A post on Biologos with one of my theological heroes, Alister McGrath, speaking on science and religion.
Category: Science & Technology
The Test of Faith documentary looks like a superb new resource from the Faraday Institute. Here is the trailer.
On Jesus Creed, RJS, a professor at a major research university, is reviewing a book on missional campus ministry. This is post is so insightful, and so close to my own heart, that I’m going to reproduce it below:
The church I attend has an outstanding youth ministry. No question. And intentionally inter-generational worship. The staff is intent on building relationships. The church is thriving, even growing. The number of families with young children is increasing. And yet …
My daughter graduated from high school this year. She has been in this church since we moved here just after her first birthday; she “belongs.” There was a big graduation luncheon – complete with video and moving remembrances (we had known roughly half the 15-20 seniors since they were in preschool); the whirlwind of graduation ceremonies, family visits, and open houses. And the next Sunday as we prepared to leave for church she informed me that she was now supposed to attend one of the adult education communities … and as she put it “No Way!” For a time perhaps she no longer belongs.
This leads to the question I would like to address today.
What does your church do to intentionally reach, walk along side, and disciple 18-25 year-olds?
The above incident – while true – also gives a bit of a wrong impression. We are in a University town and have a growing church based campus ministry reaching college students, graduate students, and beyond. June, July and August are slow months for campus ministry (and other ministries). Nonetheless this incident is telling — our 18 to 25 year-olds are entering a strange new world. They are not children, or even youth – but neither are they full-fledged adults. The expectation that they will smoothly enter the adult program (even for the summer) is unrealistic. Emerging adulthood is an excellent description.
Church based college ministry – ministry to the college-aged adults is the focus of Chuck Bomar’s new book College Ministry 101: A Guide to Working with 18-25 Year Olds. This book is what “101” implies, an introductory guide and overview. I found it an easy read with a number of excellent insights. There is little detailed analysis, although he is clearly familiar with much of the literature. I will highlight a few of his points to start a discussion.
Why College-Age Ministry? This may seem obvious to some, but certainly not to all. The drift of college-age people from church is a well documented phenomenon.
“If our goal is to develop mature believers (and I hope it is!) we can’t afford to watch college-age people detach from the church. Developing ministries that nurture and disciple college-age people isn’t optional for churches. It’s part of our calling as the body of Christ. “(p. 21)
Ask Scot if we have a problem and stand back – we’ll get an earful (a well researched and articulated earful). We have a problem.
Identity formation. Many of the reasons for a church to invest in an intentional college-age ministry arise from the specific features of this age, amplified by our modern society where higher education of some form is becoming the norm. Bomar stresses the importance of identity formation for college-age people. They are exploring, taking ownership. and becoming. It is an exciting, challenging, and unsettling time.
“I want to say once more that identity formation isn’t just a big issue for this age group. It is the issue. I know some leaders who wonder why they need to understand identity formation. They believe that if they simply teach the Word of God, then identity will take care of itself. But this search for identity is so all-consuming that it greatly impacts the way a young person understands the Word. Identity is where our concern ought to lie.” (p. 37)
A successful college-ministry will emphasize relationships, discipleship, and mentorship, not numbers and programs. We need to meet people where they are – and college-age people are not, for the most part, settled and suited to our standard church model.
Teaching and Discipleship – one of Bomar’s best sections.
“Our traditional approach to spiritual formation isn’t really forming people as much as it is indoctrinating them. The simple articulation of conclusions we’ve come to doesn’t prepare college-age people for the intellectual challenges they’ll face as adult Christians.
Let me put this another way. College-age people who were raised with one perspective on questions of identity and meaning and life eventually become aware that this perspective isn’t the only way of thinking, that the answer might not have been as simple as the church made it seem. They start to wonder why we never told them about these other perspectives. And then they question all the conclusions we’ve taught them, wondering if the church is hiding something.” (p. 129)
According to Bomar a good college-age ministry should break away from the educational model. We shouldn’t teach our conclusions, we should teach the method used to reach our conclusions. A good college-age ministry doesn’t provide answers, it develops people “passionate about thinking correctly, asking questions, and seeking answers for themselves.” (p. 131)
This is a frightening prospect for some. It seems safer to provide the right answers up front. After all, if we don’t some of their conclusions and answers may differ from ours. But this we must leave in the hands of God, in the humble realization that some of our conclusions, answers, and positions are likely wrong.
Bomar suggests three significant changes:From teaching the law to teaching the faith; from knowing facts to understanding truth; from surface assumptions to deeper connections. We must realize that difficult questions often have ambiguous answers – and become comfortable with this.
Well, this is enough to give a taste – Bomar’s book contains practical wisdom and insight. It is a good start, but only a start to spur deeper conversation and thinking about college-age ministry.
This is the second entry in the “Redemptive Violence and Film” series between yours truly and Thomas. This is my first entry: “Terminator: The Eschaton.”
“I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and makes war.” – Rev. 19:11
The summer blockbuster film Terminator Salvation follows the exploits of John Connor as he fights for the human disapora against Skynet, an artificial intelligence that seeks to obliterate humanity in favor of a world run by and for machines. It’s a bad movie, filled with ludicrous plot holes (Earth to machines: haven’t you seen Goldfinger and Austin Powers? Kill John Connor before letting him into your secret lair!), though the post-apocalyptic special effects are undeniably cool. Yet, with all its absurdities, something about Terminator Salvation nudges my Biblical-relevance-o’-meter. Is it Left Behind for our ironic post-industrial sensibilities?
I spent many hours in my youth listening to preachers who thought they had figured out the imagery of Revelation 19. They imagined the armies of the earth literally gathered on the plain of Armageddon (the Megiddo Pass) to confront Christ, the Rider on the White Horse, in physical battle. At the conclusion of this decisive battle, the “beast” and the “false prophet” who lead the rebellion against Christ are “thrown alive into the fiery lake of burning sulfur” (v. 20). The remaining combatants are “killed with the sword that came out of the mouth of the rider on the horse, and all the birds gorge[] themselves on their flesh” (v. 20-21). (These scenes are only available in the “Unrated Director’s Cut” version of the Bible. The Disney Family Bible skips right to the “no more tears” part).
Here is “redemptive violence” at its thickest. Only after this cleansing apocalypse — and the ensuing, mysterious millennial period and final outbreak of rebellion in Chapter 20 — do we reach the quiet shores of the New Jerusalem in chapter 21, in which God “will wipe every tear from [his people’s] eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away” (v. 4).
I will need to demur to the literalism of those “Summer Bible Conference” preachers who first introduced me to the starkly horrific elegance of the Bible’s apocalyptic literature. Precisely because the genre is apocalyptic, these images must be understood as images, impressionistic and sometimes nearly incomprehensible pictures of realities far deeper than their “literal” surface. Those preachers were correct, however, to note that the divine reckoning they represent, in which “kings, generals, and mighty men, [and] horses and their riders” are judged along with “all people, free and slave, small and great” (ch. 19, v. 18) by the blazing light and piercing truth of Christ, is a violent act.
So perhaps we can see John Connor as Christ figure, a Rider on a White Horse, expurgating the steel-cold machinations of sin, leading a remnant of humanity to its final salvation. I would like to say that this is so, except that Connor also embodies the trope of the tragically stoic hero, the man who must deny his humanity so that others can live. Maybe Connor is a kind of high Medieval Christ, staring distantly from an altar triptych with big, vacant eyes. Better yet, he might reflect a Nestorian duality, never truly entering into the price of his atoning violence. Either way, we, the movie audience, are invited to gaze at the spectacle of a mechanical ritual sacrifice without experiencing the expurgation of real blood, sweat and loss. “Terminator” ultimately offers us Salvation without kenosis. For the real thing, the Rider must win his White Horse by way of the Cross.
Ted Davis of Messiah College writes an excellent overview of John Polkinghorne in First Things.
An extensive new Papal Encyclial was just issued concerning social teaching in light of the current economic crisis. This is an important document, which all Christians should carefully consider. I hope to do a number of posts on it. A taste:
We recognize . . . that the Church had good reason to be concerned about the capacity of a purely technological society to set realistic goals and to make good use of the instruments at its disposal. Profit is useful if it serves as a means towards an end that provides a sense of both of how to produce it and how to make good use of it. Once profit becomes the exclusive goal, if it is produced by improper means and without the common good as its ultimate end, it risks destroying wealth and creating poverty.
Recently we watched the movie Freedom Writers, which is about a high school teacher who works with inner city students. It’s a little hokey, but not a bad movie. At one point, the teacher brings the kids to a holocaust museum, and they meet with some camp survivors. A somewhat incongruous thought struck me at that moment: can my theology handle the Holocaust?
Of course, no theology, no reasonable system, can “handle” the Holocaust. That kind of evil by definition defies reason. What I mean is, does my theology provide a system of justice that can account for the victims of the Holocaust?
I’m starting to think of this disturbing question as the “Holocaust Test.” A theology that can’t pass the Holocaust Test seems too small. Human history is filled with holocausts. The Nazi Holocaust is unique in its focus on the Jewish people. Yet we can also speak of African slavery, of communist dictatorships and gulags, of the killing fields of Cambodia, of Rwanda and Uganda, and so on. What does our theology say about the innocent blood — the blood of men, women, and young children — that cries out from the ground of human violence?
I’m afraid the very conservative brand of Evangelical theology I’ve inherited fails the Holocaust Test. The individual eschatology in this system is simple: those who have heard and responded to the Gospel are in Heaven; those who have not are in Hell. Anne Frank, and the millions of other Jewish children who died in the Holocaust, simply are lost (assuming they passed the “age of accountability,” whatever that might be). All of the Jewish adults who died in the Nazi camps, simply are lost. We should state the logic of this theology in terms that are as unflinching as its teaching: the residents of Berkenau and Auschwitz went straight from the gas chambers to the flames of Hell.
Obviously, I’m not the first person, or the first Christian, to realize that this view of eschatology is grossly inadquate. There are many ways of thinking about Christian eschatology that avoid the simplistic poles of hyper-exclusivism and universalism. On the Roman Catholic side, after Vatican II, there has been much reflection on how the grace extended in Christ through the Church can spill over to non-Catholics and non-professing-Christians. On the Protestant side, there is Barth, who was a universalist of sorts, and more “evangelical” voices such as Billy Graham, John Stott, Dallas Willard, and others who are by no means universalists, but who strongly suggest that the mystery of God’s salvation cannot be circumscribed by what is visible to us in the human context.
The Holocaust Test forces us to tread in some difficult waters. I don’t think the Biblical witness, or the Tradition, or reason or experience, support true universalism. It seems abhorrent to me to suggest that Anne Frank and Hitler share precisely the same fate, whether in Hell or in Heaven. Freedom means that we have freedom to reject God, and many do reject God, which is the definition of being “lost,” now and in the eschaton. But, at the same time, the crabbed little “four spiritual laws” view of individual eschatology can’t possibly be the whole story if there is such a thing as divine universal Justice.
What do you think?
An excellent essay in CT by Alister McGrath on what Augustine might have made of Darwin. (HT: BioLogos blog)
A group headed by Francis Collins announces today the launch of the BioLogos Foundation, an effort to improve dialogue between Christian faith and the natural sciences. Collins provides some additional background on a new blog, “Science and the Sacred,” associated with the project. This is exciting. I hope and pray that it represents a new, constructive phase in the maturation of evangelical perspectives on the natural sciences.
I recently discovered the Trinity Forum, an outstanding resource on faith and culture from a Reformed perspective. I’m looking forward to their new initiative on faith and science, funded by the Templeton Foundation. A forum that includes Francis Collins and Dallas Willard as well as Trinity Forum President Luder Whitlock is bound to be interesting and hopefully productive.