Fear of the culture has driven the church in a lot of ways over the last two or three centuries. The first part of the story is the birth and rise of modern liberal theology. (Note, I said liberal theology, not liberal politics; this isn’t about whether one voted for John Kerry, or supports Barack Obama. Though it can be related, it’s a different set of issues, as can be seen from the number of prominent evangelical leaders who are quite liberal politically, such as Ron Sider and Tony Campolo.) Liberal Protestantism, though its roots may go back further, began in earnest in 1799 when Friedrich Schleiermacher published his book On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers. Schleiermacher, who was only 29 when he began writing this book, was part of a group of young upper-class German intellectuals who met weekly to discuss the ideas of the day. Though the others in the group respected and admired him for his intelligence and wit, though he became quite good friends with most of them, and though he shared most of their beliefs, in one key respect they could not understand him at all. You see, most of those in Schleiermacher’s circle were convinced and passionate atheists, people who despised religion, while Schleiermacher was a minister, a chaplain at the Charity Hospital in Berlin; how could he share so many of their beliefs and yet be a Christian? His closest friends in the group decided to resolve the issue: at Schleiermacher’s birthday party, they badgered him into writing a book.Though he initially tried to avoid writing it, Schleiermacher took the task quite seriously. His purpose as he set pen to paper was not to challenge his friends’ beliefs, nor to bring them to an encounter with the transcendent, personal, holy God of the Bible; rather, his aim was to present them with a conception of religion, and particularly of Christianity, that they could accept on their own terms. He sought, in other words, to produce a version of religion that fit with what the educated culture already believed, to accommodate religion to that culture. Given the beliefs and expectations of that culture, he produced an interpretation of Christian faith that sounds closer to Buddhism than to historic Christianity, in which religion is “to be one with the Infinite and in every moment to be eternal”; and while those who followed after him argued with one aspect or another of the picture he painted, producing their own pictures of religion to fit their own cultural situations, they accepted his approach to theology, seeking to conform their faith not to Scripture but to the demands of their culture. Thus, we had a later German scholar, Rudolf Bultmann, “demythologize” the New Testament, removing all miracles and other supernatural elements; after all, the educated people of his time didn’t believe in miracles, so there couldn’t have been any.Around the same time as Bultmann was beginning his career, a backlash was beginning in America. Between 1910 and 1915 a series of twelve booklets were published, titled “The Fundamentals,” which set out five fundamental doctrines of orthodox Christianity. These were: the doctrine of the Trinity; the doctrine of the two natures of Christ, that Jesus was fully human and also fully God; the doctrine of the literal physical Second Coming of Christ; the doctrine that salvation is by grace alone through faith alone, by Christ alone; and the doctrine that Scripture is the inerrant word of God. In 1920 the term “fundamentalism” was coined to describe the beliefs of those who held to these five fundamentals, as over against those who didn’t, and for a couple of decades, that’s all it meant. In the 1940s, however, there was a split among those who held to these fundamentals, resulting in a new group which came to be known as “evangelicals.”The cause of the split was, once again, fear of the culture. The fundamentalist movement had fought liberal theology on detail after detail for years, but it had absorbed the belief that the gospel cannot address the dominant culture without changing; so, refusing (rightly) to conform the gospel to the culture, fundamentalism moved to wall out the culture. When some leaders in the fundamentalist movement—most notably a radio preacher named Charles Fuller, who would give his name to Fuller Seminary—sought to go in a different direction, it was that which provoked the split and launched the modern American evangelical movement.There was good reason for that, as the cultural separatism of fundamentalism is problematic on a number of levels. Though it has been a pretty effective way to ensure doctrinal purity, it has severely restricted the witness of that part of the American church. What is more, far too many kids who grow up in that subculture go off to college and see their faith melt on their first real encounter with people of other beliefs; sadly, the result of such encounters tends to be people who don’t believe in much of anything anymore.Unfortunately, while fundamentalism represents the most obvious expression of, and response to, fear of the culture, it continues to be a problem as well for both liberals and evangelicals, if in subtler ways. Specifically, I think many among both liberals and evangelicals are at some level afraid to challenge the assumptions of the culture to which they belong, and so choose to conform their preaching and ministry to fit their culture; the only difference, really, is which section of American culture they’re conforming to. Thus in evangelical circles it seems that most pastors aspire to lead megachurches, and the whole idea of the church as a business and the pastor as its CEO has become very powerful in the last decade or two; thus we have influential pastors of evangelical churches openly measuring their success by their market share. Effectively, then, you can measure how good your ministry is by how good you are at giving your “customers” what they want, whether that be in the music selection on Sunday mornings, in the range of programs you offer, or whatever. The result, too often, is the baptism of American consumer culture, and the Jesus who once overturned the tables of the moneychangers is used to sell coffee mugs, T-shirts and figurines.The flip side to that is the liberal wing of the American church, which is tuned into a very different strain of American culture. Among liberal pastors, it seems to be an article of faith that our culture—by which they mean the culture of our elites—must correct the Scriptures, rather than the other way around. The Bible, on this view, is a rather outdated book produced by cultures that didn’t know as much as we do about biology, psychology, physics, and any number of other things; therefore, if the Scriptures contradict what our culture believes it knows, we are justified in concluding that it is the Bible that is wrong and must be brought into line. Thus orthodoxy is dismissed as old-fashioned and outdated, as if the truth of a statement could be determined by its age, and by whether or not our culture finds it amenable.What we need—and it isn’t easy—is to get free of that fear of what the culture thinks of us, and what it might do to us, and to learn to speak the truth whether it’s what people want to hear from us or not. Democracy is the greatest form of government this world has yet invented (which, as Winston Churchill noted, isn’t saying much), but it has the unfortunate tendency to give us the mindset that truth is determined by majority vote; we need to shake ourselves free of that mindset and learn to recognize, and challenge, the unexamined assumptions in our culture that conflict with the character and will of God. We need to learn to look for the unasked questions, and ask them, knowing that we will be challenged if we do, and then stand up to that challenge. If our brothers and sisters in other parts of the world can stand up to persecution when it might cost them their lives, the least we can do in America (and in the West as a whole) is take a little verbal abuse.
Category Archives: Religion and theology
Is liberation theology collapsing under its own weight?
A recent dispute between two major figures in the movement’s rise, the Brazilian brothers Leonardo and Clodovis Boff, suggests that maybe it is. Certainly, having a significant liberation theologian suddenly turn and unleash a devastating critique of the core assumptions of liberation theology strongly suggests that the movement’s day is drawing to a close; and for the response to be less about answering the arguments in that critique than about impugning it as a power grab suggests that it was never really all that theologically sound to begin with, that it was really more about the politics all the time. It also serves as a useful reminder that those who spend all their time denouncing the errors of others are usually those least able (or willing) to accept correction of their own.HT: Presbyweb
Follow the evidence
As I sit here, CSI is going in the other room; it’s an old episode, of course, but apparently someone was interested in watching it. I didn’t like the episode well enough the first time around to want to watch it again, so I’m in here tapping the keys. It did spark a thought, though: the preacher’s job in studying Scripture (and anyone’s, really) is much the same as that of a criminalist or forensic scientist: follow the evidence, wherever it leads. When we run into problems—as individuals, as churches, as denominations—is usually when we set the evidence aside in favor of what we want to believe, or start allowing our preferred conclusions to distort our interpretation of the evidence. As Christians, we need to let Scripture speak for itself, to seek to understand it on its own terms, to the best of our ability; we need to allow it to tell us things that we don’t want to hear, to challenge our comfortable assumptions and stretch our cozy faith. We need to allow God to speak through his Word to lead us to the truth, rather than insisting on leading ourselves to our own ideas.As Gil Grissom is wont to say, “people lie, but the evidence never does.” To be sure, we’re never guaranteed to interpret that evidence correctly—even when we’re trying our best to be faithful, we still make mistakes because we’re still limited; but we can trust the Spirit to work through the process to correct our errors, if we’re open to correction. It isn’t solely on our shoulders to get it right—that’s the work of the Spirit in and through us; ours is to learn to get our own agendas out of the way so that they don’t block the Spirit’s work.
Evening prayer
As I’m sure is no surprise to anyone who’s spent much time reading this blog, I have an interest in apologetics, which is the rational defense of the Christian faith; as irritating as I sometimes find the attitudes of the so-called “New Atheists,” I appreciate the part they’ve played in stirring up a similar interest in a lot of my contemporaries in the church who’d never paid any attention to apologetics before. Too many Western Christians for far too long have simply conceded the rational arguments to their critics, assuming that their opponents were right, and tried to defend their faith on other grounds; but I don’t believe the atheists have the best of the argument (though I’ll certainly concede they have arguments which need to be taken seriously and respectfully), and I think it’s a good thing that more and more Christians are realizing that.That said, I think we need to be careful not to go overboard here. Apologetics has gotten a bad name in the past from people who thought they could use it as a bludgeon to beat people into the Kingdom, and we must be careful not to let enthusiasm drive us into such an attitude. We must always remember that the love of God in us should be the primary thing in us drawing people to Christ—we should know the arguments and be able to offer them appropriately, but they should be secondary.In this, as in so many things, I continue to be educated and humbled by C. S. Lewis, and particularly by this poem of his:
The Apologist’s Evening PrayerFrom all my lame defeats and oh! much more
From all the victories that I seemed to score;
From cleverness shot forth on Thy behalf
At which, while angels weep, the audience laugh;
From all my proofs of Thy divinity,
Thou, who wouldst give no sign, deliver me. Thoughts are but coins. Let me not trust, instead
Of Thee, their thin-worn image of Thy head.
From all my thoughts, even from my thoughts of Thee,
O thou fair Silence, fall, and set me free.
Lord of the narrow gate and the needle’s eye,
Take from me all my trumpery, lest I die.
Pray without ceasing
In 1949, on the island of Lewis, off the west coast of Scotland, the leaders of the local presbytery of the Free Kirk of Scotland grew so worried about the way things were going that they issued a proclamation to be read in all their congregations lamenting “the low state of vital religion . . . throughout the land,” declaring, “The Most High has a controversy with the nation,” and calling on everyone to pray that God would call the nation to repentance. In one parish on the island, the parish of Barvas, the message took root with a pair of sisters in their eighties. The sisters encouraged their pastor to pray together with the elders and deacons, and promised that they would pray twice a week from ten at night until three in the morning. So the minister and lay leaders prayed twice a week in a barn—no word on whether they stayed up until three AM—and the sisters prayed in their home; they did this faithfully for several months, in which nothing happened. During this time, a request was sent to an evangelist named Duncan Campbell, asking him to come to Lewis; he declined, because he was scheduled to speak elsewhere. God had other ideas, however, and his commitments were cancelled, freeing him up to go to Lewis. The result was a spiritual explosion, as revival swept the island, transforming it by the power of the Holy Spirit. Where once the jail was full and the churches nearly empty, the situation reversed itself—the churches were full to overflowing, while the jail was shut up for lack of use, because there was no crime. It was a remarkable time, and over the years, many have praised Campbell for it; but as he himself said more than once, it wasn’t his preaching that brought revival. Indeed, many who came to Christ during that time never heard him or anyone preach. No, this was no pre-planned preacher-driven event; rather, the roots of that revival were to be found in the faithful, persistent, believing prayer of those two sisters, and of those who prayed with them; they were certain God would answer them, and refused to stop until he did.That is stubborn prayer. It’s the approach to prayer which Jesus tried to develop in his disciples, and it’s part of what Paul talks about in his epistles. It’s the spirit we see in Jacob when he wrestled with God at Peniel—he was clearly out of his weight class, but he would not let go until God blessed him. He hung on for dear life, through his exhaustion, through the pain in his dislocated hip, through the screaming ache in his muscles . . . through it all, he hung on until he had nothing left but determination; and as the night was ending, God blessed him. We don’t often think of Jacob as a model for anything, but in this, he is; he’s a model for us in prayer.That may seem strange to us, because we aren’t taught that way; and some might be wondering, “Isn’t that selfish? If God tells us ‘no,’ are we allowed to just badger him until he gives in and gives us what we want?” Certainly, that could be true, if we’re praying selfishly; but if our prayer is truly focused on God and centered on his kingdom, that’s another matter. Such prayer leads us out of selfishness, not into it, in part because it draws us out of our small desires and teaches us to desire the presence of God, that we may live in the awareness of his presence.To understand the significance of that, stop and think about what it means to be in someone’s presence, and particularly to be in the presence of someone you love. It means that it doesn’t take any effort to talk to them; it means you hear them when they talk to you; it means you’re open to them, available to them, and they’re open and available to you. It means that even when you’re not talking to them or specifically thinking about them, you know they’re with you, and so they’re involved in some way in what you’re doing; their presence connects them to you. Even if you aren’t having a conversation, conversation is always possible, and comes naturally; and even your silence can be its own form of communion.That’s what our life with God is supposed to look like; that, I believe, is what it means to pray without ceasing, as Paul commands us in 1 Thessalonians 5. That’s what it means to pray at all times in the Spirit, as he says in Ephesians 6. It’s not a matter of talking all the time, by any means; the silence and the listening are as important for us as the times when we talk. The key, rather, is to be in what we might call a spirit of prayer, by the Spirit of God, such that we are aware of and attentive to God when he speaks, and that conversation with God flows naturally out of whatever we’re doing—that whenever we have something to say, whether something that’s bothering us or something that gives us joy or a question that’s puzzling us, it’s perfectly natural for us to turn and say it to God, just as we would to anyone else to whom we’re close.As you can probably guess from this, I don’t agree with those who say that it’s unspiritual to pray for your own wants and needs. In fact, I’m always kind of surprised to run into that attitude, though I shouldn’t be—it’s common enough. In my last church, I had an elder sit in my office and argue that position, angrily and at great length; he firmly believed that if you could do anything about a problem, you shouldn’t be praying about it, because it was your responsibility to get out there and fix it yourself. He then argued, further, that if you had created the problem, you had no right to ask God to help you fix it, because it was on your shoulders. I bit my tongue and didn’t point him to the numerous psalms in which David and other psalmists do exactly that. When he told me that God helps those who help themselves, though, I did remind him that that isn’t Bible, it’s Ben Franklin. (All I got in return was a blank look.)There are a lot of people who think this way, but their view isn’t rooted in Scripture; Paul takes us a very different direction. Look at Ephesians 6:18: “Pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests.” Then in Philippians 4:6, Paul says, “Don’t be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.” Notice: when? “on all occasions”; we might also say, “at all times.” About what? “Everything.” These are commands to ask God for things, to tell him what we need and want and ask him to provide for us; they insist to us that God wants us to do that, and indeed that he expects us to do so.Why isn’t that selfish? Well, in the first place, what’s the foundation for our requests? Our relationship with God. We don’t go to him just as someone who can give us stuff and demand that he do so; this is not just another consumer transaction. Rather, we talk to him as someone who loves us and whom we love in return, and we tell him what’s on our heart, including our needs and our desires, because he cares about us and he wants us to tell him. We don’t just ask in order to get what we want—we also ask in order to deepen our relationship with God. When we approach him in that way, it’s not a demand for services, it’s an expression of our dependence on him, and an act of trust. It’s an act of trust that he can in fact give us what we ask for, and that he does actually want to give us good things. That can be hard, because there are times when trusting him is hard, and times when we don’t want to admit we need him; but in all circumstances, whether good, bad, or whatever, we are called to do so, and asking God to meet our needs is an important discipline in learning to do so.In the second place, people who ask of God selfishly do so in a spirit of entitlement; they believe they deserve to get what they want, and regard it as nothing more than their due. By contrast, Paul tells us to pray in a spirit of thanksgiving. This doesn’t mean simply to thank God in advance for the things he will do for us, or even to thank him for the things he has already done, though both are important; rather, this is to be our basic attitude in prayer, and in all of life. This too is a recognition that we are completely dependent on God, that everything comes to us as his gift; this is the truth that James captured when he said, “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights.” Because of this, because of God’s goodness and generosity to us—yes, Paul assures us, even in the midst of our suffering—gratitude should be our fundamental response to life.Whatever our circumstances, in a grateful spirit, we are to bring all our requests—our wants, our needs, our concerns, the deepest desires of our hearts––all the things which lie at the roots of our anxieties and fears, as well as those anxieties and fears themselves and everything to which they give rise—into the presence of God, trusting that he’ll take care of us. We don’t do this because he doesn’t know what we want, or need, or fear; we don’t pray for his sake, we pray for ours. We do this as a formal, deliberate acknowledgement of our dependence on him, and to give us the assurance that he knows what we want, what we need, because we have told him. Perhaps most importantly of all, we lay our requests at God’s feet because doing so draws us closer to him, and focuses our minds and our hearts on him; and so doing, it involves us in and connects us to the work he is doing in and around us.Third, if our prayer is truly kingdom-centered, then it keeps us aware of the bigger picture, which we see in Ephesians 6 ; we understand that we don’t just pray that God would bless us, or that he would bless others, so that we and they would be happy and fulfilled and healed and free from pain and could go on to enjoy our lives. Rather, we pray for our needs and the needs of others in part because each of us is involved, individually and as part of the church, in the great struggle which is the inbreaking of the kingdom of God into this world. The kingdom is resisted, both openly and subtly, by the forces of the prince of the powers of this present darkness, and so Paul tells us that we need to be armored up and armed to deal with that resistance; and the foundation of that is prayer. We pray for our needs and wants, and for the needs and wants of others, so that we might be strengthened, and so that opportunities for the enemy to undermine us or weaken us would be closed off. And because the enemy is always looking for ways to do that, and the spiritual struggle we face is continuous, so too we must pray continuously. Ultimately, as we do so, we find that it trains us to depend on God, and to use the gifts that he’s given us not on our own initiative, but on his; and it prepares us, as the Rev. Tim Keller put it, “to have our hard hearts melted,” to have the barriers in our lives torn down, “to have the glory of God break through,” so that we may see his glory in our lives.This isn’t something you can learn how to do by having someone tell you, or by reading a book; the most I can do, or anyone can do, is point you in that direction and invite you to do it. We can only really learn this by doing it—by asking God to teach us to live in the awareness of his presence, so that we learn to be in prayer throughout everything we do, and by setting aside time just to pray, for focused conversation with him. We can only learn to trust him with the things that are on our hearts by trusting him, by praying about them whenever they weigh on us; we can only learn to listen by listening. That’s why stubborn prayer is so important—it’s not about wearing God down, breaking down his resistance; it’s about wearing our egos down, breaking down our resistance. It’s not so much about storming the gates of heaven as it is about opening our own gates and letting heaven storm us.
The importance of the fourth act
My thanks to Jared Wilson over at The Gospel-Driven Church for reminding me of Tim Keller’s piece “The Gospel in All its Forms,” which is an excellent discussion (as one would expect of Rev. Keller) of the ways in which the gospel message is one, yet multifaceted, speaking in different ways to different people and different groups of people with the singular message of the good news of Jesus Christ. I was particularly interested, this time around, in the Rev. Keller’s consideration (which Jared emphasizes) of the eschatological element of the gospel:
If I had to put this outline in a single statement, I might do it like this: Through the person and work of Jesus Christ, God fully accomplishes salvation for us, rescuing us from judgment for sin into fellowship with him, and then restores the creation in which we can enjoy our new life together with him forever.One of these elements was at the heart of the older gospel messages, namely, salvation is by grace not works. It was the last element that was usually missing, namely that grace restores nature, as the Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck put it. When the third, “eschatological” element is left out, Christians get the impression that nothing much about this world matters. Theoretically, grasping the full outline should make Christians interested in both evangelistic conversions as well as service to our neighbor and working for peace and justice in the world. . . .Instead of going into, say, one of the epistles and speaking of the gospel in terms of God, sin, Christ, and faith, I point out the story-arc of the Bible and speak of the gospel in terms of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration. We once had the world we all wanted—a world of peace and justice, without death, disease, or conflict. But by turning from God we lost that world. Our sin unleashed forces of evil and destruction so that now “things fall apart” and everything is characterized by physical, social, and personal disintegration. Jesus Christ, however, came into the world, died as a victim of injustice and as our substitute, bearing the penalty of our evil and sin on himself. This will enable him to some day judge the world and destroy all death and evil without destroying us.
I was particularly interested in this, as I said, because I’d just read, a couple days ago, a piece in Perspectives addressing this point of view. The Rev. Jeffrey Sajdak, pastor of First Christian Reformed Church in Pella, Iowa, was responding to a fellow Pella pastor, Second Reformed’s Steve Mathonnet-VanderWell, who had taken a shot at neo-Calvinists (he called it “a friendly nudge to see if anyone is awake”) in an earlier issue. In the course of that article, the Rev. Mathonnet-VanderWell gave us a parable, what we might call the Parable of the Theater. The Rev. Sajdak responded to that parable this way, titling his article “The Fourth Act”:
His concluding story about the great theatre deftly highlights these challenges; yet the story he tells is incomplete. The drama needs another act. . . .There’s another act, an act that is dear to the hearts of many neo-Calvinists, the act of Consummation. I have personally been enriched by and preached some of the insightful commentary of Richard Mouw on Isaiah and Revelation and the New Jerusalem. The vision of this world being transformed, renewed, and restored is a grand and exciting vision. The highest aspirations of culture, stripped of their sinful taints and malicious purposes, enjoyed by all the inhabitants of the New Jerusalem and the New Earth.
The Rev. Mathonnet-VanderWell, in his own response, granted the point but argued that we should be careful not to jump there too quickly (for reasons which I find dubious, and which seem to me to say more about his philosophical and theological preferences than anything else). Personally, however, I think the Rev. Sajdak is right, as is the Rev. Keller: most of us, especially in Reformed circles, are far more prone to forget about that fourth act than we are to overemphasize it and misuse it. (What’s more, when it is misused, the best defense against that misuse is a right emphasis on the coming consummation of Jesus’ work, the restoration of the proper created order.) That’s a problem, because it’s the fourth act, the completion of God’s plan to redeem the world (not just individual people), that gives us the proper perspective on the first three; without it, our understanding of Jesus and his work will inevitably be skewed.
Exercise in cultural theology: “Kyrie”
I guess it’s ’80s pop week here—more than a little odd for someone who never listened to the stuff at the time. Still, there were a few songs from that era I really liked anyway; “We Didn’t Start the Fire” was one of them, and this was another one.
For those who don’t know, kyrie eleison means “Lord, have mercy.” Many don’t; I’ve seen people write that it means “God go with me,” and I’d always assumed that the songwriter thought that’s what it meant. In fact, though, John Lang (who wrote the lyrics) grew up singing the Kyrie in an Episcopal church in Phoenix, and knew the meaning of the words. In a lot of ways, that makes the song more interesting, I think; it’s still a prayer for God’s presence as we go through life, but Lang knew when he wrote it that it’s also a prayer for his mercy on that road, which we certainly need, both in the bright days and when our path leads us through “the darkness of the night.”
I appreciate Lang’s almost mystical sense of life in this song; in the context of an ancient Christian prayer, with the imagery of wind and fire which has been used of the Spirit of God going all the way back to the time of Moses, one can certainly understand it to refer to the work of the Spirit in our hearts, and the song as a prayer for his mercy as we seek to follow where he leads us.
My one quarrel here is the third line of the chorus: “Kyrie eleison—where I’m going will you follow?” I don’t think that really fits with the first line (“Kyrie eleison down the road that I must travel”), and taken by itself it gets matters exactly backwards; actually, when we start looking at things that way—”God, I’m going this way; are you coming?”—tends to be when we get into trouble (and thus need his mercy the most, of course). I suspect it was most likely meant to ask, “Are you going with me down this road you’re sending me on?” but that misses the fact that God doesn’t send us, he leads us. There have been times when I’ve sung this song, privately, as a prayer, but when I do, I reverse that third line: “where you lead me, I will follow.”That’s the orientation we need to have if we’re seeking to live under the mercy of God; his mercy isn’t simply something to which we appeal when we go wrong, but is in fact the light that guides us to go right.
Kyrie
Kyrie eleison
Kyrie eleison
Kyrie . . .The wind blows hard against this mountainside,
Across the sea into my soul;
It reaches into where I cannot hide,
Setting my feet upon the road.My heart is old, it holds my memories;
My body burns, a gemlike flame.
Somewhere between the soul and soft machine
Is where I find myself again.Chorus:
Kyrie eleison down the road that I must travel;
Kyrie eleison through the darkness of the night.
Kyrie eleison—where I’m going will you follow?
Kyrie eleison on a highway in the light.When I was young I thought of growing old—
Of what my life would mean to me;
Would I have followed down my chosen road,
Or only waste what I could be?Chorus out
Words: John Lang; music: Richard Page and Steve George
© 1985 Ali-Aja Music/Indolent Sloth Music/Panola Park Music/WB Music Corp.
From the album Welcome to the Real World, by Mr. Mister
Considering the practice of the Jesus way
In the latest issue of Perspectives, I was interested to run across a review of a recent book called Jesus Brand Spirituality: He Wants His Religion Back. With a title like that, I would have expected “just another critique of the shallowness of evangelical certitudes or the meanness of some of the Religious Right or yet another call to be open and in conversation as we emerge into new ideas”; according to the glowing review by Byron Borger of Hearts & Minds Books, however, it’s nothing of the sort. In fact, the book’s author, Ken Wilson, isn’t a liberal at all, but rather a Vineyard pastor, and according to Borgan,
Wilson has written a thoughtful, mature, and deeply engaging study of the ways in which we can approach Jesus, how to make sense of life in light of his ways. It talks about how the best of four streams within Christianity can unite to help create a passionate, faithful and yet grace-filled, life-giving spirituality. (Wilson’s four dimensions, by the way, are the active, the contemplative, the biblical, and the communal.) . . .
Jesus Brand Spirituality is ideal for mainline Protestants who want to make sure their liberal theology doesn’t go off the tracks, who want to stay close to Jesus and the earliest biblical truths, even if they are not quite where more traditionalist conservatives stand. It is equally helpful for anyone committed to historic Christian orthodoxy but who may sense that the recent cultural conflict, dogmatism, moralism, and overlays of the evangelical subculture may have obscured some of the clearest elements of the faith. And—please don’t miss this—it is also a fabulous read for anyone who is a skeptic or seeker; at times, it seems like it is written precisely for those who just are willing to get “one step closer to knowing.” . . .
No matter where you are on your spiritual journey, or with which denomination or tradition you stand, I am confident this book will challenge, stretch, inspire, and bless you.
That sounds promising. Interestingly, it fits in quite well with the other review in this issue, by David Smith, of Craig Dykstra’s Growing in the Life of Faith: Education and Christian Practices.In that review, Smith writes,
“Practices” is, in this context, a pregnant term, used in a way that reaches beyond its everyday meaning. Dykstra’s usage draws upon the widely discussed account of social practices found in the writings of Alasdair MacIntyre (particularly in After Virtue). Roughly speaking, for MacIntyre a practice involves a complex and coherent social activity pursued with other people because of goods that inhere in the activity itself—like playing a sport for the satisfaction of a well matched game rather than with the aim of getting one’s name in the paper. Such practices have their own standards of excellence to which the practitioner must submit, and they provide a matrix within which our own pursuit—and perception—of excellence can evolve. Such matrices, MacIntyre argues, are where virtue grows: not through having moral rules explained, but through submitting to the discipline of socially established practices. . . .
What if being and growing as a Christian is not well characterized in terms, say, of assent to doctrines but requires a pattern of Christian practices within which Christian beliefs are at home? What if faith development has as much to do with being enfolded in and submitting to such practices as hospitality to the stranger, worship, community, forgiveness, healing, and testimony as with grasping increasingly complex articulations of doctrine?
This, too, I think is a book I want to read, and in part for the same reason: to consider how Christian belief and Christian practice are interwoven, neither making sense without the other—indeed, neither truly existing without the other. Christian belief is belief which is lived out, and Christian practice is an expression of belief—they aren’t separable; and at their core, they’re all about becoming, living, walking, being, like Jesus, living life in his footsteps.
On heterodoxy and salvation
Dr. Richard Mouw, the president of Fuller Seminary, put up a post on his blog a few days ago reflecting on another Dutch Presbyterian, the great theologian Cornelius Van Til (who was, among other things, the founder of the presuppositional school of Christian apologetics). In it, he describes a conversation he had with Dr. Van Til, a discussion of Karl Barth, which had a formative influence on his approach to Christians with whom he disagrees:
Van Til’s remark left a lasting impression on me. He was firm in his verdict that Barth was far removed from historic Christian teaching, yet he was still unwilling to offer a similarly critical assessment of the state of Barth’s soul. Ever since, I have tried to exercise a similar caution. It is one thing to evaluate a person’s theology. It is another thing to decide whether that person has a genuine faith in Christ.There are folks these days who worry about what they see as an overly charitable spirit in people like me. They think it is dangerous to enter into friendly dialogue with thinkers whose theological views are far removed from traditional Christian orthodoxy. They tend to think that if a person is unorthodox they cannot be in a saving relationship with Christ. I take a different view on those matters.
I appreciate this post because I share Dr. Mouw’s caution (and Dr. Van Til’s)—or perhaps I might better say, humility—in this respect; I think we tend to be far too quick to pronounce wrong doctrines salvation-impairing. I do believe there is a point at which people are so far from the truth that they are in fact worshiping a different God (Hinduism, for instance, is obviously a completely different thing than Christianity), but I suspect that that point isn’t exactly where we think it is, and that the line between saving faith and beliefs which do not lead to salvation is perhaps somewhat fuzzier than we assume.HT: Presbyweb
The bounds of the canon and the limits of its authors
I’ve been reading Joseph A. Fitzmyer’s commentary on Philemon (in the Anchor Bible series), preparing for a future sermon series; in the course of his discussion of slavery, which is an essential part of the introductory work on that book, I was interested to read the following paragraph:
What strikes the modern reader of such Pauline passages [as the Letter to Philemon] is his failure to speak out against the social institution of slavery in general and the injustices that it often involved, not only for the individual so entrapped but also for his wife and children. If I am right in interpreting the “more than I ask” of v 21 as an implicit request made of Philemon to see to the emancipation of Onesimus, that may tell us something about Paul’s attitude toward the enslavement of a Christian; but that “more” has been diversely interpreted over the centuries and its sense is not clear. Moreover that is an implicit request about an individual case of a Christian slave who could help Paul in his work of evangelization. Would Paul have written the same thing to the non-Christian owner of a pagan slave? Would he have agreed with Aristotle’s view about “friendship” with such a slave [that friendship with a slave considered as a slave was impossible]?
There are two issues in that paragraph. The first, the fact that Paul (and for that matter the rest of the NT writers) didn’t condemn slavery and demand immediate, empire-wide emancipation of all slaves, is a vast subject and beyond the scope of a single post. I will note that we should bear in mind that slavery in the ancient world was a significantly different thing, and quite a bit less vile, than slavery in the American historical context; that said, though, the injustice of it (both fundamental and circumstantial) was still very real. The basic argument here, in a nutshell, is that the system of slavery could only be changed gradually, and that it was Christianity which brought that change—a point made quite clearly by M. R. Vincent in a passage Dr. Fitzmyer quotes:
Under Constantine the effects of christian sentiment began to appear in the Church and in legislation concerning slaves. Official freeing of slaves became common as an act of pious gratitude, and burial tablets often represent masters standing before the Good Shepherd, with a band of slaves liberated at death, and pleading for them at judgment. In A.D. 312 a law was passed declaring as homicide the poisoning or branding of slaves . . . The advance of a healthier sentiment may be seen by comparing the law of Augustus, which forbade a master to emancipate more than one-fifth of his slaves, and which fixed one hundred males as a maximum for one time—and the unlimited permission to emancipate conceded by Constantine. Each new ruler enacted some measure which facilitated emancipation. Every obstacle was thrown up by law in the way of separating families. Under Justinian all presumptions were in favor of liberty.
Beyond that is for another post, or series of posts, or maybe a book or three; and while it’s an issue that offers a lot to discuss, it’s also not a new one. What really struck me in Dr. Fitzmyer’s comment quoted above were his closing questions:
Would Paul have written the same thing to the non-Christian owner of a pagan slave? Would he have agreed with Aristotle’s view about “friendship” with such a slave?
The reason that struck me is because it seems to me there’s an assumption there which needs to be considered: namely, that what Paul thought about such questions matters to us, and thus that if we had the answers to such questions, it would affect our interpretation of Scripture. At one time, I would have thought that was obvious—after all, this is Paul, the guy who wrote half the New Testament; of course we want to know more of what he thought about everything. Anymore, though, I don’t agree with that. After all, as much as I believe that God by his Spirit inspired Paul to write the letters which we now have, that only makes the letters authoritative; Paul, as brilliant as he was, was still a sinful, fallible human being. Just because we affirm that the Spirit inspired the thirteen letters of Paul that we have in the New Testament, it doesn’t mean that the Spirit inspired everything else, or even anything else, that he said or wrote or thought.As such, while I don’t know the answers to Dr. Fitzmyer’s questions, I also don’t care about those answers; I have no problem affirming that if Paul in fact agreed with Aristotle, that that’s the reason God kept him from saying so in any of the letters we have. The idea that Paul might have believed something means nothing to me if that belief is outside the bounds of the canon of Scripture, because I don’t follow Paul as such; I only follow him as he follows Christ. I recognize Paul as a fellow redeemed sinner who had his unrighteous behaviors and his un-Christlike ideas and his limits to his understanding just like me, or anyone else; the key for me is that in affirming the inspiration of Scripture, I affirm that the Spirit kept all those things outside the bounds of the canon. Inside those bounds, within the letters we have, we have Paul at his best, guided and shaped by the Spirit’s work; outside, it doesn’t matter.