On p. 100 of JHILBP, I say, “Jesus came… to form that family of God around himself.” To which Jim replies:

Jesus doesn’t seek to form anything around himself- he seeks to form a people of God around God, the Father. Kirk’s (apparently Barthian) Christocentrism has led him astray. Jesus was theocentric to the core. His will was to do the will of the Father. Nothing less, and nothing more. For Jesus, it wasn’t about Jesus. It was about the Father.

Let’s get the important stuff out of the way first: Jim is the third person ever, and the third person in the past week, to call me a Barthian and/or Neo-Orthodox. You will forever be on the top three list in applying the label to me! Well done!

The difficulty in responding to the paragraph is that I don’t want to say that Jim’s wrong, that it’s not about God but rather about Jesus. However, what I want to say is that the way in which Jesus’ ministry is about God is by being about Jesus.

Jesus is the one in and through whom God’s kingdom is dawning in the world. Jesus is the King of God’s coming Kingdom (at least as that story is told in the Gospels).

Let’s bring this down to the ground level of the Biblical stories.

Jim rightly says that Jesus comes to do the will of the Father (John 6:38; cf. 4:34). But Jesus then turns, in chapter 6 of John, and immediately says, “This is the will of my Father: that everyone who looks to the son and believes in him will have eternal life” (6:40). The way in which people on earth faithfully respond to God is by faithfully responding to Jesus.

This is what I mean by Jesus coming to form a community around himself–to reject Jesus is to reject the Father, to accept Jesus is to accept the Father. This, in contrast to either everyone already being part of the people of God, in contrast to people being delineated the people of God simply by keeping Torah and faithfully worshiping according to the OT prescriptions, and in contrast to Jesus simply saying that the previously given covenant is sufficient to delineate God’s people.

Similarly, in a passage I discuss more than once in my book, Jesus says, in a statement that would seem to be to Jim’s point, “whoever does God’s will is my mother, sister, and brother” (Mark 3:34, CEB).

But how are these people worthy of the approval as those who “do God’s will”?

“Looking around at those seated around him in a circle, he said, ‘Look, here are my mother and my brothers’” (Mark 3:34, CEB).

Sitting at Jesus’ feet, following Jesus, puts one within the will of God. Jesus does form a community around himself. Following him becomes the defining marker of the people of God. Yes, it is the people of God, the Father, who are formed; yes, it is the will of God, the Father, that is done. But it is done by following Jesus.

It wasn’t about Jesus?

No, this we cannot say. Jesus places himself in the middle of everything–”Whoever hears these words of mine and does them…” (Matt 7); “Whoever is ashamed of me in this wicked and perverse generation…” (Mk 8); “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me…” (Lk 4); “He came to his own… To all who received him, to all who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God (Jn 4).

Though each Gospel tells its own story of Jesus, each agrees on this: Jesus is the way to the Father, the one in and through whom the people of God is being reformed. It is, of course, about God, because “whoever has seen me has seen the Father,” says Jesus in John. Or, “Jesus was a man, testified to by God,” says Peter in Acts.

So while I don’t want to disagree with Jim that this mission is about the Father, I can’t see how the Gospel narratives allow for this mission to be about the Father without it being also about the son.

Think that Paul’s idea of Christianity is, basically, getting you, yourself, and you right before God? Think again…

James McGrath’s thoughts are here.

Look for Jamie Arpin-Ricci’s at missional.ca.

Read more about Christianity as Community in this free sample chapter.

The full book, of course, is for the having at Amazon, et al.

I want to riff on that a bit today, in conversation with my Open Letter to New Testament Intro Students. In short, community is crucial for keeping hold of your faith when your faith is challenged.

The context within which a dearly held conviction is challenged, and the way that faith is depicted in relationship to that challenge, can make all the difference in whether that challenge leads to a lost faith or a reconfigured and strengthened faith.

Image: Photography by BJWOK / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

In response to my open letter, several commenters voiced their concern that critical reconfiguration of what the Bible is and what it says do not happen more in the church. And I think there is something tremendously important about this call. Yes, we have to handle the issues carefully and not unduly disturb the faithful.

But here’s the problem with pretending that the Bible is something it is not: if the context of faith depicts the Bible, or science, or belief in one way, and then a student enters a non-faith environment and discovers that the Bible or science or belief are entirely different it creates an apparently clear choice. Either stay with the faith and reject the learning or hold fast to the learning and reject the faith.

The reason why NT Intro destroys people’s faith in college is because the community of faith has not been forthright about what the Bible actually is, and so the student is confronted with a choice between belief or knowledge.

In general, communities help create and perpetuate systems of plausibility. This can be a bad thing or a good thing, depending on the truth and benefits of how the group is perceiving and articulating reality.

If Christianity is true, then the calling of the church is to articulate, and demonstrate, a coming reality that is often not visible to human eyes: Jesus is the enthroned and coming Lord. We need community to keep making that reality real, to help us be renewed by the transforming of our minds, by the conversion of our imaginations.

This means that when we’re struggling, we need the community. If we leave it, we are placing ourselves on an interpretive grid where this true reality is not accounted for in the interpretation of the world. And its unbelievability can quickly become unplausibility, and the faith withers.

It is precisely because context is crucial for wrestling with faith-challenging issues that I think it is a seminary professor’s duty to deal with all the difficult issues in class. The fact that Christians, in a Christian setting, while confessing Christ as Lord, can acknowledge these things is, itself, tonic against the notion that certain realities about the Bible or history tear apart the very fabric of Christian faith.

In the film Gods and Generals, Stonewall Jackson utters this provocative line to a dying man who confesses to unbelief: “Well then, I will believe for the both of us.”

When we’re struggling, we need people to believe for us. We need people to carry our belief when it cannot carry itself. We need ourselves to be infused with the gift of faith that comes from the participation in the body of Christ. And we need to know that our struggles can be Christian struggles, modes of living and doubting that honor the Christ whose faith saves us.

Ok, there’s some value in such a self-assessment. We do need to have a level of integrity in what we do on our own and what we profess in public. We mustn’t be hypocrites.

But…

At some point I decided that what is most important is who we are when we are part of the communities in which we find ourselves; or, perhaps more telling–who we are when we are among the people with whom we have chosen to surround ourselves.

Who are your people, and what does your life look like when you are together with them? What do you do together? Who are you for one another?

From a Christian perspective, one might say that who you are as a functioning member of the body of Christ is more important than how much you look like an ear when you’re hanging out alone in the ear storage facility.

This week we have friends in town. Good friends. Life friends. Friends who love my children even when they’re going ape-poop. Friends who can say, “No, I’m sorry, that’s a really bad idea.”

With good friends, we come together and rediscover not only who they are, but also who we are. We remember that the guy who spends all day long in his study or his cube, the woman who spends all day long moving in and out of examining rooms and filling out charts and dictating patient visits–these people aren’t the full embodiment of who we are.

What really matters is more than this–although these alone dynamics play their part. What really matters is who we are when everyone’s looking, when everyone’s gathered, when everyone’s loving.

Bell wrote a book many disagreed with, and the disagreement immediately was charged with words like “Heresy,” and was roundly condemned in many circles.

Maudlin points out how blithely the notion of heresy was invoked:

Why would leaders attack as a threat and an enemy someone who shares their views of Scripture, Jesus, and the Trinity? What prevented leaders from saying, “Thanks, Rob, interesting views, but here is where we disagree”?

What list of theological beliefs must be fully checked off before someone can be embraced as brother or sister even if we disagree about other important issues?

Maudlin sees in this reaction itself the true threat to evangelicalism. The threat to the evangelical church’s life is not creeping liberalism. The true threat is tribalism.

But now I think the biggest threat is Christian tribalism, where God’s interests are reduced to and measured by those sharing your history, tradition, and beliefs, and where one needs an “enemy” in order for you to feel “right with God.” Such is the challenge facing the church today and what the reaction to Love Wins reveals.

Or, in the words of Paul, “If you bit and devour one another, take care or you might just consume one another.”

I think Maudlin is on to something. At some basic level we have gotten our story wrong. We have begun to act as though the way that we know we’re faithful to Jesus is if we condemn anyone who seems to be tearing down the walls of the theological circle that inscribes the faithful.

But there is no such wall.

Falling within a theological border is not, has never been, can can never be, the means by which the faithful followers of Jesus are demarcated.

The first-century church had to painfully wrestle through the reality that Jesus came to break down the dividing wall of hostility that was Israel’s Law. It seems that we must come to terms with a Jesus who breaks down the dividing wall of hostility that is Christian Theology.

If we don’t, we may find ourselves in the very position of Paul’s opponents in Galatia, compelling others to become like us if they would be marked as part of the people of God–and thus as agents of nothing less than anti-gospel.

The goal of this struggle is knowledge of Christ. That is all.

But we need to be careful about how quickly we run to this conclusion. There are several paths we might take to get there, and in my western context the way to such knowledge is typically articulated as something personal and intellectual: I pray, and I know Christ. I study and I know Christ.

But Paul has another route in mind.

He prays for everyone’s hearts to be encouraged and united together in love (Col 2:2). There is a rich interplay between who we are as individuals and our life together in community. Christian epistemology is never an internal, private affair. We can know only as we know together and only as we love together.

Contexts determine much of what we can know, much of what we will find persuasive. One of the most significant functions of Christian community is to create an environment of love, where Christ as the all-in-all of God becomes a compelling and believable confession.

On the flip side, this corporate route to knowledge underscores why the failure of Christian community is such a grievous affront to the faith of individuals. If a community of love provides the context for sure knowledge that Christ is God’s all in all, then a community that destroys and discourages the hearts of its people, a community filled with strife and division, will disprove the message to the hearts of the hearers.

The assurance that Paul prays for, the assurance that leads to full knowledge of Christ as all, does not come from reading books or having our dilemmas solved through apologetics.

The assurance Paul prays for comes only from community—a community of encouragement and love that is, itself, the earthly manifestation of the body of Christ.

And for the past 6 weeks or so, we have been adding normal church to our Sunday routine, heading to an evening worship service at a smallish church plant.

Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Why are we adding “normal church” to our regular pattern of worship?

For one thing, I have always missed large group singing. I find that atmosphere to be more often conducive to connecting with God through song. In small groups the experience of joint worship is usually not as enveloping.

Another dynamic is opening up more connections. While the intimacy and depth of small group relationships is a crucial part of our life together in Christ, there are gifts and opportunities that one finds in a larger group that cannot exist in a small house church simply because of numbers. In this case, we were looking for a little more diversity in “age and stage,” especially after some turnover in our house church. Currently there is no peer for our 6 year old in the house church, Laura and I are the oldest members, and there is only one other man in the church besides me.

A larger community contains a healthy “more” than the house church in this respect. That is to say, “more” is not always better. Having more connections can often be a cover for having fewer significant relationships. But the up side of numbers is to be found both in opportunities for connecting with more and more kinds of people and also in being in community with people who have more gifts for the building up of the body of Christ.

So, house church has been and continues to be a rich source of worship, community, and sharing in Christ with people in San Francisco. And, we’ve started enriching that sharing in Christ together by starting to connect with the good folks at Eucharist.

Any questions?

Another story of Presbyterians going Presbyterian on one of their own.

The story is old. It goes something like this: Inerrantist, complementarian, Presbyterian, covenant theologian, willing to sign off on the 80+ pages of the Westminster Confession of Faith, has his ordination stymied by a theological debate.

Seriously.

I’ve pretty much come to the point where I’d think that if anyone is willing to sign off on your 80+ pages of theology that you should grab them and never let them go.

But that’s not how the conservative Presbyterian world works. That’s not the fruit of traditional Reformed Theology.

And what I say to them I say to all of us: If the fruit of our theology is that it makes people jerks, it is not good theology.

At some point, we have to step back and say that it’s not merely that people take the theology in a wrong direction, or that people with good theology nevertheless behave badly. There is something in the culture of the places that cling to Reformed or Neo-Reformed theology that makes them rabid about theology.

And these worlds aren’t alone. Lots of us move in or through ecclesiastical circles where there is a viciousness to the theological conversation, or a viciousness in the pursuit of holiness.

I am thankful for the Reformation. It opened up the doors for much-needed reform to come to the church. And that good reform did come both to the Roman Catholic church and through the newly birthed Protestant churches.

But one of its most unfortunate legacies was its providing us a theological justification for separating our theology and teaching from our ethics and behavior. Faith is one thing. Works is something else. The faith we profess is crucial. The works we perform will all need to be forgiven.

And with that, we surrendered our calling to judge by fruit. We are not to believe every prophet. We are not to believe every teacher. And while many of us have strong standards of judgment, ours are not the ones Jesus erected.

For us, the standard of judgment has to do with theological correctness, with correspondence to our system of doctrine. False teachers are run out of town when they say the wrong thing about the Bible or what God was thinking about before creation, or sex.

But Jesus tells us that the reason to run someone out of town is not their theological system but their fruit.

And what we too often, too willfully, forget, is that contentiousness and divisions are the very fruit of the flesh that demonstrate a person’s walking by the flesh and not by the Spirit.

In other words, if the fruit of your theology is that it creates a community of jerks, your teaching has gone awry.

Contentiousness should be a wake up call for us. When we find ourselves in worlds where fights recur, something has gone amiss–we should examine how we’re defining the gospel and thus ourselves as God’s people, and figure out what went wrong.

If we get hold of this one thing, the rest will fall into place.

I hear tell of a college whose motto proclaims, in the words of a Protestant Reformer, that the mind is the way to the heart. And there is a vast company of heirs to this motto: Christians who believe that if we get our theology right, the rest will fall into line: right thinking leads to right acting.

Others, of course, put the shoe on the other foot: believe what you want, but really, just get about the business of doing. Do what you’re called to. Share the gospel, and the rest will fall into place–right worship, right understanding.

Missional and attractional church models can fall prey to such thinking: get your people involved in the world around them, and the worship of the church will become more robust! or, build robust worship and mission will flow from there!

But the reality is that the Christian life is a many-faceted affair, and each facet demands its own attention, and no facet will necessarily draw the others along with it.

We all have areas that we gravitate to more readily–and we all easily fall prey to absolutizing the one, prioritizing the one thing at which we excel, proclaiming that this is the way forward to the whole.

But this is comfort at the expense of the truth.

In reality, we have to cultivate a half-dozen to a dozen spiritual practices if we are to faithfully love God with heart, soul, mind, and strength, and no one of us, and very few particular communities, will ever do all of them well.

The worshipers might need to be pulled out on mission. The thinkers might need to be pulled out of their easy chairs by the doers. The practicers might need a theology lesson. And the goers might need to be reminded that there is a worshiping community into which to return.

Rather than claim a corner on the market of doing it right, maybe we just need to start living like we need each other. Not only to do what we cannot, but to help us do what we would have been able to do on our own, but what we can as part of a functional body.