Tag Archive - cruciformity

On Jesus’ Choosing Twelve Males

February 3, 2012 in Bible Thoughts with 20 Comments

I know that many of you wake up on Fridays eager for the weekly Karl Barth post. I hate to put you off another day, but today I have something a bit more pressing to take care of.

Yesterday, I posted the first of two responses I wanted to make to John Piper’s description of Christianity as a “masculine” religion. Rachel Held Evans has issued the summons for replies, and I think this is an important moment to inject a more biblically sound reading of gender issues in the church. Thanks, Rachel, for stirring us to positive response.

Today’s issue has to do with the significance of Jesus’ choosing of twelve men to be his disciples. This is one of several issues I take up in Jesus Have I Loved, but Paul?.

The story within which this selection of the twelve is embedded leads us to draw a very different point from Piper’s.

Jesus chooses twelve men. These twelve Jesus specially commissions. Jesus came preaching, casting out demons, and healing. The disciples are sent to preach and heal and cast out demons.

Jesus comes proclaiming and inaugurating the reign of God, and these men are sent out to participate in that coming. When Jesus feeds the 5,000, he hands the bread to them. They are the chosen. They are the insiders.

In contrast (let’s stick to Mark’s Gospel here), the women in the story are marginal. There are small handfuls of nameless women. They touch Jesus’ robe, they ask for healing for their daughters, they throw a few coins in a box in the temple, they anoint Jesus’ head with oil.

So while the women are coming in and going out, acting on faith and finding praise for their faith, it’s the boys who are getting it done!

Getting it done, that is, right up until the great, transitional moment in the story.

“Who do you say that I am?” “You are the Christ.” Ok, so far so good. Then, Jesus begins to tell them what this title entails: “The Messiah must be rejected, suffer, and die. Then he’ll be raised.”

Peter rebukes Jesus. Jesus rebukes him back: “Get behind me Satan.”

What happens then?

Move on to ch. 9, and the disciples who had been empowered to exorcise are unable to cast out a demon. The disciples who had been given the charge to proclaim cannot overcome the mute-making spirit.

Later that same chapter Jesus again predicts his death. The disciples’ reaction? They walk along debating with each other about who is going to be greatest in God’s coming kingdom.

We begin to see what they don’t get about Jesus’ ministry: the cross turns the economy of the world on its head. They have a standard of greatness that entails a certain kind of leadership and power, but Jesus wants to transform their ideas. He wants them to see greatness in the cross and the child.

As if Mark, or Jesus, thought we might miss the point, we get the whole thing a third time.

Jesus predicts his death, and this time the subsequent response of the disciples is James’ and John’s request to sit at Jesus’ right and left hand. Again, Jesus has to combat not merely the request, but the wrongheaded assumption about what greatness in the kingdom of God looks like:

Jesus called them over and said, “ You know that the ones who are considered the rulers by the Gentiles show off their authority over them and their high-ranking officials order them around. But that’s not the way it will be with you. Whoever wants to be great among you will be your servant. Whoever wants to be first among you will be the slave of all, for the Human One didn’t come to be served but rather to serve and to give his life to liberate many people.” (Mark 10:42-44, CEB)

In the story, the disciples do not understand what is entailed in leading the people of God. They think it is about greatness and power rather than service and death.

And so, we have the group represented by Peter. The rock. Is being “the rock” a good thing? In Mark, the rocky soil indicates plants that spring up well, but fall away when danger or persecution arise on account of the word. Mark repeats the language of “falling away” when the disciples scatter, leaving Jesus to die alone.

The Twelve were committed to Jesus, and happy with him–but only as one who came with power. They had no faith in their calling to participate in his way of death. They did not have eyes to see that the ministry of Jesus turned the economy of the world on its head.

Shall we return to the women now?

How are we to assess these women who, in the narrative world, are outsiders, on the margins?

Unlike the disciples who are rebuked for being of little faith, Jesus commends these women as having great faith: “Daughter, go in peace, your faith has made you well.”

Moreover, there is one episode where Jesus ties a human inseparably to the gospel story. It is the episode of the woman who pours out oil over Jesus’ head. This looks to be a royal anointing! But when Jesus defends her he says, “Leave her alone, she has prepared my body beforehand for burial.”

The act of anointing prepares Jesus for burial: Messiahship and death are held together, and here is the only person in the whole story to get it. This is why “wherever the gospel is preached what she has done will also be told in memory of her.”

What does it mean to live at the margins, to be unnamed? How does this compare with being the twelve, the dudes, the insiders?

According to the economy of the world, with its measures of greatness, to be the twelve is to be exemplary, in the place to lead, to exclude others from leadership, to stand close to Jesus and guard the gates of who else can draw near.

And to the extent that we look to Jesus’ selection of them, and the apparent marginalization of the women, as paradigmatic for male leadership in the church, we show ourselves to be people whose minds have not yet been transformed by the very story to which we are appealing.

It is only by agreeing with the disciples’ way of assessing the world that we can see their “insider status” as a true insider status, to be replicated by other men in church history.

Jesus offers another way: You guys don’t get it! It’s the rulers of the Gentiles who lord authority over people. It shall not be so among you.

There is another way. It is the way of the cross.

There is another way. It is the way of the “marginalized” in the worlds eyes lying closest to Jesus in faith and understanding.

Are we really supposed to hold up as our model the “Satan” who denied the gospel of the crucified Christ, and claim that Peter is paradigmatic of the place of men as insiders and faithful leaders in the church?

Or should we not seek out the one who did the good deed for Jesus, holding together Messiah and death from her place at the margins? Should we not seek out the one who sought out Jesus merely to touch the fringe of his garment and learn from her what it means to walk in faith?

The irony of appealing to the boys as insiders is that in so doing we show ourselves to be adopting the boys’ understanding of power, privilege, and leadership in the kingdom.

And this view is roundly rebuked by Jesus in words of dissuasion and the work of the cross.

Pastoring the Cross; or, The Epic Fail Pastors Conference

January 23, 2012 in Bible Thoughts, Conferences with 4 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.

Missional Institutions?

January 13, 2012 in Bible Thoughts with 6 Comments

An idea has been rumbling around, if ill-formed, in my mind for the past couple of months.

There we were, seminary professors, church pastors, and Christian leader types, having some pretty awesome and fun and challenging conversation about the missional calling of the church. And something about the setting, the gathering of folks I was truly honored to be on stage with, made me wonder if we were the group of people whom folks should be listening to about the church in mission.

Hold that thought. We’ll come back to it.

Yesterday’s stop on the blog tour raised questions about how definitive cruciformity is of our Christian calling. The fact of the matter is (moving on from yesterday’s conversations) that my attempts at fidelity to Jesus very rarely, if ever, look like the cross. Many folks have influential positions and large followings–they have power. Well… I guess I might say, we have power, to a certain extent.

And as I reflected on this yesterday, I wrestled with the impossible possibility of cruciformity being institutionalized. Self-giving, self-sacrifice, death–these are not the principles of faithful administration of a large organization.

Let’s see if we can put these things together.

During the Newbigin conversation, N. T. Wright brought up the need for the church to speak truth to power, to which Pamela Wilhelms replied, “We can’t do that because we are power–or at least, dependent on it.” Our churches, our denominations, our seminaries are funded by the very power dollars that everyone complains about getting the free ride during the financial crisis; the 1% underwrite the very possibility of our having such a meeting, of churches sustained to the extent that we can have large buildings, multiple persons on staff, heavy educational requirements, and the like.

So here’s where I was sitting somewhat uncomfortably, and would love some discussion with you: to what extent can those of us who work within, depend upon, and serve through large Christian organizations speak meaningfully about “the mission of God”?

Are we free enough from the needs of self-preservation to tell the church that the mission of God is a holistic, cosmic mission of reconciliation that the church is too small to contain?

Are we free enough from the power of wealth to speak the prophetic word that, at times, needs to be spoken when an economic system becomes a source of injustice? or a hindrance to justice more generally?

Does the fact that are already filled, already rich, already kings (to paraphrase Paul’s mockery of the non-cruciform Corinthians in 1 Cor 4) render our voice mute when it comes to awakening people to the call of the mission of God?

Resurrection by Crucifixion

January 12, 2012 in Academia, Bible Thoughts, Church, Jesus Have I Loved with 6 Comments

Today’s post is prompted by a confluence of two streams: teaching in the Corinthian correspondence and AKMA’s thoughts in review of my chapter on ethics, “Living the Jesus Narrative.” The question these two have raised to my mind is, “What does the in-breaking of resurrection into this life look like [according to Paul]?”

In both Thessalonians and Corinthians Paul uses language to speak of the reception of the gospel, the effect of his ministry, that seems to be anything but cruciform. When the gospel comes through Paul, it arrives with “power and Spirit” (1 Cor 2:4; 1 Thess 1:5). Paul can speak of the signs of a true apostle accompanying him: signs, wonders, and miracles (2:12).

Paradoxically, however, this power is shown to be God’s power precisely because it comes in the midst of suffering:

We know this because our good news didn’t come to you just in speech but also with power and the Holy Spirit and with deep conviction. You know as well as we do what kind of people we were when we were with you, which was for your sake. You became imitators of us and of the Lord when you accepted the message that came from the Holy Spirit with joy in spite of great suffering. (1 Thess 1:5-6, CEB)

How do you know that this joy, power, and Spirit are genuinely from God? Because they come in spite of your own suffering, says Paul; because they come despite the powerlessness of the messenger, and because in coming through such suffering they cohere with the gospel of Christ crucified.

I stood in front of you with weakness, fear, and a lot of shaking. My message and my preaching weren’t presented with convincing wise words but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power. I did this so that your faith might not depend on the wisdom of people but on the power of God. (1 Cor 2:3-5, CEB)

Resurrection looks like the power of God being made known through, and in the midst of, the weakness, suffering, and persecution that are the embodiment of the cross. More particularly, Paul’s vision of resurrection life now seems to be most sharply in focus when he speaks of his own suffering bringing life, by the Spirit, to others: “We always carry about the dying of Jesus in our mortal flesh so that the life of Jesus also may be made known in us.. So, death works in us, but life in you.”

As the self-giving Christ brings life to the cosmos, so the self-giving Christians bring life to those to whom they speak.

AKMA pushes me on some important questions that I feel I have no good answers to. How do we do ministry like this? For one thing, cruciformity cannot be institutionalized. It is the antithesis of the institution, which must always live, at least in part, to perpetuate itself.

What happens if a good and lowly sufferer does well? What if her church takes off? What if she gets a PhD? What if, horror of horrors, her book sells?! What if we are filled? What if we are already rich? What if we have become kings–while the apostles are being exhibited last of all as people condemned to death?

I don’t have a clear or easy answer.

I suppose that persons more godly than myself can make myriad small decisions to embrace the way of the cross such that their success continues to be a manifestation of the power of God.

I know of a couple of godly, exceptional NT scholars who have made some self-sacrificial decisions in terms of career and public visibility in order to care for ailing family members. From the midst of their self-giving so that others might live, beauty and strength shines forth.

I know teachers who aren’t great communicators (cf. 1 Cor 2:1-5), but whose life and message transform the students who come across their paths.

That’s a start.

Akma has more questions, challenging questions on his page today. I’m guessing he wants to go some other directions with resurrection. I have a few more places I’d like to go with it as well. Maybe later…

Insurrection (pt. 1)

December 23, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Book Reviews with 9 Comments

We want to believe, says Peter Rollins. It’s natural. We want to know that someone is watching. We want to know that things beyond our control will get better. We need to hope for a brighter future.

And, he says, this is just the problem.

In his book, Insurrection, Rollins makes the case that our ideas of God are, pervasively, sub-Christian, precisely because they hope too much for a happy tomorrow rather than embracing the broken today.

Rollins warns the reader early on that the purpose of this book is, in essence, to slash and burn: this is a work of “pyro-theology,” not constructive theology–an attempt to burn away the husk that has accrued to Christian faith and practice and return to the source.

In the end, this will be both the book’s strength and its failing. Its strength in that it holds up the mirror to the church and demands of us that we take a long hard look at what we say and do–and how these things fail to embody the gospel we confess to believe.

But it is also the book’s weakness as Rollins insists on a “not/but” where he should have constructively engaged in a “both/and.”

First, then, the strength of the book and what the church desperately needs to hear.

The book begins with reflecting on the significance of crucifixion. Christ was crucified. We are co-crucified with Christ.

And, on the cross, Christ was abandoned by God.

Thus, to live into our co-crucifixion is to live in a space where we experience and acknowledge that we are forsaken, that there has been no miraculous deliverance. The church has to create space for this embrace of darkness. Rollins speaks of our common mythology–the one that makes us all want to believe in God–that things will get better because God is present to deliver.

When we suffer, there will always be an army of Job’s comforters who attempt to save our mythologies, and like Job, we must resist them.

What does this have to do with the church? The church, wittingly or not, creates structures that reassure people that the experience of crucifixion isn’t what is truly real. The church’s confident sermons, its songs of comfort, tell us that the co-crucifixion is not ultimately determinative. “The structure acts as a security blanket that enables us to speak of the Crucifixion without ever undergoing its true liberating horror” (48).

The problem as Rollins outlines it is that when we have people celebrating divine presence in dozens of ways, we are enabled “to admit that absence and forsakenness are part of our faith without experincing the transformative trauma of this admission” (70). And, of course, while being the agents of certainty, many pastors secretly harbor the very doubts that they are covering other for others.

Instead, the community should be helping us acknowledge and find life in the midst of suffering. The “new life” of resurrection that Rollins will turn to in part two of the book is lived now as life is found within the suffering and trauma of the world.

Although he uses language and takes it to a level that I am not always comfortable with, Rollins makes a strong and important case in the first part of his book that crucifixion is a crucial component of the Christian life experience–not something to be overcome in order for us to know and live what is true, but something that is to be lived in as where we discover the truth about ourselves in the Christian story.

Next time, we’ll turn to what he says about resurrection. And this is where I’m going to want to part ways with Rollins, in order to embrace a paradox of saying yes to what he advocates while simultaneously saying yes to the hopes of traditional Christian piety.

Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book from the Speakeasy on Tap book review folks. The Federal Government wanted to make sure you knew this, so that you could have all the information you needed to determine whether I was basically paid advertising rather than an objective reviewer. Of course, I never told the folks at Howard that I’d write a positive review, but they gave me a copy anyway. So, now that you know, you can decide for yourself: will I buy the book, or is this word of Kirk simply too tainted to be believed? I hereby fulfill my duties to the Federal Government.

Teaching in Grace

December 13, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading, Church with 5 Comments

The final chapter of Church Dogmatics volume 1 returns to familiar themes: the importance of teaching, the grace which the church must entrust itself to so that it can continue teaching while it recognizes its own imperfections, and the mandate to continue teaching that the church must answer to in all circumstances.

I find myself once again wrestling with an ambivalent reaction to Barth.

Barth Teaches--But Does He Act?

On the one hand, he does well to keep insisting that the church must entrust itself to grace and continue teaching, not waiting for some presumed level of perfection to be attained before following its mandate. I have known too much, in the Reformed Tradition, of “waiting for the Spirit to move”/allegedly “keeping in step with the Spirit,” as an excuse not to pursue obedience.

But on the other hand, I continue in my dissatisfaction with Barth’s summary of the church’s vocation in under the rubric of “teaching.”

Even in the book where Jesus is most centrally depicted as “teacher,” and where the disciples are entrusted with carrying forward the teaching ministry of Jesus, they are not told to “go teach doctrine,” but instead, “Go… teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you.”

Doctrine is important. What we believe can delineate the saving story of God in which we are enveloped and within which we find our salvation.

However, the end of the church is not teaching, but obedience to what we are taught; not obeying the mandate to teach true doctrine, but the mandate to live a whole life following in the way and submitted to the instruction of the Teacher.

There is a rise in the love of old things in the church these days. Some people falling in love with the Reformers and their theology, some people falling in love with the church fathers; everyone falling in love with the liturgy.

The old things are good!

But there is a danger here that in getting wrapped up in the ancients we will get wrapped up in their fights; that in getting wrapped up in the controversies that lent them their identities we will wrap our own up in affirming the answers to the questions they gave.

We become the church that believes, and confesses through its practice, that our identity and highest calling is to teach true doctrine. And on the way to our theology classes, ancient texts clutched close to our breasts, we bless the homeless on the street: peace be upon you! be warm and well fed!

This is where I think Barth is dangerous: in affirming as the core of our identity the mistake that many of us, academics like my self most of all, are prone to fall into. Teaching is not what makes the church the church.

The self-giving love of Jesus has that honor, and our highest calling is to embody that story in our life together.

Abandoned by God

December 8, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Spirituality & Prayer with 11 Comments

“My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”

The stark cry of Jesus on the cross.

The cry of the man who ended up abandoned by God because he did exactly what God wanted him to do.

The cry of the man who had prayed to God for deliverance only to have his request denied.

The cry of untold others of us who find ourselves abandoned by God, not rescued from our trials, despite our prayers and, most disturbingly of all, in spite of our attempts to faithfully follow God in the world that is now the source of our death.

I had a conversation this week with someone who was living this: the experience of suffering, of rejection, the lure of death even, that stemmed from years of trying to be faithful only to have it fall apart.

The stories aren’t uncommon.

A young couple devotes themselves to the church community. They know that this is is the means God has ordained for their spiritual growth and health. The find themselves spiritually and emotionally abused.

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

A professor at a Christian school or pastor of a particular church serve faithfully—with true fidelity to both God and their congregation, only to be run out because of politics, because of theology.

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

A young couple diligently seeks the guidance of God before committing to engagement and marriage, commitedly works through their issues in therapy and counseling, continuing the relationship in the face of what appear to be insurmountable obstacles, relying on the Lord’s strength, only to end up divorced.

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

The bottom line is this: the feeling of abandonment by God is more severe the greater our conviction that what we’ve done, and the point where we’ve been abandoned, has been done in order to honor God, in what is true obedience to scripture combined with our personal sense of calling.

Here’s the point: any experience of emotional trauma can wreak havoc on your relationships, including your relationship with God. And, when the reason we were in the circumstance in the first place is not our own creative notion but a response to the calling of God, that relational dissonance is amplified incalculably.

In other words: don’t be surprised if your experience of / relationship with God takes a huge hit as you struggle with that rejection or suffering that comes from faithfulness.

As I talk with people who have gone through these things (including myself, to whom I speak more than I speak to most people), it often takes people years to begin experiencing again what they know to be true in their heads with respect to God’s continued presence, guidance, and even provision of new and better ways.

When Jesus was most faithful to God, he also experienced the profundity of abandonment.

Our calling to take up our cross and follow, as much as we might hope it will mean that Jesus experienced it so we won’t have to, often means the opposite: that we will recapitulate his experience in ourselves.

So what is faith for the people of God?

Continuing to trust that the God who raised the Lord Jesus from the dead will raise us also with Jesus.

It is trusting that the suffering is not a sign of faithlessness from us, an indication that we were “out of God’s will.”

It is trusting, and praying, that we will yet praise the name of the Lord in the land of the living, among our brothers and sisters who will celebrate our deliverance along with us.

Love & Labor

November 3, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Culture, Spirituality & Prayer with 5 Comments

The first house that Laura and I bought needed a lot of cosmetic love.

The first day we owned it I pulled out the avocado green dishwasher with a couple buddies. And, yes, the old shut-offs were leaky so water was soon cascading into the basement. Within a couple of months, though, we had laid the kitchen tile, painted the cabinets, replaced the counter tops, changed the sink fixture, moved in the new appliances–and voila! The kitchen was beautiful (and all decked out to the Night Kitchen theme).

With saws and nails and hammers in hand, we loved on the dining room by tacking up wainscoting and chair rail, painting with a silver linen look, and changing out the light fixture.

Image: dan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I love that first house, not because it was an awesome house, but because we poured our labor into it.

Last weekend, I finally made good on a vision for planting some flowery vines and other things in front of our house here in San Francisco. It wasn’t much, but it makes a huge difference in how I see the house. And I’m proud of the my house here for perhaps the first time. I love the way those changes enhance the way it looks.

It wasn’t love that made me labor, it was labor that made me love.

John Locke proposed that mixing your labor with the soil was how property rights developed. I don’t know about his theories of government or his history, but I know the feeling he’s talking about. When you mix your labor with something, you feel like it’s yours.

The same goes for our relationships.

Once upon a time, the main pre-marriage counseling that my circle was into was a set of bootlegged Tim Keller sermons. He was talking at one point about how we treat children differently from our spouses: “By the time that child is 18 years old, even if he has no redeeming qualities whatsoever, you love him. Why? Because you’ve spent the past 18 years pouring yourself into him.” Conversely, in marriage, we hope to find our fulfillment by having our own needs met by the other rather than discovering love in pouring our life into our spouse.

And there’s the trick. Too often in our relationships we look for someone, or something in the case of organizations, that are worth loving, and then envision ourselves laboring there–at least for as long as the initial infatuation lasts.

But perhaps that is only a quick fix. Perhaps real love doesn’t work that way. Perhaps real love, be it of an individual or a community, is not about responding to love with labor, but cultivating love through our labors. Perhaps the dynamic that more truly satisfies, the place where more profound love, develops, is not in the discovery of the lovely, but in the cultivation of love through our giving ourselves to our beloved.

Can we ever love a church if we ask it to meet our needs? Or will we only love it if we give ourselves to it? Can we ever love a city if we only use its resources to meet our expectations? Or will we only love if we pour out our lives in making it better?

Mix a little labor. See what happens.

Jesus Eschatology

October 17, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 16 Comments

When I last made an impassioned plea for eschatology, I said that eschatology is what happens when the people of God, not seeing the promises of God with their own eyes, nonetheless continue to believe that God will make good on what God has promised.

More specifically, I suggested that eschatology needs to be read as one dynamic of the story of Jesus–not as a self-contained entity to be strung together based on various Bible verses.

So what is Jesus-story eschatology? It is about the goal of this world breaking into history with the advent of Jesus, the Messiah.

When Jesus sets out, he proclaims, “The time has been fulfilled! The reign of God has come near!”

As I like to tell my students, Mark gives us a two-sentence sermon, but then two chapters of stories: the stories are the way that Mark shows us what it means that the time is fulfilled and the kingdom drawn near.

The reign of God is breaking into the world through

  • authoritative teaching
  • power over hostile spirits
  • power over physical illness
  • power over social and religious isolation
  • power over the guilt of sin
  • an open invitation into the reconfigured people of God

What is the eschatology that Jesus brings about? It is the regathering of the people as promised, the restoration of the people to full standing in God’s family. It is a defeat of the hostile powers that warred against God’s people to keep those people from experiencing the fulness of the blessing of God.

It is even the provision of an abundant land, where the baskets of grain overflow.

All of this means that the reign of God has drawn near. In the person of Jesus, the king of God’s kingdom, God is restoring the earth to rights.

But here is where we have to be careful. In fact, we are right up to the point where the history of Christianity has shown us that we are always most often prone to go astray.

Image: Sura Nualpradid / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The danger is that by embracing an inaugurated eschatology we will get the idea that we are now able, at long last, to walk by sight. The disciples thought they understood the abundance of the kingdom that was unfolding before their eyes. They were pretty sure it meant that the throne of the king would be established in Jerusalem, with them on thrones next to it.

But that’s not how the kingdom works.

What they should have learned from the parables, what they should have learned from the feeding of the 5,000 and the feeding of the 4,000 is that the kingdom breaks in where there is nothing we can see with our eyes capable of producing the needed abundance.

What they should have been ready for after eight chapters of watching a Galilean peasant walk about doing miracles, bringing healing and life out of despair, is that the ultimate victory of life in the age to come is ushered in by the ultimate nothingness (death) bearing fruit in an incalculable harvest (through Jesus’ resurrection).

Eschatology is the refusal to give up on the promises of God, even when it looks like God has given up on us and on his world.

Inaugurated eschatology is the conviction that the power of the kingdom, the promised fullness of God, will burst forth and provide in rich abundance here and now, even when we cannot see with our eyes the fullness of the harvest.

Inaugurated eschatology is the summons to move out on faith, trusting that the smallest seed will sprout and bring forth a plant in which all the birds of the air can find their food.

Inaugurated eschatology is the summons to begin to feed the hungry with the little we have, trusting that the God’s kingdom economy of abundance is not constrained by the lack by which we would measure it.

Inaugurated eschatology is trusting that if we truly become servants, loving others with the self-giving love of God in Christ, that life untold will spring forth from that place of death.

The danger of inaugurated eschatology is triumphalism, that in our round proclamations that all things are made new we might miss the fact that we cannot measure with our eyes and hands, yet, the abundance of God’s kingdom.

The solution is to remember that it is still eschatology, about the end–and that in Jesus-eschatology the great and climactic end comes by way of the cross.

We still walk by faith, not by sight. And the way we walk is the one to which the Crucified summoned us: take up your cross and follow me.

Theology is Important

August 26, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 13 Comments

For all of my moaning about certain ways of doing theology or thinking of Christian identity in particular theologized ways, I have something even more important to say, and I hope it’s not lost amid the cries and protests.

Theology is important.

I do worry about certain ways of doing theology, and want to push for a reconeptualization of Christian theology away from systematic theology and confessional theology and creedal theology to something that more inherently embodies the narrative character of scripture, God, the church, and (I believe) the cosmos.

But to call for a new way of doing things is not the same as rejecting theological enterprise out of hand. I am a theologian. I am a theological reader of scripture.

And, in my better moments, I even realize that the theologizing done by the councils of the church was a faithful enactment of their own calling to say for their time and place what needed to be said then and there.

Moreover, I believe we should, as is so often advocated, learn from history so that we do not repeat its mistakes. It’s just that I happen to see in that history a series of mistakes by the “winners” that should be avoided rather than a series of heresies by the “losers” that are ever in danger of reproduction.

Both, of course, can be dangers, but given the thousands year history of judging salvation by statements of doctrine, I think that the pendulum swing to assessing salvation by faithful or unfaithful practice is a salutary one.

For this time. For this place.

But then, how will we know what we’re supposed to do? There’s a lot of theology that goes into that: faith in a theological narrative that says that the Suffering One is not a victim or a mistake, but the very means for God’s salvation of the world.

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