{"id":2010,"date":"2011-04-21T13:52:30","date_gmt":"2011-04-21T20:52:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tgdarkly.com\/blog\/?p=2010"},"modified":"2011-04-21T13:52:30","modified_gmt":"2011-04-21T20:52:30","slug":"inflection-points-for-theological-reflection-on-love-wins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/2011\/04\/21\/inflection-points-for-theological-reflection-on-love-wins\/","title":{"rendered":"Inflection Points for Theological Reflection on Love Wins"},"content":{"rendered":"

It is easy to criticize a book like Rob Bell\u2019s \u201cLove Wins.\u201d\u00a0 Books like this, which are written for rhetorical effect and popular impact, usually aren\u2019t very well grounded Biblically or theologically.\u00a0 As Scot McKnight noted<\/a> in his series of posts reviewing Love Wins, there are plenty of important nodes of Biblical interpretation and theological inquiry at which Love Wins, at best, is shallow and confused.<\/p>\n

All of this, I think, is quite unfortunate.\u00a0 The questions Bell raises, even if he raises them using unfair, leading rhetoric, represent critical theological inflection points at which mainstream evangelicals in America continue to feel the weight of fundamentalism\u2019s withdrawal from the broader Church and culture.<\/p>\n

Here is what I see as some of these key inflection points:<\/p>\n

Christology<\/span>:\u00a0 What does it mean that Christ is the incarnate Son who died for the sin of the world and rose again victorious over sin and death?\u00a0 And what does it mean that the incarnate Son is the pre-existent Logos<\/em>, through whom the universe was created and in whom the universe holds together?<\/p>\n

Protestant fundamentalism lacks a Christology in which Christ could be any sort of active agent outside the walls of the fundamentalist\u2019s own social \/ religious network.<\/p>\n

Outside protestant fundamentalism, Christian theologians are exploring the implications of a robust Christology for relations with non-Christian religions and for the theodicy problems presented, for example, by the unevangelized, the mentally disabled, and apparently virtuous practitioners of other religions.<\/p>\n

Pneumatology<\/span>:\u00a0 What role does the Holy Spirit play in the world outside the Church?\u00a0 Does the Holy Spirit work in culture generally, or only in the Church, or primarily in the lives of individual Christians?\u00a0 Is the Holy Spirit\u2019s work always or typically visible and recognizable?<\/p>\n

Protestant fundamentalism, in its non-Charismatic versions, views the Holy Spirit primarily as the agent of individual conversion and guidance.\u00a0 In Charismatic \/ Pentecostal versions of fundamentalism, the Holy Spirit typically is linked primarily to the health and wealth of the individual believer.<\/p>\n

Outside protestant fundamentalism, Christian theologians are exploring whether and how the Holy Spirit precedes the proclamation of the Gospel and influences culture in both visible and hidden ways.<\/p>\n

Ecclesiology and Sacramentology<\/span>:\u00a0 What role does the visible Church play in the economy of salvation?\u00a0 When the visible Church prays for the salvation of the world (as in many traditional liturgical prayers), does that prayer truly effect anything in the history of salvation?\u00a0 When the visible Church practices the Lord\u2019s Supper \/ Eucharist, does that practice enact anything with respect to God\u2019s plan of salvation?<\/p>\n

Protestant fundamentalism approaches the practice of prayer and the sacrament of the Lord\u2019s Supper primarily individualistically \u2013 prayer is directed towards changing individual people and Communion is a personal remembrance only.\u00a0 Protestant fundamentalists who engage with culture tend to do so through the venue of power politics.<\/p>\n

Outside protestant fundamentalism, Christian theologians are exploring how the Church, as the instrument of God\u2019s salvation, affects culture and history through its practices of liturgy, prayer, and the Eucharist, often in subtle ways.<\/p>\n

Missiology and Eschatology<\/span>:\u00a0 What is the function of the Church and of individual Christians in relation to the world?\u00a0 Why is care for the poor and oppressed a primary hallmark of the Church and of Christian faith in the scriptures?\u00a0 How does the Biblical theme of God\u2019s concern for the poor and oppressed relate to God\u2019s plan of salvation and to the equally Biblical themes of sin, retribution, and atonement?\u00a0 Should most individual Christians continue to practice ordinary occupations, raise families, and participate in broader civic life, or in view of the state of the world and of Christ\u2019s return should most or all Christians withdraw from the world and focus primarily on evangelism?<\/p>\n

The missiology of protestant fundamentalism focuses almost entirely on effecting individual conversions.\u00a0 In the post-war missions boom among protestant fundamentalists, this approach was fueled by dispensational premillennial eschatology, in which a primary motivation for missions was to rescue a small remnant from the approaching Tribulation (and, paradoxically, to speed the Lord\u2019s return).<\/p>\n

Outside protestant fundamentalism, Christian theologians are exploring the robustness of the Biblical concept of \u201csalvation,\u201d the connections between the meaning of the doctrine of election and the Bible\u2019s teachings about the God\u2019s concern for the poor and oppressed, and the implications of the Biblical emphasis on physicality and resurrection for the eschatological future.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s important to note that when I say \u201cChristian theologians are exploring\u2026,\u201d I mean Christian theologians working within the broad framework of creedal orthodoxy.\u00a0 Of course, there also are theologians in various Christian polities who are radical pluralists and who seem unconcerned at all about the confessional claims of the creed.\u00a0 But I am speaking of the leaders of the Catholic and Orthodox churches (including some great scholarly Popes and Bishops), of Lutheran, Reformed and Anglican thinkers who have contributed to volumes on Nicene faith, of Pentecostals teaching in historically fundamentalist schools, and of evangelicals teaching in many of our colleges and seminaries.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also important to note that when I say \u201cChristian theologians are exploring,\u201d this does not represent only a recent development.\u00a0 All<\/em> of the nodes I mention above have been the subject of theological inquiry for centuries.\u00a0 It is true that the challenges of modernity have accelerated many of these questions, but that is not surprising \u2013 modernity was and is a challenge, as were each of the various cultural and intellectual settings in which Christian faith has been expressed in the past.<\/p>\n

The question is, how will we who identify as broadly evangelical respond in this moment?\u00a0 Can we use this as one opportunity to enter into the bigger theological conversation?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It is easy to criticize a book like Rob Bell\u2019s \u201cLove Wins.\u201d\u00a0 Books like this, which are written for rhetorical effect and popular impact, usually aren\u2019t very well grounded Biblically or theologically.\u00a0 As Scot McKnight noted in his series of posts reviewing Love Wins, there are plenty of important nodes of Biblical interpretation and theological […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2010","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-theology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-wq","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2010"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2010\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}