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Orthodox Heretic

May 4, 2011 in Book Reviews, Kindle Reading with 1 Comment

In one of my classes, I tend to end the quarter with this video of Peter Rollins reading the story “No Conviction” from his book, The Orthodox Heretic.

The whole book, is now available for Kindle download at the low low price of 99 cents. Kindle reader apps are available for free download for your iPhone, iPad, Mac, Windows, etc. Of course, everyone should have such a reader anyway, and be enjoying access to hundreds of free public domain titles. So go grab the app, and download the book for a challenging read.

I’m Giving Away Half the Church

April 6, 2011 in Book Reviews, Church with 18 Comments

Earlier this week I reviewed Carolyn Custis James, Half the Church: Recapturing God’s Global Vision for Women (pt. 1 here, pt. 2 here).

The goodly folks at Zondervan have provided me with a copy to give away, and here’s how I am going to do it. In short, this will be a Hall of Shame contest–but I won’t shame you publicly.

This book will be given to:

(1) the man
(2) ordained in a denomination that does not ordain women
(3) who has gone the longest without reading a theological book written by a woman.
(4) If there are multiple persons who tie with “never,” the tie-breaker will be: what books or articles have you read by egalitarians on the subject of women in the church?
(5) You must solemnly swear before God that you will read the book in the next six weeks.

To enter, send an email to daniel@jrdkirk.com, outlining your qualifications. I will not announce the winner, in the interest of preserving the privacy of the contestants–and because I wouldn’t want any of you dragged before your Presbyteries to give an account for yourself for the reading this blog or of the book with which you’re gifted.

So let’s see those entries, guys!

Half the Church (for the 2/3 world): Part 2

April 5, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Book Reviews, Church with 29 Comments

Yesterday I began a look at Carolyn Custis James, Half the Church.

James is intimately familiar with the conservative North American environment in which a focus on marriage and home-life as a “woman’s calling” creates anemic exhortations to marry and bear children as the highest possible calling. Women, though strangely, not men, are often exhorted toward marriage and child-rearing as the heart of what they need to find significance in God’s world.

One of the most amusing moments of the book was when she looked at Genesis 2. “It is not good for the man to be alone.” Why, she prods, do we not hear more preachers following the biblical example and preaching that it is men who need to marry and get a home life going if their lives are to be complete?

Well played!

But this intimate familiarity with, and participation in, the conservative evangelical world ultimately compromises the message of the book.

As I indicated yesterday, James digs deep into scripture in order to develop a theology of women as sharing in the subduing and ruling over creation; women are like God: “helpers” and deliverers in the battles that confront God’s people.

So what of the situation of women in North American churches? As I highlighted yesterday, James points out that a culture-shock awaits women who come to the church, where egalitarian assumptions are undone in patriarchal systems. She tells a story of a friend who is petrified to get to the point about gender roles in the church in conversations with a woman he’s sharing the gospel with at work.

In short, James knows and tells us that subordination of women in the church is not good news–and not the best reading of scripture either.

But when she comes to address the question head-on, she ducks. She won’t say it. She won’t say that women should be allowed to be ordained.

That’s a question that theologians disagree on, she says. It comes down to a few key texts that people disagree how to read. So there’s no answer to be given, and we just need to develop a more holistic vision of women as leaders in the church and God’s agents in redemption.

No.

What James has argued vividly is that the question of women’s relationships to men in the church is not a matter of a few isolated prooftexts.

Those texts depend for their interpretation upon any number of things, foremost of which is this: what did God intend in creation? It is, in short, impossible to disagree vehemently with 1 Timothy 2′s theology of the inherent subordination of women at creation (as James’ theology of creation does, though she never says so) and then go on to support its application of that creation-theology in the church.

James has created a theology of gender that is inherently egalitarian, but refuses to say so at the crucial point at which most of her likely audience will be confronting the injustice against women. To put it differently: the upshot of this book is that injustice is to be opposed when occurring in a distant land, but not when when occurring in our own.

Here is where James and I disagree: for her, ordination is a distraction to the message that we need a theology and praxis within which all women and girls are valued and celebrated as necessary workers in God’s kingdom. For me, the failure to ordain women is the manifestation of the very problem she’s fighting. As she highlights in the book, it is one of the most likely reasons for competent women in North America to be turned off from the gospel–churches proclaim a secondary status for women precisely through their hard ceilings. Moreover, here is my concern: this is the actual issue at which the actual readers of the book are likely to have to deal with the subjugation of women in their own worlds. And this includes James.

What the women in complementarian churches need is a champion to lead them forward in a more biblical vision, an ezer-warrior who will fight the fight to stop excluding half the church from the most celebrated work that the church itself does. What women in North America need is a fulsome biblical theology that will show women in “conservative, Bible-believing churches” that it is precisely in believing the Bible that the injustice and discrimination they are subjected to is shown up as a denial of the good news. It is disheartening that a book that goes so far in providing such a vision nonetheless stops at the point at which such discrimination is practiced in its own context.

As James’ own stories show, failure to ordain women, failure to treat women as equal, is not good news to women. The church in North America will fail to be the champion of justice for women as long as it continues to teach, preach, and embody the very patriarchal system that creates the injustices she has denounced around the world. This book is about the unimpeachable, biblical importance of women–but, I fear, only for the 2/3 world “out there”, not the 1/3 or the 1% who are subjected to the power of patriarchal systems here at home.

This book is a wonderful, winsome challenge to the normal way of doing business. But I walk away feeling somewhat like I read the definitive treatise on race relations only to have a passing reference at the end indicate that slavery is a very difficult issue, with biblical scholars on each side continuing to wrestle with a handful of texts that we’ll never agree on. I wish the paragraph weren’t there so that we could all be freed to draw the right conclusion rather than addressing it at all and giving us the freedom to draw the wrong one.

I think I can say that our disagreement is over this question: would addressing ordination shipwreck her program? or does refusing to address it? From my own experience with women in the church, the ordination question creates, perpetuates, and is part of, such a systemically toxic environment for women, that I think a pro-women theology that does not touch it remains only a theology for the 2/3 world at the expense of our own.


Disclosure: I received Half the Church from the publisher at no cost other than the understanding that the book would be reviewed on my blog. My agreement to review the book did not require a positive review or endorsement.

Half the Church (for the 2/3 World): Part 1

April 4, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Book Reviews, Church, Culture with 8 Comments

Carolyn Custis’ James latest book, Half the Church: Recapturing God’s Global Vision for Women digs into scripture, in conversation with the worldwide struggles facing women and girls, to produce a holistic theology of women in the plan of God.

The book succeeds in demonstrating three things with crystal clarity:

    1. Scripture provides a wealth of resources for demonstrating that women and men are created not only with equal dignity but also equal function as image-bearing, world-ruling leaders.
    2. The deplorable situations in which women around the world find themselves require us to trumpet this equality and establish the church as a beachhead for the kind of equality that denounces and overturns all injustice based on gender.
    3. A commitment to live and serve within theologically conservative circles will ultimately compromise the integrity of theologically creative writers, or their arguments. This book is so compromised.

James lays the groundwork for her biblical exegesis and theological portrait by telling us in the west that too much of our conversation about women in general and gender roles in particular don’t make sense outside our highly privileged world. The idea that a family could survive on a single income, leaving the woman to mind the house with no commercial engagement, is a debate afforded our position in untold luxury.

And, as long as our theology of women has nothing to say to the 2/3 world, it is not, and cannot be, a viable theology of women.

But James isn’t finished. In conversation, particularly, with the book Half the Sky, James begins each chapter with a story of women’s plights around the world: four year old “brides” who are supposed to throw themselves on the funeral pyre of their “husbands,” girls sold into sex slavery, girls turned out to die, girls who are sold for cattle as their marriage price. Globally, there is a problem of women being not valued, of being valued only for possible revenue they might generate when sold.

And so the book strives to articulate a biblical theology of women that shows how women are not only “equal” in some sort of vague sense, but equally entrusted with representing God’s reign upon the earth.

James creates high expectations as she begins the book with all this in mind. This backdrop of global exploitation is the perfect setting within which the church might speak a message that is truly good news. So she asks: (1) What message does the church offer women? (2) What will the church do to address women’s suffering globally? And (3) What message will we send to the world by how we mobilize our own daughters (41)?

As if to underscore how far we’ve fallen from articulating ideal answers to such questions, James later says,

Yet instead of casting a powerful gospel vision that both validates and mobilizes women, the church’s message for women is mixed at best–guarded, negative, and small at worst. Everywhere we go, a line has been drawn establishing parameters for how much or how little we are permitted to do within the church. As in the wider culture, there are always exception… But culture shock awaits many women who migrate from the academy or the secular workplace to the church. In the former, opportunities are vast and their contributions valued and pursued. In the church, what they have to offer often goes unnoticed or is restricted to “appropriate” zones within the church.

What, then, does the Bible have to say, that we should be listening to, if we are to build the kind of theology of, and place for, women that will be received as good news by the rest of the world?

Over two chapters, James develops a theology of gender based on Genesis 1-3. Genesis 1, she rightly shows, demonstrates a profound equality: male and female are both created in God’s image, and this means that both are charged to rule and subdue, not merely the men.

The story of women in a world gone wrong must be one where they are helping bring about the reign of God, his will being done on earth, through all sorts of endeavors, not least in seeking the liberation of other women who find themselves ensnared. Women must participate in the rule of God by making the world a better place for all–just like men are charged to do.

There are a number of high water marks for this book as it creates a fulsome vision of women within God’s created order. One is when she looks at Psalm 8′s recounting of the creation narrative. This psalm’s

words underscore the fact that the world is wide of the mark when it devalues and discards women and girls. By making us “a little lower” than himself, God affixed the highest possible value on his daughters and his sons. It also certainly means (and the church should surely openly trumpet this) that the Bible’s high view of women cannot be surpassed. Our tendency is to look sideways–to compare ourselves and compete with other people. The Bible calls us to raise our eyes and our aspirations and strive to be like God.

What the book demonstrates for those with eyes to see is that the question of women’s roles in the church, or their place in the cosmos, cannot be confined to a few proof texts that seem to limit women’s participation in church. Though all such creative and energetic theological pictures will call for points of exegetical disagreement at certain points, in general James paints a picture that is faithful to the biblical narrative and easily accessible to all readers.

In tomorrow’s post we’ll look at where her program falls apart–namely, when the theology needs to be applied, and the prophetic word needs to be proclaimed, in her own church context in the U.S. rather than the other side of the world.

Disclosure: I received Half the Church from the publisher at no cost other than the understanding that the book would be reviewed on my blog. My agreement to review the book did not require a positive review or endorsement.

Rob Bell Controversy: My Take

March 2, 2011 in blogging, Book Reviews, Church with 17 Comments

(1) Last week, Chris Hays warned us Christians to calm down.

(2) Justin Taylor didn’t.

(3) Rob Bell sold a ton of books. (Seriously, people, it is in the top 25 of ALL books right now on Amazon. Do you realize how many books you have to sell to do that?)

(4) Just like Chris Hays said.

New Bible Translation

February 23, 2011 in Book Reviews, Humor with 16 Comments

Of late we have been graced with several new Bible translations.

The NIV 2011 has updated the evangelical favorite, incorporating a number of changes that the now-defunct TNIV had made.

The Common English Bible (CEB) produced a new translation for what seems to be a mainline Christian crowd.

And just yesterday my attention was drawn to an even more recent translation project, directed toward those whose social location is defined, more or less, by the phrase “I can haz cheeseburger?”

Yes, the lol cats bible translation project, launched in 2007, has now borne fruit in the brand new LOL Cat Bible.

Having just learned of this yesterday, I haven’t had time to do a full perusal of the translational and theological impulses behind it.

It looks like they have gone with the subjective genitive rather consistently. Moreover, I find a disturbing amount of theological simplification–perhaps what one expects in a Bible directed toward grammatically incompetent felines.

Here’s Romans 3:21-26:

    21 But nao we knowz about goodness comin from Ceiling Cat. Teh Law an teh profettz tellded us about it.22 We get dis goodness thru beleevin in Jebus.23 Evribodi haz maded Invisible Errors an iznint as good as Ceiling Cat,24 but we can go to teh ceilin enniwai bcz Jebus died to taek awai our Invisible Errors.25 Ceiling Cat did thingz dis wai on purpus,26 to show how niec he iz.

This certainly cuts the Gordian Knot of the text, but one wonders whether important nuance is lost in the broad language of expiation employed here.

Also, I note in my spot-checking that the gender-exclusive language of “brothers” is chosen, raising serious questions about how female cats and the cisgendered, androgynous, spayed, and neutered readers will respond to the text.

Similarly, the conservative theological impulses are reflected in Romans 16, where Phoebe is a “helper”, and the apostleship of Junia is buried beneath a reminiscence of past mischief.

In all, it seems that in terms of reaching a new people group, the translation is a success, but in terms of theological depth and hermeneutical sophistication, as well as other points of connecting with a contemporary audience, the translation leaves much to be desired.

Rising Tide of Secularism?

February 21, 2011 in Book Reviews, Church, Culture with 5 Comments

One of the common components to the story of American religious history as told among Evangelicals is that Christian influence is waning and that modern culture is more hostile to Christianity than ever before.

Are we so sure?

    Historical demographers and sociologists have shown that in 1776 only 17 percent of the national population belonged to a church. It appears that an official religion governed an indifferent population for much of the colonial period. Then, in the nineteenth century, under the influence of evangelical expansion, church membership began to increase sharply. By 1850, 35 percent of Americans were church members. By 1906 the number was 51 percent. Sixty-two percent of the American populace belonged to religious institutions by 2000, though not specifically Christian churches. Evangelicals led the expansion. (David Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom, 5-6)

The Bible Can Stand and Witness Against Us

February 4, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading, Bible Thoughts, Book Reviews with 11 Comments

I am, to say the least, geeked out and other wise excited about this week’s #Barthtogether reading on the Bible as the word of God.

Here are a couple of teaser quotes.

    “[Scripture] does not seek to be a historical monument but rather a Church document, written proclamation.”

    “Exegesis… entails the constant danger that the Bible will be taken prisoner by the Church.”

    “after any exegesis… [the church] has to realise afresh the distinction between text and commentary and to let the text speak again”

That section of the reading (§1.4.2) was the highlight for me.

As I read through this section on the word of God written, I was gripped by Barth’s refusal to equate revelation with anything “within” us. I hear Barth’s voice as prophetic for today in a manner analogous to what he needed to say in his own day. The notion of written revelation is an after-the-fact confession that God has, in fact, acted; God has, in fact, revealed.

Revelation is not timeless truth, it is the act of God. And, we might add, what is revealed is not timeless truth, but the acts of God–Barth would say, I think, the act of the eternal God revealing himself to us in Jesus Christ.

This section made my heart sing because Barth does such a nice job of holding together the acts of God and historical contingency–something that we in our modern contexts too often find impossible, sliding to one side or the other. On the right, people slide off toward “God,” minimizing history; on the left, folks slide off toward the contingent, minimizing the word and act of God.

Barth also resonates with me here because of his insistence that the Bible be always free to stand over against the church, that it must always be freed afresh from the constraints of our exegesis so that the text might be at liberty again to confront us as a surprising revelation of God. My hesitancy to corral the Bible by the “rule of faith” and other confessional expressions found a perhaps unwitting ally here.

I did have a couple of quibbles. You know–those places where a biblical scholar reading a theologian talking about the Bible made me nervous.

The account of Bible as canon was as good as I think we can do: the Biblical books we have pressed themselves as word of God upon the early church. But then, the history of canonization is messy, and the biblical books don’t depict themselves as scripture for the most part.

And I could have entirely done without the claim at the end that word as revelation, proclamation, and scripture parallels and find its confirmation in the Trinity. To the paralleling of one’s theological thoughts with the Trinity there is no end. And I cannot imagine that many of theme approximate the reality of how God truly is at work in the world or left marks of God’s triunity within it.

On the level of a professional New Testament scholar, the reading raised interesting questions about how to conceptualize the handling of the Bible outside the church. If the Bible is word of God as it is testimony to God’s revelation, and the confirming testimony to the church’s proclamation, then what do we say about the Bible when it is read for what it said in history, when it is read outside the church, when it is talked about to describe it rather than to invite obedience?

Lingering questions…

Barth §1.3.2-1.4.1

January 29, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading, Book Reviews with 7 Comments

The first section for this week finds Barth delineating the relationship between preaching and dogmatics. Here I found myself resonating with the inherently contextualized nature of the theological enterprise that Barth is engaging in.

For Barth, dogmatics follows Christian preaching, reflects on it, and seeks to articulate what the church must say and must not say.

The effect of this subordination is to conceptualize dogmatics as something that will always be in process. The proclamation of the church must continue to speak to people of its own day and time, and dogmatics must look back to this recent past event in anticipation of a proclamation that will come in the near future.

At the same time, however, Barth insists that dogmatics not be made answerable to the demands of a given culture–an important caveat but perhaps one that needs to be worked out a bit more. Without being made “answerable” to various demands of science, philosophy, or aesthetics, the church’s theology must still speak within a world that has a particular scientific slate of knowledge, a given aesthetic and the like. Contextualization is inevitable, and dogmatics must help the church find its way forward well so that the church won’t end up just doing it badly.

I found myself of two minds when reading §4.1 on the Word of God preached (the first of three “Word of God” sections).

Barth is extraordinary in his repeated insistence that the Word is God’s, remains God’s, and never passes to human control. But I find myself wondering here if Barth hasn’t underestimated the divine freedom he so highly prizes? Might God not choose to bind himself to the word preached as an event that will occur at set times in human history? Must there be a decision by God to turn the human words into God’s words on an occasion?

Here Barth is clearly working out a thoroughgoing theological basis for the Protestant distance from Roman Catholicism: neither in sacrament nor in preaching is God’s presence, Spirit, and grace always present ex opere operato–just by the work being done.

On the other side, however, the discussion of how God uses people without setting aside their humanness (and bread without setting aside its breadness) rang true–especially inasmuch as there is analogy with Jesus as a human in whom the divine grace was at work. I leave you with this week’s money quote:

The human element is what God created. Only in the state of disobedience is it a factor standing over against God. In the state of obedience it is service of God. Between God and true service of God there can be no rivalry. Service of God does not have to be removed in order that God Himself may be honoured in it. Where God is truly served, there–with no removal of the human element, with the full and essential presence and operation of the human element in all its humanity–the willing and doing of God is not just present as a first or second co-operating factor; it is present as the first and decisive thing as befits God the Creator and Lord.

Barth on God-Talk and Church Proclamation

January 21, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading, Book Reviews with 10 Comments

Welcome to week 3 of #Barthtogether (Church Dogmatics §1.3.1). I’m enjoying this slow wade into the Church Dogmatics. And in particular, the exercise of attempting to stretch my mind around Barth’s understanding of the word of God is an important challenge. Here is where Barth has so often–right at the outset!–been left behind by more conservative Christians because he does not simply say that the words on the page of the Bible are the word of God.

Why won’t he just come out and say that? It think the reason is articulated when Barth differentiates between secular and sanctified; their distinction is not a state in which they exist or a subject matter about which they speak, or a realm they occupy. Instead, their differentiation is an event, “The ongoing event of the final distinction, the event in which God Himself acts…” (p. 48)

This event is, of course, tied to the creation of the church, which is the body of Christ, because God elects that body as his own sacred space, we might say. But that church is sanctified as an on-going act of God’s holy-making action–and that holy-making action must apply also as something that occurs to the church’s proclamation. God makes the human words holy that would not be holy without that act (p. 49).

In locating proclamation in the broader life of the church, Barth places himself squarely within a Protestant, even what we might with the right qualifications even call “evangelical”, mold: preaching is the presupposition of service for the world, teaching youth, and even theology.

But it’s Barth’s definition of preaching that is so vaunted as to cause me to step back and scratch my head over the dissonance between this theological ideal and what I experience in reality. Preaching is where God the king speaks through the mouth of God’s own herald, and is therefore God’s own speech, to be acted on by God’s subjects.

It is often the case that when theological interpreters of the New Testament today speak of the NT, they refer to its “totalizing theological claims.” The God spoken of, and actions performed, create a demand on the reader to respond in faith. This, says Barth, is the substance of our preaching as well: in the event, God speaks and demands response (p. 52).

A couple of points will follow from this overall picture of the need for God to be at work for the preaching to be the word of God. First, since what is needed is the act of God, God is free to speak in surprising places, to use surprising words and means to speak to people. You might think Balaam’s ass, you might think foreign priests like Melchizedek.

Another point that follows is that neither preaching nor any other churchly function conveys grace simply by doing it–they are only means by which God may choose to administer grace. The “event” of grace, of speaking, of truly demanding, is the work of the spirit as words are spoken (as sacraments are given, we might add), and not bound to the event as such. The grace is bound to God.

A third point that follows is that “modernist dogmatics” ultimately fails because it does not finally know that people have to listen to something outside ourselves–to a true God–rather than simply reflect on our experiences.

And here is where the value of Barth’s view comes into play in our own context as well.

As we grow continually more aware of the different ways that various cultures have spoken about God, and interpreted God through the lenses of their own time and place, we have to continue to find ways to speak of God’s revelation in the Word as something that truly comes from God and draws us into our own culture-bound reflection.

If the words are simply the words of people and fully explicable on that score, than there is no Word to be proclaimed. But if God has in fact revealed, if Christ is in fact the revelation of God, then revelation is not merely possible but has in fact occurred and can in fact be assumed.

And then, we can have hope, hope that there is a God beyond who speaks, who is known, who has made himself knowable to the people of the earth. And with such hope, we can respond in the obedience of faith, knowing that our labor is not in vain because we have heeded the living voice of the true and living God.

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