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Idols, Sex, and Rock ‘n Roll

January 7, 2012 in Bible Thoughts, Culture with 4 Comments

Observation:

In stereotypical anti-pagan polemics in the ancient world, Jewish argument would go something like this: those guys worship idols, which leads to all sorts of sexual lasciviousness, which (of course!) leads to the further degradations we see in society such as thieving and drunkenness and rebellion.

You can see this reflected in Romans 1: they rejected God, served the creature and images of it; therefore God gave them over to shameful lusts; moreover they are treacherous, reckless, conceited, and the like. This, in turn, seems to be riffing off the wisdom of Solomon. See also 1 Thess, where turning to the living God from idols (1:9) entails, first and foremost eschewing sexual immorality–not living in lustful passion like those Gentiles (4:1ff.)!

Observation:

This is the exact opposite of how many of us in evangelical-like church circles think.

For us, it’s get those kids under control (they’re doing all these little tell-tale things like disobeying their parents) or next thing you know they’re going to be having sex, which is the step on the slippery slope that will keep them from church forever.

I’m not saying that the ancients or us were right or wrong, and I can set the countdown timer at 10 seconds, at which time I know there will be a comment telling me that people who have done these smaller things we look at have abandoned worship of God already.

The point, really, was simply an observation: we see things flowing uphill from little, pervasive failures, through the biggies like sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll, and finally up to a denial of God.

In the context where alternative worship, through idols in particular, was a live option, the ancient Jewish people (including Paul) saw things flowing downhill, from a fundamental denial of God through “big sins” like sleeping with your step-mom, and on to a life filled with every little annoyance and perturbation and sin you could think of.

If You Can’t Be with the Bible You Want…

January 6, 2012 in Bible Thoughts, Humor, Media with 3 Comments

So with this being the week of “If you can’t have the Bible you love, maybe you should try Loving the Bible you have,” as noted over at Unsettled Christianity, I thought that an apropos theme song for Bible lovers this winter might be the following from Stephen Stills:

Knowing God?

January 6, 2012 in Barth Dogmatics Reading, Bible Thoughts, Media with 10 Comments

The question of whether, and how, we can know God has been very much alive for the past couple hundred years. It’s been a problem philosophically, as the gulf between a supposedly transcendent God and the world in which we find ourselves has proven too much, say the philosophers, for the God on the other side to do us much good.

God got sent to the in-law suite in the attic whilst we went about our daily business of cooking and cleaning and loving and warring.

With Freud and Feuerbach, the problem came closer to home. Maybe the problem isn’t that God is too much “out there” to do us any good. Perhaps the problem is that God is far too much “inside.” Perhaps God is a projection of our needs, of our desires.

We are living, now, in a somewhat peculiar moment. The information age has made the musings of the phiolosphers more readily available; the education age has made advanced study of theology and philosophy more extensively enjoyed (or, at least, performed!); and people with philosophical and theological training are bringing their message to the masses both in books and in freely available popular media (return here to point 1: information age).

Where this is all going is here: over the past two weeks I have read Peter Rollins’ Insurrection, heard him with Barry Taylor on the Homebrewed Christianity Podcast, engaged with Rollins’ “love is God” philosophy with friends on Twitter–only to turn to the first 30 pages of Karl Barth, Year 2, and find his insistence that there is a God who is objectively known and knowable, because this God is, in fact, known in the church.

Barth Experiences God by Listening to Homebrewed Christianity on His iPod

Here, Barth does not argue against the position that God as such is truly known, if mediated, God makes Himself known and people hear with faithful obedience. Instead, he begins with the assumption that because there is a God made known through Jesus Christ in the church, that God is, in fact, knowable.

Barth’s argument is circular: God is knowable because we know God. He does not attempt to enter the circle by way of argumentation, but begins within the Christian story where God is made known in Christ and in scripture, and uses this story to tell us what it is to know God.

But I agree with Barth in the necessity of this circularity: you do not arrive at the God of the Christian story by starting with an idea of God in general and working your way in. You either believe in this God or you don’t; you either believe in this particular God, or you believe in another. The unmoved mover is not the God of Israel.

I found Barth more satisfying than those who suggest that God is of ourselves rather than made known according to God’s own decision.

In short, the notion that God is of ourselves, or found in our actions, or project of our desires, is not the God of the Christian story. If God was not in Christ reconciling the world to Godself, then the story is simply false. To confess resurrection is to look to a moment in time when God broke into history and vindicated the crucified Christ–truly overcoming death and taking Jesus out of the world.

The God found in my acts of love does not have this power, the power of the gospel, which is real power for salvation.

Barth manages to hold onto both the uniqueness/otherness and true knowability of God. God chooses to reveal Godself as an object that we can know. This knowledge is always mediated: ultimately through the Word of God in the flesh.

Knowledge is true because God chooses to make Godself object. It is unique because we are dependent on this self-disclosure and cannot know the true God without such disclosure. It is true knowledge when we not only believe that this God has spoken, but obey the summons that the voice brings.

The self-involving God is an object of our knowing through a self-involvement of us as knowers. Thus, while the truth of the notion that God is known when we love in obedience to God is maintained, so is the otherness of God who is not identical with that love of neighbor itself.

****

Jerry has his Barth Together thoughts here.

And Brain Maiers is back in the game!
Anyone else?

Behold the Man

January 5, 2012 in Bible Thoughts with 6 Comments

If you want to know what it means to be human, look at Jesus.

This is the claim that my Fuller colleague, Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, works out briefly, clearly, and beautifully in the January issue of Christianity today. [I'll post a link when it becomes available.]

Veli works out this claim in between our contemporary cultures turn to the scientist to help us answer the question of what it means to be human, on the one hand, and the creeds’ silence about Jesus’ life, on the other.

“…we know who we are becaue we have been created in his image, in the image of the one who became one of us and into whose image we out to be conformed until the day when we see him face to face.” (30)

He goes on to highlight how the New Testament speaks “in very concrete terms having to do with the actions of Christ”: we know Jesus through his enfleshed actions here on earth.

Building on the church father Irenaeus, and his idea of recapitulation, we learn what it means to be truly human by looking at Jesus: “we discern that being a real human means having a life shaped by dependence, service, and ultimate self-offering to the Father—and all this in the face of the temptations and trials of life” (30).

Taking full stock of the incarnation helps us to unravel misguided notions about “who we really are.” There is not some disembodied “soul” within us that is “us,” to the expense of our confounded bodies.

No, the Word became flesh to be human among us.

There is also no isolated “I” who is truly human.

No, the Word is second Adam and thus human as one of the member of new humanity. We are saved into “the communion of believers of all ages.”

There is one particular direction I would have liked to see Veli discuss in brief, and that is the connection between image-bearing and rule. Jesus not only proclaims, but inaugurates the Kingdom of God as its King, a role originally given to Adam that he recapitulates. And, this rule over the earth is part of the destiny awaiting those who are Christ’s: if we endure, we shall also reign with him, says 2 Timothy 2.

All Christians have a theology of Jesus. And most of us need a good infusion of understanding of the rich significance of Jesus’ humanness. He did not become flesh and blood simply so that he could die. He became a man so that he could show us what it means to be fully and truly human.

The Failure of Individualism

January 4, 2012 in Bible Thoughts, Culture with 22 Comments

Ok, so here’s the story.

Yesterday I saw this tweeted and flipped my lid: “If you want to stop human trafficking, make disciples.” It was attributed to Francis Chan at Passion 2012.

As a self-contained statement, I find this admonition to be incredibly damaging. What better way to distract people from the real human needs in the world than to spiritualize the needs of the people around us?

In the immediate context of the talk, Chan went on to speak of the people around us as possible perpetrators. And so, within these few sentences, the way we’re supposed to understand the world seems to be something like this: If everyone loves Jesus, we won’t have to deal with human trafficking and sex slavery anymore.

Such an assessment is naïve, to say the least. There are greater powers at work in the world than the power of individual human hearts that act out of accord with the will of God.

On Monday I was talking about the hot topics before us, and mentioned “the gospel” as a holistic entity as one of those hot topics. We continue to need to learn that the purposes of God are bigger than simply the rectification of persons.

I found that 90ish seconds of Chan’s talk to be dangerous for this reason. People who already assume an individualistic gospel hear an individualistic means toward overcoming a pervasive evil, and are sent on their way to ignore the problem by telling people God loves them and has a wonderful plan for their lives.

We hear what we already know, and I worry about how 40,000 college students and 1.5 million online viewers heard that snippet, or read it in Tweet form.

If you want to end human trafficking, work to end human trafficking. Give to International Justice Mission. Learn from Not For Sale, and support their work. Find out where human trafficking is likely at work in your area (find someone to show you the “massage parlors” with the bars on the windows and inward facing security cameras).

Disciple making in itself, keeping Christians from soliciting prostitutes, is never going to solve the problem of human trafficking.

Now, having said all that, the larger context of Chan’s talk leads me to believe and hope that he would agree with my concern, and with the trajectory of sending people to work, truly work, for the freeing of prisoners.

The talk itself was about believing the Bible and doing what it says. He tells a story about throwing a banquet for a bunch of poor people as a self-imposed exercise in obeying rather than explaining-away Jesus’ instruction to do so.

He exhorts the audience to believe that the power we see at work in Jesus is still at work today–to heal, and to free the captive!

The very beginning of the talk was Chan celebrating a talk that had come before his, one in which someone was talking about kids trafficked for sex, and he was passionately responding, stirring the crowd up again with the desire to respond and act to free those kids from slavery.

So what happened in that 90 second piece that got me riled up?

One more piece of context: the entire talk was shaped as a call to passionate, faithful, believing discipleship propelled by an individual’s own reading of the Bible without anyone telling us what it says other than what we can see for ourselves.

Individually faithful discipleship. Driven by individual Bible reading. We could talk all day about his hermeneutics and the like, but here’s what I think happened: the “stand against sex trafficking” piece was not part of the planned talk, but was something Chan was passionate about and worked into his talk at several points because of the previous, powerful speaker.

And, as several folks have alerted me to, Chan does tons, including giving millions of dollars, to help rid the world of this scourge.

But, the message of “be and make faithful individuals” is actually a poor container for holding the social justice message that Chan also finds to be biblical. In this brief, 2ish minute riff, the theme of his talk itself (be and make faithful disciples) was brought into conversation with an issue that didn’t fit the topic (end human trafficking), with unfortunate results.

The 90 seconds troubles me, because it captures one possible way of construing the relationship between personal discipleship and the world “out there” that I think too many Christians buy into. I fear that hearing those words from Chan has the power to perpetuate not merely wrong-headed engagement with human trafficking, but a divinely approved withdrawal from the issue. I don’t think it was the best of what Chan had to say that night about human trafficking.

Much better was his strong affirmation at the end: this Jesus we serve really does have the power to free prisoners–so let’s go do it.

On Trusting the Bible

January 3, 2012 in Barth Dogmatics Reading, Bible Thoughts with 33 Comments

Funny, just yesterday I post a few musings about what might be hot topics, I sort of give B list status to “what’s the Bible and what are we supposed to do about it,” and then the onslaught.

First, there was Rachel Held Evans’ indication that this is going to be a big topic for her this year: we need to learn to love the Bible we actually have.

Then there was an email message from someone taking a church history course that had come to the point of dealing with Neoorthodoxy and Karl Barth in particular.

Here’s how it’s all connected.

The student taking the church history class was getting an assessment of Neo-Orthodoxy from a prof at a school with an inerrancy statement. So there’s a presumption of a high view of scripture here–which is a point at which more conservative Evangelicals have routinely chided the Neo-Orthodox.

A summary of his assessment was this: the Neo-Orthodox were reacting against historical Jesus scholarship, and separated actual history from interpreted history. In retreating from actual history, Barth, Bultmann and Brunner severed the link between what actually happened and scripture. As a historian, this prof says that we have to affirm the actual history relayed in the text.

Here are a few thoughts: first, Barth and Bultmann were doing very different projects. Bultmann was moving away from a historicized Jesus in favor of a demythologized Jesus who confronts believers in an existential moment of decision. He is intentionally recontextualizing Jesus into the framework provided by existentialism.

Barth was doing something very different, inasmuch as he was calling the church back to scripture as the authoritative witness to Jesus as the incarnate word of God.

But here’s the more important point for today’s discussion: the inerrantist church history professor is calling us to a Jesus we have no access to, in denial of the Bible we actually have, in order to uphold his “high view” of scripture.

In reaffirming the centrality of the historical Jesus, the professor has done several things at once. First, he has affirmed the centrality of a kind of access to Jesus that God has not seen fit to give to the church. We do not have a historical Jesus record, we have theologically crafted narratives that interpret Jesus for the church.

Second, in so affirming this need, he denies the sufficiency of the Bible we actually have. Barth was right: the Gospels are witnesses to the incarnate logos, and this is what God has given us. To insist on the centrality of the historical Jesus is not only to clamor for what we do not have, it is to misunderstand the nature of the Gospels as historical documents that tell about historical events.

It’s both as historians and theologians that we must acknowledge that the Gospels are interpreted, theologically laden narratives–and that this is just what God wanted us to have.

Ironically, the conservative rejection of Neo-Orthodoxy in the name of a “high” view of scripture, at least in the case of Barth, ends up as a rejection of the Bible we actually have in favor of a man-made construct that does not match up with it.

We do not need to fear the theologically-laden, deeply interested, and individually shaped narratives of Jesus that God has given us. We need to find ways to celebrate that our God has given us precisely this Bible rather than the one we so often would prefer.

What’s On Your Plate?

January 2, 2012 in Bible Thoughts, Church, Culture with 14 Comments

Slowing the blogging pace and stepping back for a week or two over the holidays, I started to think about what streams of conversation are flowing with particular force these days.

Over the past couple of years there have been emergent or missional conversations that always provided ready fodder for conversation. But those streams have largely dried up as ever-present conversation pieces.

Here are a couple of things that strike me as continuing points of interest as I scan the blogosphere. But I’d also love to hear from you: what are you thinking about and finding yourself in vigorous conversation about as you strive to work out what it looks like to faithfully follow Jesus in 2012?

  1. The Gospel. I know that sounds rather broad and… well… settled, but here’s what I mean: in the more or less evangelical circles in which I run, we are finding a good deal of traction in conversations that press us to articulate a holistic gospel that affirms the “spiritual” dynamics of a restored relationship with God through the death and resurrection of Jesus while also affirming that the spiritual work of being at work in the world for the good of all God’s creatures is integral to the faith.

    Recent books by Scot McKnight, Tom Wright, and yours truly are all working to contribute to such a recalibration of the evangelical gospel, that has been too long denying what it should have been affirming (in many circles). The gospel is good news for the whole world.

  2. Human origins after evolution. As denial of evolution becomes a rallying cry for both religiously and politically conservative movements, it moves certain brands of Christianity into more of a backwater. Too many Christians now have too much education for this non-viable position to continue to hold sway among thoughtful evangelicals.

    But, this means that we are confronted with a monumental task. And here is where the conservatives are right: to affirm evolution entails a reconfiguring of the narrative of humanity in significant ways. What can Christians say about the significance of humanity’s place in the cosmos once the story of evolution displaces the story of one-off creation? What can be retained? What must be replaced? Pete Enns’ book, and the interest it is generating even prior to publication, is one piece of bookish evidence about the continuing significance of this issue.

  3. Gender in the church. Here’s one for which I have no direct evidence in terms of tell-tale books. (I apologize.) But, with the continuing surge of the neo-Reformed movement, there has been a concomitant surge theological conviction about male dominance of the church.

What do you think? Are these issues the ones that are active points of conversation in your world? Are there others? I started to wonder if “what the Bible is” might not be another significant point where evangelicals are entering a new place (cf. Christian Smith’s, The Bible Made Impossible), and if folks find themselves increasingly in conversations about sex and sexuality?

Anyone?

Christmas Contagion

December 30, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Culture with 9 Comments

Jesus came with more than his fair share of surprises. Among these was his power to reverse contagion.

“Contagion” is a fancy way of talking about something being contagious. In particular, we talk about contagion as how things become “unclean.”

If an unclean object comes into contact with a clean object, the clean becomes unclean. Uncleanness is more powerful than the cleanness an object might carry around.

Priests are holy and eminently clean. But they can’t go into the same room with a dead person: the unclean dead defiles the living clean.

Jesus messed all this up.

Jesus came and touched the unclean, declaring to them, “You are cleansed.”

The unclean leprosy did not defile Jesus. The purifying touch of Jesus cleansed the leper.

How relevant is any of this to us? After all, we don’t live in a world whose boundaries are marked by laws of purity and impurity. We don’t come to a temple for cleansing.

But, in general, Christians still struggle with the fear that we will be defiled by the unclean.

A few years ago I was gently ribbing a friend on Facebook who was describing their “quiet evening at home,” on October 31. They had gotten some candy, bobbed for apples, sipped some hot cider, made a bonfire.

Two things were equally clear: (1) they were celebrating Halloween. (2) They weren’t calling it Halloween because it’s a pagan holiday.

See also: every church that allegedly has a “Harvest Festival” even though nobody in our post-industrial age even knows what difference an ingathering of food would make compared to any other day of the year.

Christmas presents similar problems for us. We get all bent about Christmas celebrations that are less than what we would idealize as “Christian.” Many of us get worked about taking Christ out of Christmas and the like.

And so we’ve resorted to believing that the power of the world’s contagion, the power of the world’s uncleanness, is an overwhelming power to be feared, rather than being willing to embrace, participate with, and (either literally or figuratively) rubbing shoulders with the non-believing world around us.

Jesus is more powerful than the forces of the world that would defile us.

There is no power in non-Christian music or movies or celebrations that the cleansing power of the resurrected Christ (who is Lord over all) cannot overcome and purify.

So lighten up. Proclaim Christ. Worship Jesus in that old tavern or Masonic lodge or Druid temple if you’re fortunate enough to get the space.

He whose purifying power we bear is greater.

Insurrection (pt. 2)

December 28, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Book Reviews with 5 Comments

The first part of Peter Rollins’ Insurrection was an exposition of the crucifixion as definitive of the Christian life (see part 1 of my review here).

Next, he turns to resurrection.

This is the part of the books that elicited the strongest reactions from me, both positive and negative.

I knew I was going to have problems with the chapter when its epigram read:

“I am God,” says love. -Marguerite Porete

God is love. Love is not God. This is a fatal mistake that haunts the chapter. It begins well, however.

Rollins leads us through the realization that we tell stories about ourselves. We have ideas about ourselves. But these do not match the reality of what we do. The true us, Rollins argues, is found in what we do; the explanation of what explains our actual actions is a more realistic depiction of us that the ways we idealize or even demonize who we are and what matters to us and what motivates us.

We say that we know money and a larger house and a different neighborhood will not make us happy, and yet we devote all our time and energy to obtaining those things. Which is the real us? The one that says she does not believe it? Or the one who acts like she does?

This part of the book is pure gold. It helps put more meat on an assertion that I make regularly: the hardest part of preaching is convincing people that the message is calling them to repentance. We tell ourselves stories about who we are and what we believe, blind to the fact that our lives belie every bit of it. We need stories to unmask our self-deceit.

Rollins argues in compelling fashion that “our actions do not fall short of our beliefs–our actions are are beliefs.”

Ch. 7 is where things get more complex.

Rollins articulates here the best of what biblical scholarship will tell you as well: the kingdom of God, and even eternal life, are not categories simply about the future, but categories about a transformed here and now that we are called to participate in.

But Rollins mistakes the presence of the transcendent God within our world for the falsehood of the idea of a continued transcendence. And he mistakes the presence of the kingdom here and now for the falsehood of the idea of a future and perfect reign.

The biblical narrative maintains a tension between the already and the not yet, as well as between the immanent and the transcendent. This dialectic is lost in Insurrection.

Thus, I find myself celebrating much of what Rollins affirms–because presence and realization are central to the gospel. And yet I find myself parting ways with Rollins in what he denies–because transcendence and futurity are core components to the gospel as well.

Here’s the problem, that manifests in the chapter, with confusing the statement “God is love” with its pagan counterpart, “Love is God.” This confuses God with the activity and attribute of God; it invites us, in fact, to worship and serve the creature–better, our own creation–rather than the creator.

In Rollins’s words, “God is the name we give to the way of living in which we experience the world as worthy of living for, fighting for, and dying for.”

God is a label of value we append to what we find beautiful in the world. God is an idol of our own making, rather than a being who is at work to make the world worthy of living for, fighting for, dying for. Far from a splitting of hairs, labeling God aright in relationship to the creation is the difference between Christianity being a projection of our imaginations, or a reality in which we are called by Another to participate, the difference between true (all of life-)worship, and idolatry.

Thus, while Rollins rightly challenges us with his claim that we cannot claim to love God while hating our neighbor, Christianity can never ground this on the claim that God is the love that exists between one person and another.

Heeding Rollins’ urgent pleas, we will find ourselves more invested in the world, never guilty of that classic failure of being so heavenly minded that we are of no earthly good. But we must so engage the world with the understanding that the kingdom is God’s and not ours, and that there is a future for this world because the resurrected Lord is at work in it here and now.

Integration

December 27, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Culture with 4 Comments

Blogsphere confessional: I hate New Year’s Resolutions. Mostly, this is because I’m full of myself. I tell myself that when I see something that needs to change, I just do it. Why wait for a new year to begin what I should have already started doing?

But I now repent in sackcloth and ashes.

Basically, what this tells you about me is that I don’t like something until I own it. Then it becomes the greatest thing ever. At least, until I leave it behind again.

(Note to self: talk to therapist about God complex: things become good by my involvement with and blessing of them, as I see the world.)

So to what do I now find myself needing to commit as the new year approaches? A more integrated life. By this I mean that I can no longer sideline everything else other than working and taking care of the kids.

A few weeks ago I had a flare up of a sometimes-recurring lower back pain. Put simply, this is “sitting on my butt” disease. Sit too long in the car. Sit too long in front of the computer. Your back ends up doing too much of the work, your other muscles don’t support you as they should. The lower back spasms. And you end up wasting a day of your life at the doctor and shuffling around at about the speed of a three-toed sloth.

This was a wake-up call to me: the life that I am given to live on this earth is not just a life of work and family–as important as those things are; it’s not just about mind and community. It is also an embodied life. And more…

So I return to the great command to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and am reminded that applying this in my little world means adding some things that I have allowed to fall to the side.

I cannot love God with my mind if I have so neglected my body that it will not allow me the solace to sit and read and write.

Of course, once I start thinking about the holistic calling to love God, other areas of neglect surface soon enough as well.

And so, back to my original confession: I have a few days of vacation here before the New Year. Days in which to not only fret about the syllabus that has yet to be written for next Wednesday’s class, but also to take inventory of a life that does not fully lean God-ward as I would have it.

With a new year, a new quarter, and a newly awakened awareness, I think of restructuring my days and my week so that the care I take of my life might show in action the fullness of integration that I confess to need in theory.

So bring on the new year’s resolutions. And maybe even the actions that make good on them.

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