After the Tour

January 27, 2012 in Jesus Have I Loved with 1 Comment

The blog tour that took place over the past few weeks was a great success from where I sit: the reviews asked some penetrating questions and also gave folks a taste of what Jesus Have I Loved, but Paul? is all about.

All the blogs from the blog tour are linked on the blog tour website. If you missed any of the posts, head over and catch up! In addition, Tony Jones followed up with a second engagement of my chapter on homosexuality which led to my own post in response and a great conversation ensued.

So, let’s say that you’ve read the book and you liked what was going on there. If you’re so inclined, here is my shameless request for you to help me get the word out about the book:

First, if you’ve finished with the book (I mean, for the next couple weeks or something, before you read it again), would you give (I mean, loan) your copy to someone else to read? Putting the book in people’s hands may the single most important thing for an unknown person such as myself to have the book start finding some ciruclation.

Second, if you’re reading along and enjoying what you read, would you post a word or two to your social network? A quote from the book? A, “120 pages down, only 79 more to go #JHILBP” or something?

Third, if you read and enjoyed the book, would you write a short review on Amazon? As weird as it may sound in theory, people actually care what the Amazon reviews say, how many there are, etc.

Finally, if you’re in the Bay Area +/- 8 hours, when am I coming to speak to your church, fellowship group, school chapel…?

Thanks to everyone who is taking the time to read the book and critically engage its ideas. You honor me with your efforts.

No Such Thing as Christian Natural Theology

January 27, 2012 in Barth Dogmatics Reading with 3 Comments

So there you were, cultivating a rich missiological approach to your own cultural context. You were studying the environment in which you found yourself, looking for glimmers of the transcendent, unconscious acknowledgements that there was a God worthy of worship just beyond the recognition of your neighbors.

You were looking at Acts 17, and pondering what statues to an unknown God there might be in your workplace or civic life.

You were studying Romans 1 and imagining that a knowledge of God persists among those who do not, as yet, know God in Christ.

And then brother Karl comes along and opens up his can of Christological grace in the presence of totally depraved sinners.

Next thing you know, natural theology of every time is being denied. Points of contact are shown up as little more than ways to get people to see quickly that they do not, in fact, know God (and won’t likely be willing to). And you are sent to your room in tears.

The main line of biblical witness, Barth maintains, is that God is known, and can only be known, through His revelation of Himself in Christ. This consistently Christological frame of reference radically discounts claims that God is known otherwise than as God is revealed in what is often called “special revelation.”

Barth explores the “secondary line” of biblical witness that may seem to require us to acknowledge that God can be known, in some sense, in creation. But again and again he comes back to the point that what the text such as Ps 8 or Ps 19 or Rom 1 or Acts 17 depend upon is a prior conviction that God is truly known as the God of Israel.

And that’s at the heart of Barth’s point: God of Israel.

In order for God to be known, God must be known as God has bound himself to a particular people and a particular act of salvation. There is no idea of “God in general,” no abstracted knowledge of what a god is like that is simply true of our God because it’s true of some hypothetical being. God is known as God truly is, and that is tied to a particular revelation.

The God whom the Psalmists know is the God of Israel, the Lord of the Exodus and of the wandering in the wilderness, the Giver of the Law, the Hope of David, His wisdom , His power, His goodness, His righteousness, originally and conclusively this God alone. (Dogmatics §26.1, p. 109)

To me, the most interesting moments in this section were Barth’s wrestling matches with the apparent biblical counter-evidence.

Why does Acts 17 not establish the viability and significance of the “point of contact” for reaching new people? Because it is when he brings in the identity of the unknown God as the one who has raised Jesus and will judge the world–i.e., what is revealed of God in Christ–that Paul is mocked and rejected. Is this really an invitation to hold onto “in roads” for the gospel where people are ignorant in their so-called “knowledge”?

There are unanswered exegetical questions, but in this section we see the genius and consistency of Barth as he demands that the revelation of God always be a true disclosing of the true God–something unavailable to fallen human beings unless it come to us by grace.

Natural theology? No. Only theology of the revelation of God in Christ.

Clarity, Brevity, and the Fullness of God

January 26, 2012 in Bible Thoughts with 5 Comments

One reason I like to blog: I can say as much or as little as I want on any given day. I try to stay at 400 words or less, sometimes it’s hard to do that little. Usually it’s about right.

Writing study notes for a Bible is a huge challenge for me. I’m working on that for Colossians right now. Yesterday’s labor of love? A footnote for, “completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions.” You pretty much have to say what you’re going to say in 40 words. Otherwise, you’ve used up your word count for the whole chapter.

Here was my attempt at that:

Paul sees his own suffering in ministry as an extension of the work of Christ on the cross (cf 2 Cor 4:10-12). He is working to complete (lit., “fill up”) the work of reconciliation by creating reconciled communities that participate in the reconciliation Christ has already accomplished.

You hope you’re giving folks enough tidbits and breadcrumbs to find their way to exegetical treasure.

One fascinating thread that runs through the description of Christ in Col 1: the connection with Wisdom. Here, I’m not saying anything that hasn’t been said often by others.

The connection with Wisdom in the Jewish tradition helps fill in some otherwise puzzling details.

For example, what are we to make of the language of “fullness”?

Both God and Wisdom are said to fill the earth–indications of God’s presence and saving power. But in Colossians, it is Christ who becomes the focal point of the fullness of God.

God fills heaven and earth (Jer 23:24)–but Christ is now the fullness of God. Christ is that by which God fills the earth. God’s Spirit and Wisdom fill the earth (Wisdom 1:6-7), but that fulness has Christ as its substance.

These notions of God’s presence and power are focused on Christ–and Christ is revealed as the one in whom all things on earth hold together. That sovereign presence of God, known everywhere on earth, is now a reconciling presence in the crucified and risen Christ.

And, the hope of God’s final glory is that this Christ indwells us, making God’s fullness the filling received by all who are united to Him.

How is it that Christ can be sufficient? How is it that Colossians can consistently call people away from other sources of wisdom, power, fullness, and knowledge?

Because the Christ who bears the fullness of the cosmos-filling God indwells us–and we, too, are in Him.

There I go with 400 words again…

Homosexuality: Silence and Story

January 24, 2012 in Bible Thoughts with 76 Comments

I am grateful to Tony Jones for returning, once again, to engage ch. 9 of Jesus Have I Loved, but Paul?, after first critiquing the chapter last week.

He summarizes my three-fold engagement with scripture:

  1. We can’t run to the OT on this, but need to begin with the NT interpretation of the place of sex within the Christian story.
  2. Jesus is silent on the issue. I take this to be a slight argument against Jesus’ approval of homosexual practice–Jesus was Jew, and where he disagreed with his Jewish contemporaries we’ve heard about it.
  3. This leaves Romans 1 and 1 Corinthians 6 as the principal sparring grounds for our exegetical debates about homosexual practice.

To points 2 and 3, he has this to say:

First, we don’t use Jesus’ arguments from silence to uphold ethical evils such as slavery, racism and rape. So what’s the argumentative force of arguing from Jesus’ silence on homosexuality?

Second, this leaves a couple of verses in the traditionalist camp, hardly enough to exclude one whole segment of society from full participation in the church.

I think that this is a strong counter-argument to a biblicist approach to homosexuality. Having one or two verses in our pockets is not sufficient to create blanket ethical statements for the church. But I’m working from another angle.

Image: digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Everything we believe and practice as a church has to be integrated into the larger narrative of the God at work in the world through the people of Israel to reconcile the entire cosmos to Himself in Jesus Christ.

In the book, I argued that the larger, redemptive dynamics of that story were sufficient to overturn practices of slavery and of excluding women from pastoral ministry and teaching. This was on the basis of a couple of considerations: (1) the overall trajectory of the story toward social equality and liberation; (2) the indications that inequalities and subjugations entailed in hierarchical relationships are dynamics of a disordered world and therefore subject to redemption; and (3) varied testimony in scripture.

The narrative of scripture undermines the complementarian efforts, for example, to uphold 1 Tim 2:11-15 as universally normative for male-only leadership in the church.

I increasingly feel the weight of the argument that point 1 is a factor in favor of full inclusion of homosexuals in the church.

It was factors two and three that kept me from allowing the trajectory toward freedom and liberation to play a decisive role. What I mean is this: first, whereas the indications in scripture are in favor of subjugation of women and other humans as slaves are distortions of the world as God intended, the narrative within which Paul’s critique of homosexual practice is embedded in Rom 1 is the opposite. There, homosexual desire and practice itself is depicted as an outcome of a world gone astray from God.

Also, there is no counter-testimony on this issue such as there is on so many others such as those pertaining to women in the church or ethnicity and the people of God.

So the bottom line of my response to Tony’s post is that it’s not simply two verses, but how those verses fit within the larger story line of the biblical narrative.

This is why I suggested that a different means of argumentation would have to be offered to convince me that homosexual desire and practice is o.k. within the biblical narrative. One of these is a reconsideration of what the “new creation” looks like that is both making itself felt in the present and toward which we are straining–the new reality that we are to realize in an incipient way within the church.

The second is a compelling work of the Spirit in and among my brothers and sisters (yes, I will call them that gladly) who are practicing homosexuals such that their acceptance by God as they are becomes an undeniable testimony of God that they should be received by the church as such.

To my mind, the call to affirming and embracing is an uncircumcision argument: a plea to recognize that God has accepted and embraced those whom we could never anticipate, based on scriptural exegesis, would be accepted as they are.

Our story has taken any number of unexpected turns. If the embrace and affirmation of practicing homosexuals is one of them, it will be one of those moments that could not have been anticipated beforehand, calling us to reimagine a bit more broadly the place of sexuality in our story.

Based on Tony’s first engagement with my chapter, I think this is where he is, and where I’m not yet ready to go.

To me the issue is less the content of a couple of verses and more the overall narrative withing which those verses find their coherence.

Pastoring the Cross; or, The Epic Fail Pastors Conference

January 23, 2012 in Bible Thoughts, Conferences with 3 Comments

One of the most powerful gifts that the gospel has to offer the church is the reality of power in weakness. This is not only the texture of our cross-shaped gospel, it is also the means of effective ministry that integrates itself with the message of the cross that we proclaim.

In real life, this is hit home almost every time I, someone I’m listening to, or someone I hear of, is willing to admit of particular weaknesses and struggles to other folks in the body–or when we confess our actual, particular sins to one another.

Unfortunately, many of us are driven either by the internal voice of self-protection or the external calls for perfection, and live and minister in hope of attaining to, or at least seeming to attain to, a level of perfection that is truly impossible.

Many of the conferences that we attend that are directed at our growth actually feed this vain striving after perfection. They offer us better ways to get where we will never arrive, and hinder our embrace of the weakness that is our reality.

Enter, the Epic Fail Pastors Conference.

From all accounts, last year’s gathering was a singular opportunity for pastors to gather and embrace a transparency that fed both their own hearts and the lives of their congregations.

So get thee to Mansfield, OH, March 22-24. This one is worth getting out for.

The organizer, J. R. Briggs, has more thoughts here.

Wardrobe

January 23, 2012 in Culture, Humor with 4 Comments

I’m not normally one who gives much thought, time, energy, or money to augmenting his wardrobe. Over the past year, however, I have found two exceptional pieces of clothing that demanded purchase.

Both are t-shirts.

First, in honor of my breakfast making, E’s obsession with, and Halloween dressing, as Darth Vader, together with E’s choice of an “I am your father” Father’s Day card, there was this:

Then, in honor of… well.. my singular focus when it comes to music, there was this:

I commend them both for your consideration, and for your further insight into the man behind the blog.

Enjoy.

Worship as Belief

January 22, 2012 in Bible Thoughts, Church, Spirituality & Prayer with 5 Comments

It falls to me to pick the worship songs for our house church.

This, as you might guess is something of a liability for me, and perhaps my group. I comb through the song sheets, looking in vain for “Praised Be Thou, Inaugurator of Participationist Eschatology” and the like.

So instead, I have to go with what we have.

Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Today, as I thumbed through and picked out a few things, I did so with a little bit of an internal eye roll. I grabbed a song that I knew was little more than a compilation of scripture verses. I knew it was a theologically and pastorally apt conjunction of scripture and real life.

But it wasn’t me. I wasn’t feeling it. I felt like a bit of a hypocrite singing first person singular lyrics about myself that didn’t reflect my reality, how I actually have responded to life as late.

You get it? I didn’t want much to do with the song. But I picked it anyway, inasmuch as “The Galatian Praise Song” is something I try to save for Lent.

But then…

When it actually came time to sing the song, I found myself able to sing it, to believe it, to celebrate the reality of what I was singing.

How do you think about worship?

Usually, I think of it as an attempt at an authentic response to God, reflective of where I was when I came in.

And that’s an important piece of it.

But there’s something else going on in worship as well. Worship becomes a tutor to our hearts. We sing what is true, even when we don’t believe it, or didn’t a few seconds before, in order to enter into the belief that we lack.

Worship isn’t just about experience, it is also about ultimate reality. Or, perhaps better, is about creating an experience that expresses and embodies–and therefore summons us into–the reality into which God has called us in Christ.

When we gather as one and with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, we participate in the fulfillment of God’s covenant promises. We speak truth again, we catch a glimpse of reality.

And we can believe.

Does Mercy Seat Work for You?

January 21, 2012 in Bible Thoughts with 10 Comments

How do we understand what Jesus is on the cross?

Romans 3:25 speaks of Jesus as a hilasterion. This is translated in some versions as “sacrifice of atonement,” in others as “a propitiation,” and now the CEB is translating it, “the place of sacrifice where mercy is found.”

The word is used in the LXX (Greek translation of the Old Testament) to refer both to the sacrifice of atonement and to the “mercy seat” inside the holy of holies. So what I’d like to hear from you is whether this “mercy seat” idea works for you as a reading of Rom 3:25. Does it make sense in the verse? Can you see how it’d work? Thoughts?

Here’s the passage:

All have sinned and fall short of God’s glory, but all are treated as righteous freely by his grace because of a ransom that was paid by Christ Jesus. Through his faithfulness, God displayed Jesus as the place of sacrifice where mercy is found by means of his blood. He did this to demonstrate his righteousness in passing over sins that happened before, during the time of God’s patient tolerance. (Rom 3:23-26, CEB)

Homebrewed Podast

January 20, 2012 in Bible Thoughts, blogging, SBL with 0 Comments

During SBL, I had the honor and privilege of doing a recording with the good folks at Homebrewed Christianity, Mark Scandrette, and Philip Clayton before a live studio audience at chez Scandrette. This was, in actuality, the fulfillment of a dream, as I had long hoped to bring my homebrewed beer with me to record a session of Homebrewed Christianity with Tripp, Chad, and Bo.

That discussion is now posted over at Homebrewed Christianity (which you should be subscribed to through iTunes anyway).

Take a listen, relax, and have a homebrew.

Knowing One Particular God

January 20, 2012 in Barth Dogmatics Reading, Bible Thoughts with 5 Comments

Is there some idea of “knowing” that simply have to fill with the right, God-given content, in order to understand how we know God?

Is there some idea of “being” or essence that we simply have to fill with the right, God-given content, in order to understand the God who is?

Do we begin with knowledge and being to know the God who truly is?

When we think about who God is as Lord, Creator, Redeemer, and Reconciler, do we reason upward from our general ideas to a God who is Lord, Creator, Redeemer, and Reconciler because he is such notions of ours writ large?

No, Barth will argue throughout the first part of his discussion of “The Readiness of God” (Church Dogmatics §26.1). We do not have general categories which God fills in a bigger way, and thereby conforms to humanity’s innate ideas. We know the true God as this God is revealed in Scripture. God is known as all these things: Lord, Creator, Redeemer, and Reconciler altogether–so that knowledge of the true God depends on what I would call here the story to which God has bound Godself as primary actor, not simply human notions of what someone called god should do.

In fact, Barth wants to push it back farther than this and to say that it’s not merely our ideas of Lordship, Creation, and the like that are derivative from God’s revelation of who God truly is.

The very idea, and long-standing philosophical problem, of God’s very knowability, is dependent on a prior action of God as well. We can know God because God is actually known and has actually chosen to make himself known. We can know the truth of who God is because God “is” before we are, and this truth of himself is known: Father to Son and Son to Father by the Spirit.

Knowledge of God is, then, an act of grace in which God makes Himself known. This means that it is not an act of nature, in which people might simply reason their way to true knowledge of the true God.

That last piece, an argument against natural theology, takes up a great deal of Barth’s energies as the chapter moves on.

I confess to finding myself torn here. As someone who deals with the deeply contextualized, historically situated texts of the Bible, I stumble over the idea that our images and metaphors for God are revealed rather than varied human expressions of various people in various times and cultures. Note well! I do believe that God reveals and speaks through the images–but that this revelation is known and understood and used because it carries certain preexisting connotative freight for the first hearers.

But on the other hand, I appreciate Barth’s insistence that we not affirm some “god” in general in vain hopes that someone serving such a being will one day attain to faith in the Christian God in particular. This skepticism of natural theology, not only in its validity but also in its purported pastoral value, is well grounded.

Those were my impressions of these 30ish pages. You?

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