Here are the Powerpoint slides from my first Prophetic Lament class.
Category: Spirituality
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Daniel Kirk on "Evangelical"
Daniel Kirk offers a good post on a new “Evangelical Manifesto.” I reproduce his entire post below, but I note here that I would add these to the “Manifesto”:
6. “One can be an evangelical and reject the notion that God automatically damns to eternal Hell everyone who doesn’t explicity hear and confess the Gospel. Authentic evangelicalism is always Christologically exclusive — salvation only comes through Christ — but it is diverse and humble in its understanding of how and when God may save through Christ and about how Christians should relate to persons of other religions in the public square.”
7. “Evangelicals have always affirmed the unique value and sanctity of marriage as a sacrament between one man and one woman for life, but one can be an evangelical and embrace gay people as fellow human beings deserving common dignity, respect and equal civil rights.”
I don’t know why, but for now I’ve decided to care about the word “evangelical.” “Evangelical” can be a slippery word. Lots of people want to claim it. Lots of people want to disclaim it. I wouldn’t mind leaving it, really, except that right now those to my right are insisting that you have to agree with them about a whole host of things in order to claim that label for yourself.
I posted recently about Al Mohler, who insists that you have to be a complementarian on the gender issue so as to believe in inerrancy so as to be a good evangelical. Recently the Reformed world has distanced itself from the service of Pete Enns, Tremper Longman, and Bruce Waltke because they opened the door to a reading of Genesis 1-3 that was something other than literal. Most recently, a rumor has reached my ears that a certain evangelical college (I won’t mention its name because it’s only a rumor), under the lead of its complementarian president is beginning to institute a commitment to complementarianism by only allowing, for example, men to speak in chapel. May be true, may not, but the verisimilitude is enough to make my sectarian radar go up.
I am concerned about these developments. In particular, I’m concerned because those of us who aren’t interested in helping veer the ship to the right haven’t been as interested in carving out a broad definition of evangelicalism. (Though there are some exceptions.) In our silence, the ship is listing right, and I think that many of the developments, because of that, are or will be tragic for evangelicalism in America.
In pointed (and point-by-point) response to this listing right, I offer an alternative articulation of evangelical theology in some attempt to hold onto a word whose value seems to decline with each passing headline.
Evangelicalism for the 21st Century
Evangelical is an adjective that can describe Christians of various denominations and other substantives. There are evangelical Protestants, evangelical Catholics, and evangelical orthodox. There are evangelical Pentecostals, evangelical Anabaptists, and evangelical mainliners.
To be an evangelical is to be committed to the notion that the message of Jesus is good news about a God who desires all of humanity, each group within humanity, and every individual to be in relationship with God as the God of all.
To be an evangelical is to be committed to scripture as the word of God, a word that always has the power to prophetically confront and challenge what we take for granted–both within the church and as people in diverse cultures.
To be an evangelical is to be committed to telling the gospel story such that it will sound as good news in the ears of those who hear it, even as it summons us to repentance and faith.
In light of these three commitments: that the gospel be genuinely good news, that it comes as an invitation to be received into the family of God, and that we know of the good news as we learn it from scripture, here is an evangelical affirmation for the twenty-first century:
1. You can be an evangelical and not believe in inerrancy.
We believe this because of our commitment to scripture itself. Investigation of scripture will often, to many of us, provide indications that an “inerrant” Bible is not the way that God has chosen to speak to humanity.
This is part of the good news because it means that we do not have to set aside the labors of critical scholarship to affirm that the Bible is the word of God in which the good news is articulated.
Evangelicals embrace many of those who do affirm inerrancy. Many who embrace inerrancy are able to separate issues of inerrancy from issues of hermeneutics. This enables them to free the doctrine of what the Bible is from what the Bible must teach on any given subject. Many who embrace inerrancy do so with a revisionist definition of inerrancy that only intends to signal that the Bible is our ultimate authority. This, too, is an indication that the faithfulness to scripture as the word of God can go in numerous directions of faithful handling.
To be an evangelical who does not embrace inerrancy is to be a Christian who sets aside inerrancy because of what we find in scripture itself. This is not an application of anti-supernatural bias. This is not a presupposition against miracles or historical accuracy. It is a response to the Bible that has shown itself to be something other than inerrant–with a faithful confession that God has chosen just this sort of book through which to reveal himself.
2. Evangelicals can affirm the full inclusion of women in the life of the church.
To be an evangelical affirming women’s ordination is to be someone who is convinced that scripture itself leads the way toward their full inclusion in the body.
God the Father creates humanity male and female to rule the world on God’s behalf. To be an evangelical egalitarian is to confess that shared rule in the church is faithful telling of God’s purpose in creation.
Jesus the Son receives us all into himself, baptized as one into his name, where there is no longer male and female as a primary distinguishing marker. To be an evangelical egalitarian is to confess that shared ministry in the body is faithful living out of our common possession of the identity of the crucified Son.
The Holy Spirit fills all equally so that both sons and daughters will prophesy. To be an evangelical egalitarian is to confess that shared teaching in the church is a faithful expression of the egalitarian distribution of the Spirit.
I am an egalitarian because I believe what the Bible tells me about the Triune God in redemptive relationship to the humanity restored and renewed in Christ by the Spirit.
As an evangelical, I also acknowledge that others committed to scripture might demand a complementarian assessment of humanity’s standing before God. To be an evangelical complementarian is to acknowledge that this is an issue of hermeneutics, of finding primacy in some passages while relegating others to secondary positions. This differs from fundamentalist complementarianism which sees hierarchy in the church as essential to receiving the Bible as the word of God and to our confession of the good news of Jesus Christ.
Evangelical egalitarianism is good news to the world around us because it declares that the restored world into which God is inviting it does not demand subjugation of the weak to the strong, but upends the world’s hierarchical system.
3. Evangelicals can praise the God who created a 4.5 billion year old earth.
To be an evangelical old-earther, to be an evangelical who reads Genesis 1-3 as something other than literal history, is to be a student of scripture attentive to its own indications of genre.
To be an evangelical old-earther is not to reject the stories of Gen 1-3 as out-dated, but listen to them as the Ancient Near Eastern stories of ancient origins that they are. It is to listen to them and attend to the cues that they are not meant to stand as all-encompassing narratives about the beginning of all humanity.
They speak to us truly about the condition of the earth, about God’s intentions for humanity to stand one day over an ordered cosmos, and of a particular people as the means for that glorious future. We are old-earthers because we are attentive to scripture, not because we carry in presuppositions against it.
To be an evangelical is to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with other Christians who, studying Genesis 1-3 and submitting to it as the word of God, cannot but confess that the world is 6,000 years old. To be an evangelical young earther, rather than a fundamentalist young earther, is to recognize that this is a hermeneutical decision that has an important voice in the church’s story, but one that has had a counter-voice to answer to since long before the days of Charles Darwin. It is to affirm that others may make a different hermeneutical decision about Genesis 1-3 without giving up their commitment to either scripture or the God of the Bible.
Evangelical old-earth creationism is good news because it means that students of the natural world do not have to abandon their scientific knowledge to participate in the story of God. It means that they might, in fact, have something to teach the church about what the book of nature is teaching us all about the way in which God created.
4. Evangelicals robustly affirm the social ramifications of the gospel.
To be an evangelical advocate of the social gospel is to affirm the biblical story that the disintegration of the cosmos extends beyond the relationship of God with humanity to encompass also the relationship of people with each other, the created order with systemic powers, and people with the sub-human creation.
To affirm such a robust set of problems is to demand an equally robust set of solutions. If the good news is to be genuinely good news, it must proclaim that God’s anointed king comes to make his blessings flow far as the curse is found.
To be an evangelical advocate of the social gospel is to submit to the stories of the Gospels themselves, in which restored bodies, restored communities, subjection of demonic powers, and forgiveness of sins were all part of the ministry of Jesus.
To be an evangelical is to insist that to reject the social ramifications of the Gospel is to dishonor the extent of God’s care for God’s world, and the sweep of Jesus’ ministry on earth.
UPDATE:
5. Conviction without Sectarianism. (click link for a fifth point added the next day)
Conclusion
To be an evangelical, one does not need to follow the lead of so many in power who are retrenching this movement to the right. As those who are committed to scripture, to its invitation to enter into a rich, life-giving relationship with God, and to its proclamation of a message that is actually good news, we can stand together and proclaim a story that is, in fact, beautiful to those with eyes to see.
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The Bounds of Hope
From John Chrysostom’s Paschal Homily:
He that was taken by death has annihilated it!
He descended into Hades and took Hades captive!
He embittered it when it tasted his flesh! And anticipating this Isaiah exclaimed: “Hades was embittered when it encountered thee in the lower regions”.
It was embittered, for it was abolished!
It was embittered, for it was mocked!
It was embittered, for it was purged!
It was embittered, for it was despoiled!
It was embittered, for it was bound in chains!
It took a body and came upon God!
It took earth and encountered heaven!
It took what it saw but crumbled before what it had not seen!
O death, where is thy sting? O Hades, where is thy victory?
Christ is risen, and you are overthrown!Christ is risen, and the demons are fallen!
Christ is risen, and the angels rejoice!
Christ is risen, and life reigns!
Christ is risen, and not one dead remains in a tomb!
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Giberson on Religion Cramming
Karl Giberson writes in the Huffington Post and on BioLogos in response to the claim often made by new atheist leaders that religious people “cram their beliefs down their children’s throats”:
This language evokes the harshest of images. What is a secular reader, unfamiliar with how religious children are actually raised, to think? They have never seen a Christmas pageant where dozens of happy children sing cute choruses under the direction of dedicated volunteer staff; they have not seen teenagers gathered in prayerful support around one of their friends whose little brother was just killed in a terrible accident; they have not seen older teens holding bake sales so they can raise enough money to spend two weeks in Haiti helping people in need. Instead, they must picture stern-faced parents dragging kids against their will to indoctrination sessions where they sit on hard wooden chairs until they affirm a set of beliefs in settings reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange. After years of such training, the once-open-minded children mature into narrow-minded adults who carry out the narrow-minded agendas of their parents — oppose healthcare, gay marriage, stem-cell research, Muslims, and anything else they can think of — and begin the process of having their own kids, with a new generation of throats down which more toxic ideas will be crammed.
Somewhere in America right now, there is a little girl locked in a dog cage. A man will bind her with duct tape. The man will sexually abuse her while another takes pictures and videos. The men will distribute these materials over a vast network of child pornography file sharing servers. Tens of thousands of other men will look at the pictures and videos, discuss them in chat rooms, use them as masturbatory tools, and demand more. And they will get more, much more.
I know this is true because I’m teaching a course this semester on “Cybersecurity Law.” Most of the course focuses on commercial and public espionage – hacking, data theft, and so on. This week, however, the topic has been online safety – cyberstalking, harassment, obscenity and child pornography. Our guest speaker yesterday was the Brian Sinclair, Chief of the Computer Crime Prosecution Unit in Bergen County, New Jersey. While he mercifully didn’t show us any of the volumes of child porn his unit has seized over the years (it is technically a felony to display such materials even in an educational setting), he described in general terms the sorts of things that commonly appear, including what he noted as “disturbing recent trend” towards the literal caging of victims.
It is nearly impossible to theologize about something like this without becoming either morose or trite. Bergen County is a wealthy suburb of New York City, and most of the perpetrators of child pornography and child cyberstalking here are educated middle-aged men. I could write about how the corruptions of wealth and power tempt these men to think of themselves as above any sense of law, morality or decency. Or, I could write about the perversion of the mainstream entertainment media, and how it feeds into far darker “entertainments.” I could explore how these sorts of practices explode whatever reticence I might have about the personal reality of the “demonic.” These are worthy topics.
But I feel compelled to write today about the victims. The girl in the cage is rarely rescued. As Assistant Prosecutor Sinclair explained, in the rare cases where the prosecution is able to obtain a victim statement, the victim usually has already grown to adulthood.
Where is “Justice” for these victims?
This is a piercing theological question. Any wise theologian will first admit that he or she cannot really offer anything like a satisfying answer. As a Christian, I cannot offer a satisfying answer. I can offer a Lament. I can offer some action, even the meager offering of a law school course that maybe helps raise awareness. And I can cling to a glimmer of hope, which I know with the heart of faith is more than a glimmer: Christ will return and make this right. Indeed, I can pray for these victims, and as I do so I can strain forward with the Church and the saints throughout all the ages towards the day when Christ will bring final justice into this world, the day of his return.
We Christians have lost, I’m afraid, the “blessed hope” of Christ’s return (Titus 2:13). On the one hand, this is because the dispensational “Left Behind” theology has perverted this hope into a wish for me to be “raptured,” leaving the world – including the girl in the cage, if she has not made a “conscious decision for Christ” (and how could she, being locked up and tortured?) — to burn in dramatic High Definition and Dolby Surround Sound. It’s a sort of parousia porn. On the other hand, the this-worldly rendering of the parousia popularized by figures such as Jurgen Moltmann and N.T. Wright, while offering a valuable and necessary correction to dispensationalism, at times seems to mitigate the drama and decisiveness of Christ’s personal return.
The Biblical drama of the parousia is that it is a final unveiling of what is truly real. Evil and injustice and the powers of this world are to be unmasked and shown for what they truly are. Christ is to be shown fully for who he truly is. The Church is to be shown fully for what it truly is. All will see and know.
The girl in the cage will see and know. If the Bible’s claims about God’s unwavering compassion for the poor and oppressed are true, then I have a confident hope, indeed a kind of certainty, that the girl in the cage will recognize Christ the Lamb, will be drawn into his blessed presence, will be welcomed into the company of the saints who have held her in their prayers, will be marvelously healed.
The men with the duct tape and cameras will see and know. I won’t presume to know the fate of any such individual person. Yet I am certain, based on the Biblical witness, that many of them will gape in terror and hatred at Christ the Lion, and will justly be devoured.
None of this is comforting to the girl in the cage right now – again, how could it be, while she is locked up and tortured and unaware of her own hope for redemption? None of it excuses the work that must be done right now to free her. But it should compel Christians to echo on of the concluding prayers of the Christian scriptures, without which no Christian account of “justice” is complete:
He who testifies to these things says, ‘Yes, I am coming quickly.’ Amen. Come, Lord Jesus. (Rev. 22:20-21.)
Here’s an interview with a group of folks from my church who are doing some great missional work in Uganda. This is a terrific example of holistic mission.
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Wondering Fair Blog
This looks like a good new resource from Prof. John Stackhouse and friends at Regent College.
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Hauerwas Interview in CT
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Falk on Ploughing Ahead
Great post by Darrell Falk on the work of BioLogos, which I think applies equally to any effort to renew the evangelical mind.
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What is a Theologian
A good summary by Scot McKnight of Alister McGrath’s latest book. This is a great summary of what I’d like to be.
Inside the lecture room we make a distinction between biblical scholars and theologians. The former are either Old Testament or New Testament, and the latter specialize in systems of thought, whether they focus on telling us what theologians teach (Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Barth) or what is to be taught (systematics).
But outside those walls, and particularly in the local church, that distinction vanishes quickly when folks want wisdom or answers to questions. They don’t care if I’m a New Testament guy, they might ask me about Genesis or about Jonathan Edwards. Sometimes, frankly, Christians disparage the academic life of a theologian; they can put-down those who have intellectual pursuits; they can even get into the “real life” vs. the “speculative” stuff. This is not particularly helpful to anyone, and so we need to chase down a better way.
What the Church wants from specialists is wisdom, and this brings me to something Alister McGrath recently wrote about in his new book in Alister McGrath’s newest book, The Passionate Intellect: Christian Faith and the Discipleship of the Mind
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He discusses what theologians– and I post a pic to the right of Miroslav Volf, one of America’s premier theologians — can provide for the church under four categories, but before I get there I wonder what role a theologian plays in your local church? Does your church have a “theologian”? What if you have questions … to whom do you go? What advice do you have for theologians? Which theologians do you think are really of help to the church today?
McGrath sees four components of the professional theologian’s contribution to the life of the church, and in this neither he nor I are diminishing the theological role of the pastor – and in some ways the pastor as theologian plays the same role as the professional theologian:
First, the theologian can be a resource person for the local church. Every church and every pastor has questions; often the pastor is in communication with a college professor, a seminary professor or even an author who happens to know a subject.
Second, the theologian can be an interpreter of the Christian tradition for the local church. Just recently I got a note from a pastor friend who got a letter from a parishioner who took her to task for something she said, and sent me the note — not for gossip but for genuine help with a perplexing set of inquiries. I was able to sort through some of the letter because I had been there and knew the subject and I made a few suggestions. But the whole issue came down to the letter writer having a substantially different theology than the pastor. Theologians can help here, and they can often bring the history of theology to bear on a particular issue.
Third, a theologian can be an interpreter of the Christian tradition to those outside the church. We often call these “public intellectuals” today, but think about the number of times that Christian thinkers are called into play when questions arise, and what I’m seeing in the age of the internet is the presence of theologians now on the internet and on cable TV — though sometimes the theologian is one person removed for a pastor is the one who is called into play (and the pastor has been in touch with some theologian). We needed theologians for the DaVinci Code fiasco.
Fourth, a theologian is a fellow traveler with and within the community of faith. Augustine and JI Packer are theologians who were (and are) involved in the local church — theologizing and pastoring and mentoring. Yes, some theologians seem not to care about the local church but far more care and care deeply. What happens in the community often shapes what the theologian cares about and thinks about and writes about.
