in the abstract, because no matter what you believe about this particular topic or about any topic where the question of sin is raised, it involves people. People with names and faces who are loved by God and who, therefore, deserve to be treated with dignity and respect by those of us who claim to follow Him. Witness Jamie's series of posts on the topic for an example of how this could be handled differently.

We have a saying in the evangelical world. It's trite, really, and doesn't solve anything, but it's frequently trotted out as though it answers all of the problems of approaching this sort of thing appropriately. "Hate the sin, love the sinner," we say. Only - let's be honest - this is what we mean:
Hate the sin, love the sinner.
Is it possible to hate something in the abstract? I'm not sure. I can say that I've never really seen it happen. Or, let's be more specific - even if it is possible, if our energy is spent on hating sin which, by its very nature, is embodied and personal, it's going to be extremely hard to convince anyone of the love that we claim to hold.

I'm reminded of Jesus' words in Luke 11:46: "And you experts in the law, woe to you, because you load people down with burdens they can hardly carry, and you yourselves will not lift one finger to help them." What if we were to become known as burden-bearers, as those who come alongside those who are weighed down and offer to help lighten the load? To walk with them in their struggles and offer encouragement, support, prayer, and yes, when appropriate, correction? But most importantly, perhaps we can point them to the One who carries our burdens for us, instead of being those who make the load even more unbearable.

Technorati Tags: sin, grace

Pause for Breath

I find myself in the awkward position of having nothing constructive to say. It's not that I lack for topics - far from it. I've left several posts over the past few days in various degrees of preparedness. Frankly, I'm completely frustrated, and it's coming through in my writing in a way that I dislike intensely. I'm frustrated with the near-total inability of those who should consider one another brothers and sisters in Christ to disagree constructively, honestly, and respectfully. I'm frustrated with the elevation of secondary issues to the status of boundary markers of orthodoxy. But I'm mostly frustrated with my personal inability to offer grace in my writing to those who frustrate me.

I'm tempted to say more - but I'm going to practice restraint. This week has not been healthy for me in the sense that I've become way too focused on what's going on in the blogosphere. I need to pause for breath, to make space for silence and renewal. I'm stepping away until Sunday. I'll offer more thoughts then; hopefully a few days of silence will allow me to speak with more clarity and grace.

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

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

Crazy Relatives

I've been following the insanity this evening over the emergentno.com aggregator that Justin Baeder pulled together. I'm at this point exhausted, primarily because reading too much fundagelical stuff is bad for my blood pressure.

I had this bizarre experience a number of years ago at my uncle's house. We were visiting for Thanksgiving, and his wife's brother was also at the table with the rest of the family. The problem was that this guy was a total ass. Not only was he ignorant (and displayed it proudly), but he was also loudly and vocally prejudiced. I was embarrassed to be in the same room; I can't imagine how my uncle must have felt.

I guess we all probably have relatives that embarrass us. I bet that, if this guy got to know me, he'd think I was an arrogant, know-it-all city boy. And he'd probably have a point, as far as that goes.

I think what I find so thoroughly frustrating about this whole emergent-no, emergent-yes thing is the division that it causes. I say this as someone who can't read some of these sites without mentally dropping the f-bomb (for which I recognize that I am in need of repentance). In other words, it's easy to cry foul about division in the body while your hands are full of rocks and your aim is good. But on some level, these people are family - as troubling and as embarrassing as that might be. On the other hand, they are (obviously) just as embarrassed about me.

Here's the challenge - I think of my natural response to this sort of thing, and I think of Christ's commands to do good to those who hate you, and I realize that I'm not very much like Him. I get angry and sin not. And the thing that is most frustrating is that unity gets trampled underfoot, and we continue to perpetuate the brokenness of the curse instead of living in the new life of Christ. I'm not saying that we shouldn't disagree - there are some foundational differences between folks that would be helpful for all of us to sort out. Maybe in the end we won't agree anyway - but can we at least do so in a manner that doesn't call into question someone else's place at the table?

I was going to do my review of Colossians Remixed tonight, but now I'm just tired.

Reflections on A Generous Orthodoxy Conference

What an incredible weekend! It was how I imagine the experience of being in a context where you're unable to speak in your native tongue and then returning to a place where everyone speaks your language. The team at Off the Map did a fantastic job of pulling things together. Some random thoughts:

• Brian McLaren isn't evil. He talks about Jesus like they're best friends. Also, he has a phenomenal grasp of what it means to participate in the Kingdom. His understanding of "gospel" just happens to be bigger than "butts in seats" (most quoted phrase of the weekend, I think).


• Kudos to Bill of Bill Bean Books for being our paperback pimp for the weekend. The thought did occur to me that having an onsite bookstore was sort of like setting up a Guinness table in the lobby of an AA meeting, but Bill assured us that he would talk someone down if they started to overindulge. (I walked away with only three new reads, so I count that as a mixed success.)


• I had an opportunity to chat with Jason Clark, who is one of the few people I've met who are possibly more well-read than I. I hope to catch up with Jason again next summer; our cohort at Biblical will be in London for a cross-cultural experience.


• John Franke is the only person I've ever met who can use "Barthian" in casual conversation and sound completely natural.


• Best thing about the conference, though, was being able to connect more deeply with some folks from my church. Joy and I have been attending for over a year, but because of our insane schedules we haven't really developed much in the way of relationships. It was good to spend time with folks from our community - there are some truly kindred spirits here, I think, and I'm glad that we've landed where we have.


• Big idea from the weekend - start small. (Ironic, I suppose. ;) Seriously - I think a lot of us find the thought of getting started at Kingdom-work to be intimidating. There are so many needs, and we're so overwhelmed with life as it is. Brian mentioned something refreshing and hopeful about seasons in our lives. We can't always participate in big ways. At the moment, my Kingdom focus has to include my call to raise two (soon to be three) little boys into men. But I can make space for small things, and hopefully do so in ways that the boys can participate as well.

Making Connections

I'm having another one of those weeks where disparate experiences are coming together in an interesting set of juxtapositions. I've been thinking a bit more about the whole question of story, about how we interpret our lives and our experiences through story and about how we as Christians so often do such a poor job of telling stories that help in this matter of interpretation. This line of thought has connected with some rather odd occurrences, that in and of themselves have no direct relation. First, I picked up the new David Crowder cd last week, and I've been digesting it - really good stuff, and perhaps the most interesting part is the undercurrent of story, particularly eschatological story, that runs through the lyrics. So this prompted some thinking on the sort of odd eschatology that happens in the emerging church - which, basically, is none. And I'm wondering, now, why it is that a movement (don't throw rocks - I used the "m" word) that prides itself so much on story has more or less ignored this one component that's so critical to the Old and New Testament narratives - the inauguration of the Kingdom? Left Behind nonsense not withstanding, it seems that apocalyptic speech needs redemption far more than it needs abandonment.

On another front, a friend forwarded this rather odd email from a pastor in our general area going off on another "emerging church - Satan, or something worse?" sort of rant. Most of these rants I just ignore; they're usually not informed enough to bother reading. This one, I did read, more out of a morbid curiosity than anything else (and I wasn't disappointed). But in between the lines of this rather sorry attempt at a critique, I had another thought - part of this we do to ourselves, because I'm not convinced that those of us who have bought shares in the emerging church, so to speak, can do a solid job of articulating an alternative interpretation of the biblical story to the one told by fundagelicalism. Sure, we can pick apart their version - but can we tell a better one, one that is grand and broad and deep and beautiful? Or do we just tell a different set of episodes in some oddly disjointed miniseries, episodes that have no connection except that the main characters all sort of float in and out with some degree of regularity?

Here's what I mean - I read a lot of stuff in and around this conversation that's just sloppy. I read people advocating unversalism or a particular approach to the afterlife or tolerance for this-or-that or even something as central to the story as social justice and it's not grounded anywhere except in something that passes for a storyline in episode 43. The problem with this is that I don't really see a difference between this and proof-texting, except that it's a bit more fun to read.

Maybe I'm wrong; maybe I just haven't found the right conversations. But I think that until we're able to articulate a story that is true to the Story, faithful to the Community of the saints, and that inspires our own imaginations, we'll never have the sort of transformational effect on twenty-first century first-world Christianity that I know most of us want. The rub is that I think it's there - I think the Story, when read and told truly and lovingly, has many of the pieces that we, generally speaking, are claiming. We just need to start inhabiting it, to put down the scripts for the uninspired episodes and trade up for the epic of which we're already a part.

More to come - I think I need to unpack this a bit more.

A Generous Orthodoxy Conference

Looks like I'll be attending the Generous Orthodoxy conference in DC. It would be fun to connect with anyone from the blogosphere who's planning on attending - drop me an email or leave a comment if you're going to be there.

Philly Cohort

Thursday I had the privilege of attending the monthly meeting of the Philly Emergent cohort. Dr. Joseph Mangina from Wycliffe College in Toronto presented some thoughts on the book of Revelation as ecclesiology, as well as an approach to apocalyptic writing in general. It was a fascinating collection of ideas, particularly in light of some of the things I've been reading and writing about lately. A good chunk of his thoughts tied directly into my six month long binge on Wright and Brueggemann, interweaving thoughts on empire and imagination and the importance of apocalyptic speech in our current context. Great, great stuff - he's working on a book at the moment; no word on when it will be out, but I guarantee it will be on my short list.

I have to pause for a moment and reflect on one of the criticisms I so often see about the emerging church. Often, it seems that detractors of the emerging church are quick to call what's happening style with no substance, particularly as defined by an approach to scripture. Those involved with the emerging church are said to be at best more interested in culture than in scripture. I've never found this to be the case, and this particular gathering far and away underscored that for me - there aren't many contexts where I have the opportunity to sit in a room packed full of people fully engaged with a presentation on the nature of apocalyptic speech in Revelation that's over an hour long, especially when there's almost a palpable sense of disappointment that the discussion has to close. There was no lack of respect for scripture in this meeting - I was honored to be a part of it.

It was a really great group of folks, too - our hosts, Scott Collins-Jones and his wife Fairlight, were some of the most hospitable people I've had the privilege of meeting, and it was great to finally catch up to some online acquaintances (Todd and Brad from the Well) in person. There were a bunch of other folks I met (most of whose names I've probably forgotten; I'm terrible with that sort of thing) who were open and interesting and engaged with thinking missionally about the faith that we share, even though the traditions ranged from Vineyard to OPC, house church to high church, and everything in between. An absolutely fantastic evening.

Philly Emergent Cohort

Anyone with info on the upcoming Philly Emergent cohort gathering, would you be so kind as to leave a comment with the info or email me? I know some of you are out there... I was in the middle of reading the email (literally) when half a glass of water spilled onto my laptop. I will confess that, in my panic, my charismatic background raised its long-forgotten head, and I gave serious consideration to anointing it with oil and praying for resurrection. Ah, well, I'm still hoping that it will dry out and turn on tomorrow. At any rate, if it doesn't, I can't get to my email for date/time/location etc.

On the upside, I think it's great that a cohort is finally starting in Philly! Kudos to whoever pulled it together - I hope this takes off.

Stan Grenz, 1950 - 2005

As has been widely reported already, Stan Grenz has passed away. This is a tremendous loss, first and foremost for his family and friends, but also for the body of Christ. I know that I am not alone when I say that his writings have been influential for me as I learn to navigate the new theological waters in which we find ourselves. My first serious exposure to his writing was A Primer on Postmodernism, which started me on a new theological path. Beyond Foundationalism, which he coauthored with John Franke, was also profoundly influential for me. It was this book that caused me to change seminaries to attend Biblical and begin my MDiv studies. At the time, I was midway through an MTS program at another seminary and lost most of the credits in the transfer, but it was well worth it.

Dr. Grenz, you will be missed.