Category: Theology

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Spirituality Theology

Relational Orthodoxy

Interesting discussion on Jesus Creed about how a younger pastor interested in the emerging church movement can relate to an older pastor who is wary of it.  Here’s a comment I posted for discussion, offered here for discussion as well.

Scot and others, I’m curious for your take on this rumination. So this idea of “orthodoxy” has been nagging at me for quite some time. I wonder if in the context of the young pastor’s conversations with his senior pastor, we could use a word like “authenticity” instead. “Orthodoxy” and “central to the gospel” to me sound like hard demarcations based on mere assent to propositions. You agree with this list, or you’re out. Perhaps even, “if you get this one wrong, you’re not really among the elect / saved / Christians.”

But as I read scripture, the central concern seems to be “authenticity.” The epistle of 1 John, for example, is heavily invested in “orthodoxy,” because one of the writer’s central concerns is to distinguish authentic Christians from false teachers (possibly Gnostics) who are denying the deity of Christ. But the overall emphasis is on right relationship — the false teachers were ultimately unable to exhibit a right relationship to Jesus issuing in the prime virtue of love, because they were not coming to Jesus as he is, as the God-man. The sense, I think, is not to ossify a certain statement, expression, or contextualization of faith, but to encourage and enable people to remain in authentic, transforming relationship with Jesus. I’d suggest that other places in scripture in which proto-creedal statements are passed along perform the same function.

So maybe the starting point for this cross-generational, emerging-to-conservative-evangelical conversation is to shift focus from the demarcations of “orthodoxy” to the purposes of “authenticity.” Then the younger pastor can say something like “here’s how I think what NT Wright / Willard / McKnight / McClaren / etc. helps people deepen an authentic relationship with Jesus”; and the older pastor can say “here’s where I see some concerns with authenticity.” Not hard analytical lines, but relational boundaries.

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Science & Technology Theology

Pete Enns on Davis Young's New Book

Pete Enns has posted an interesting review of Davis Young and Ralph Stearly’s “The Bible, Rocks and Time:  Geological Evidence for the Age of the Earth.”    This comment from the review is true and encouraging IMHO:  “In brief, what remains sorely needed in my opinion is deliberate conversation between biblical scholars and scientists (not just geologists, but physicists, biologists, anthropologists, etc., etc) on the question of origins.”

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Theology

Pope Benedict on the Incarnational Scriptures

This is from a recent speech by Pope Benedict.  It could have been written by many of the voices in the missional church movement.  An interesting convergence.  (HT:  Voice of Stefan).

In order to understand to some degree the culture of the word, which developed deep within Western monasticism from the search for God, we need to touch at least briefly on the particular character of the book, or rather books, in which the monks encountered this word.  The Bible, considered from a purely historical and literary perspective, is not simply a book, but a collection of literary texts which were redacted over the course of more than a thousand years, and in which the inner unity of the individual books is not immediately apparent.  On the contrary, there are visible tensions between them.  This is already the case within the Bible of Israel, which we Christians call the Old Testament.  It is only rectified when we as Christians link the New Testament writings as, so to speak, a hermeneutical key with the Bible of Israel, and so understand the latter as the journey towards Christ.  With good reason, the New Testament generally designates the Bible not as “the Scripture” but as “the Scriptures”, which, when taken together, are naturally then regarded as the one word of God to us.  But the use of this plural makes it quite clear that the word of God only comes to us through the human word and through human words, that God only speaks to us through the humanity of human agents, through their words and their history.  This means again that the divine element in the word and in the words is not self-evident.  To say this in a modern way:  the unity of the biblical books and the divine character of their words cannot be grasped by purely historical methods.  The historical element is seen in the multiplicity and the humanity.  From this perspective one can understand the formulation of a medieval couplet that at first sight appears rather disconcerting:  littera gesta docet – quid credas allegoria … (cf. Augustine of Dacia, Rotulus pugillaris, I). The letter indicates the facts;  what you have to believe is indicated by allegory, that is to say, by Christological and pneumatological exegesis.

We may put it even more simply:  Scripture requires exegesis, and it requires the context of the community in which it came to birth and in which it is lived.  This is where its unity is to be found, and here too its unifying meaning is opened up.  To put it yet another way: there are dimensions of meaning in the word and in words which only come to light within the living community of this history-generating word.  Through the growing realization of the different layers of meaning, the word is not devalued, but in fact appears in its full grandeur and dignity.  Therefore the Catechism of the Catholic Church can rightly say that Christianity does not simply represent a religion of the book in the classical sense (cf. par. 108).  It perceives in the words the Word, the Logos itself, which spreads its mystery through this multiplicity and the reality of a human history.  This particular structure of the Bible issues a constantly new challenge to every generation.  It excludes by its nature everything that today is known as fundamentalism.  In effect, the word of God can never simply be equated with the letter of the text.  To attain to it involves a transcending and a process of understanding, led by the inner movement of the whole and hence it also has to become a process of living.  Only within the dynamic unity of the whole are the many books one book.  The Word of God and his action in the world are revealed only in the word and history of human beings.

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Spirituality Theology

Reaching The Lost

I’ve lost count of how many missions events I’ve attended where the theme was “reaching the lost.”  I’ve always had a visceral aversion to this term, “the lost.”  It’s an aversion that’s bothered me at times — am I just afraid of the exclusiveness of the claims of Christ?  Perhaps, but I recently noticed this post on church growth seminars that resonated with me on this and other related topics.

I think at least some of my negative reaction to the term “reaching the lost” is ethically and theologically right.  Ethically, “the lost” is a way of objectifying people.  It moves us out of the responsibility to develop authentic two-way relationships with real individuals, in which we might learners and receivers as much as teachers and givers.  It sets us up as “better,” more enlightened, more knowledgeable than those who we’re trying to “reach.”  It devalues the personal story of the “other” and insists that “our” stories take priority.

Theologically, “the lost” ignores God’s sovereignty.  Ultimately God, and only God, knows who has received and who will receive the grace that is available in Christ.  Moreover, we do not “reach” people.  Rather, the Holy Spirit changes people, and God sometimes uses us in that process.  Finally, often this idea of “reaching the lost” is coupled with a sense of desperate urgency.  There is an urgency in that the “fields are white unto harvest” and we are called to go into those fields.  But there is no urgency in the sense of whether God’s plan of redemption will be accomplished. 

So, I’d rather set aside talk of “reaching the lost.”  Let’s instead talk of “announcing good news.”  God’s reign, His peace, has come in Christ, and we invite all to participate.

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Spirituality Theology

Guder on Missional

Some excellent quotes from Darrel Guder’s book “Missional Church“:

n      “[C]ulture is not a monolithic stationary entity that Christians should reject, accommodate, or even transform as a whole; it is, instead, a dynamic process with which Christians should interact in a critical, discriminating, and constructive manner.”

 

n      “The practice of hospitality is to cultivate communities of peace that intentionally structure themselves as safe and fearless spaces in the face of the despair and hostility of the world.”

 

n      “[M]issional communities are called to be peacemakers – reconciled and reconciling communities – making God’s peace visible through the quality of their life and ministry as model and invitation.”

 

   n      “[Missional communities] transform hostility and fear by creating safe spaces that welcome and honor the stranger.”

Categories
Historical Theology Law and Policy Theology

A Morally Deficient Theory of Contract

The religious right in the U.S. emphasizes that its view of human freedom and democracy derives from Christian principles.  A significant pillar of the religious right’s economic theory is freedom of contract.  Under this view, government should avoid regulating private transactions because the individual parties to contractual agreements are in the best position to judge the value of their bargain and possess the moral freedom to make their own bargains.  A theological basis for this view is the inherent worth of the individual in the Christian tradition and the tendency of people with governmental power to abuse that power.

These are valid notions, but they are not the whole story.  In his chapter “The Christian Sources of General Contract Law” in the splendid Christianity and Law:  an Introduction, Harold Berman traces Western contract law to its medieval canon law roots.  Berman summarizes these roots as follows:

In subsequent centuries, many of the basic principles of the canon law of contract were adopted by secular law and eventually came to be justified on the basis of will-theory and party autonomy.  It is important to know, however, that originally they were based on a theory of sin and a theory of equity.  Our modern Western contract law did not start form the proposition that every individual has a moral right to dispose of his property by means of making promises, and that in the interest of justice a promise should be legally enforced unless it offends reason or public policy.  Our contract law started, on the contrary, from the theory that a prmise created an obligation to God, and that for the salvation of souls God instituted the ecclesiastical and secular courts with the task, in part, of enforcing contractual obligations to the extent that such obligations are just.

 (Christianity and Law, at 132).  This broadly social notion of contracts was modified, Berman notes, during the Puritan era.  The Puritans’ strong notion of total depravity made them less willing to place the authority to determine which obligations are “just” in the hands of a magistrate.  Moreover, the Puritans’ emphasis on order inclined them to seek the meaning of contractual documents in the literal words of the document rather than in an overarching contractual hermeneutic of justice.  However, even for the Puritans, “private” contracts were social obligations within the all-inclusive fabric of God’s covenantal relationships with people.  Private contractual relations were not really “private” — they were covenantal relations between people who were also bound in covenantal relation to God.  As Berman notes, 

the Puritan stress on bargain and on calculability (“order”) should not obscure the fact that the bargain presupposed a strong relationship between teh contracting parties within the community.  These were not yet the autonomous, self-sufficient individuals of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.  England under Puritan rule and in the century that followed was intensely communitarian.

(Id. at 140).  

In the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Enlightenment, these theories of contract based on justice and covenant were secularized.  Justice and covenant were replaced with “the inherent freedom of each individual to exercise his own autonomous reason and will, subject only to considerations of social utility.”  (Id.)  These Enlightenment ideas “broke many of the links not only between contract law and moral theology but also between contract law and the comunitarian postulates which had informed both Catholic and Protestant legal traditions.”  (Id. at 140-41).

It is a shame, I think, that contemporary evangelical discourse about law seems to focus so heavily on notions of individual freedom to contract that are more post-Christian than Christian.  We seem to be left with two options:  the current prevailing secular legal theory of contracts, which is strictly realist and pragmatic and elides any notion of higher values, and the religious right’s libertarian view of contract, which elevates the individual far above the community.  I agree with Berman:  “[w]e may learn from history . . . that there is a third possibility:  to build a new and different theory on the foundation of the older ones.”  (Id. at 141).

Categories
Spirituality Theology

Emerging Over; A New Network?

Scot McKnight posts about a new evangelical network he is helping to found that will distance itself somewhat from “emerging” / “emergent.”  Interesting.

Categories
Spirituality Theology

Gospel, Kindgom, Mission

Here, moreover, is a far more welcoming framework for evangelism. Evangelism would move from an act of recruiting or co-opting those outside the church to an invitation of companionship. The church would witness that its members, like others, hunger for the hope that there is a God who reigns in love and intends the good of the whole earth. The community of the church would testify that they have heard that announcement that such a reign is coming, and indeed is already breaking into the world. They would confirm that they have heard the open welcome and receive it daily, and they would invite others to join them as those who also have been extended God’s welcome. To those invited, the church would offer itself to assist their entrance into the reign of God and to travel with them as co-pilgrims. Here lies a path for the renewal of the heart of the church and its evangelism.

(Darrell L. Gruder, MISSIONAL CHURCH: A VISION FOR THE SENDING OF THE CHURCH IN NORTH AMERICA, at p. 97.)

Categories
Theology

The Story and the World

A great post by Phil Sumpter on the need for connection between reading the story of scripture and pursuing the ontological implications of scripture’s claims about God.

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Spirituality Theology

Worldviews, Schmorldviews

In chapter 3 of Culture Making, Andy Crouch begins to contrast his approach to culture with other approaches taken by Christians.  In particular, he critiques the evangelical preoccupation with “worldview” analysis. 

Crouch notes that “[t]o define culture as what human beings make of the world is to make clear that culture is much more than a ‘world view.'”  “The danger of reducing culture to worldview,” Crouch says,

is that we may miss the most distinctive thing about culture, which is that cultural goods have a life of their own. . . . The language of worldview tends to imply, to paraphrase the Catholic writer Richard Rohr, that we can think ourselves into new ways of behaving.  But that is not the way culture works.  Culture helps us behave ourselves into new ways of thinking. 

Amen to Crouch’s more holistic sense of “culture!” 

I would go further and suggest that “worldview” thinking has become ossified within popular evangelicalism.  Too often, what is presented as “the” Christian worldview is, to a significant extent, merely the view of some white middle-class American evangelical-soft-fundamentalists living in the aftermath of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy.  This “worldview” unfortunately often involves a reductionist account of American history, a coarse and ineffectual interaction with the natural sciences, a flat theology of revelation, and an alternately hostile and triumphalist approach to the public square.

To be sure, there is some value in the notion of “worldviews,” and there are some things Christians of all sorts generally presuppose:  God is the creator of all things and the author of all Truth; human beings are both glorious creations of great value and awful sinners; the universe cannot be reduced to mere “nature”; human moral, spiritual and physical life is accountable to a moral and ethical framework that derives from the inherent character of the creator-God; redemption is real and possible in the crucified and risen Christ.  It can be useful to apply these themes to the products of the cultures we inherit and inhabit and to seek to color the cultures we create with them.  But we have to take care that “worldview” doesn’t become an excuse for fighting unwise battles over situated and relatively ephemeral expressions of how these themes might interact within a particular context.