Tag Archive - cruciformity

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.

Colloquium on Theological Interpretation, Day 1

August 19, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Culture with 2 Comments

I am currently in Auckland, NZ, attending the Colloquium on Theological Interpretation at Laidlaw College.

The environment at the conference is excellent, as have been almost all of the papers.

I won’t bore you with an extended recap of the 8ish papers I heard today, but there have been some common threads that ran through several of the things I heard–common concerns that I take as very good signs for the practice of theological interpretation.

Two of the papers today from OT scholars touched on issues of theodicy–and anti-theodicy. One was focusing on Lamentations and exploring the polyphonic nature of the text–there is dire complaint, there is defending of God, there is a repentant man a complaining woman, a narrator.

The questions the paper was exploring pertained to the ramifications of allowing each voice to stand, without resolving any one perspective into the perspective of another. The paper was pressing the question of what it might mean for communal praxis to embody the type of point, counterpoint; theodicy, anti-theodicy that we find in Lamentations. Similarly, a second OT paper wrestled with the viability of OT theodicy from another angle.

Then, three of the papers that focused on the NT were exploring some aspect of the crucified Christ and/or love as a driving force in our readings of scripture. I was angling for the story of Christ crucified as the controlling identity marker, hermeneutic, and ethic; another presenter used the category of love from John 14 as the essential component to the hermeneutic that leads us into all truth; and a third presenter discussed the Spirit in Galatians as the Spirit of the crucified Christ who, as this Christ-Spirit, leads Jesus’ followers into the life of new creation.

The common thread in all this is that the papers demonstrated a common drive toward a praxis that is both theologically and exegetically viable.

Much of what I’ve heard today represents, to me, the best of what theological interpretation can be. It is not a strong-arming of difficult texts so that they fit preconceived ideas of Christian theology. That caricature of Christian readings of scripture was nowhere to be found today.

Instead, it was a series of demonstrations that what these ancient texts say can be, and should be, life-giving for the communities that receive them as scripture. Faithful exegesis, even when it is somewhat destabilizing of our preconceptions about “how things are” or how they should be, perhaps especially when destabilizing, has the power to draw us to not merely saying the right things about God but acting more faithfully as the people of God.

Bounded or Centered? (Pt. 1)

August 17, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 18 Comments

As I have been in my grudge match to the death with the Rule of Faith as a “rule,” one critique I regularly find myself bringing is that it creates a bounded set. My instinct has been that so conceptualizing the Christian faith is not only a category mistake but ethically disastrous.

In short, once we have defined Christianity as a set of beliefs that must be maintained in order to be faithful Christians, then Christian ethics boils down to maintaining “the faith” that is so delineated.

What should Christians do? Defend the borders.

I have recently stumbled upon the work of Paul Hiebert. Here is what he says about bounded sets:

  1. The category is created by listing essential characteristics something must posses in order to belong to the set
  2. The category is defined by a clear boundary
  3. The objects form a homogeneous group
  4. “Bounded sets are essentially static sets”
  5. Within Western conceptual categories, bounded sets tend to be ontological sets, reflecting an absolute, unchanging nature of reality.

Two things strike me here: the quote, point 4, is the one that I most often rail against here. Christian theology is not a static set, but something dynamically in process in the ongoing story of the church. See yesterday’s post: The church has to grow up to the fact that things are not simply givens, so we cannot take an 1800 year old statement as the defining marker of who we are and what we should do.

But here’s the other problem, as Hiebert lays it out. On point 2, the category is formed by a clear boundary.

What does this mean in practice? He says:

Most of the effort in defining the category is spent defining and maintaining the boundary. Not only must we say what an apple is, we must also clearly differentiate it from oranges, pears, and similar objects that belong to the same domain but are not apples. The central question, therefore, is whether an object is inside or outside the category.

The ethic entailed in a bounded-set system is defining and maintaining the boundary.

When we envision Christianity as a bounded-set, we are consigning ourselves to a lifetime of boundary guarding. Absent from all this, of course, are other measures of Christian fidelity–such as embodying the self-giving love of Christ or even walking in accordance with the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount.

Christianity bounded the “Rule of Faith” becomes, throughout Church History, a self-referential religion, concerned with keeping itself together, and keeping out the heterodox.

This is not to say, of course, that it is without biblical precedent.There were, after all, the disciples who bravely fended off the would-be intruders upon their bounded world: “Lord, we saw a man casting out demons in your name, but he was not with us, so we forbid him!”

So what is a centered set? Stay tuned…

Storied Exhortation

August 14, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 3 Comments

At The Table, we have been reorienting toward our story by reading together The Story of God the Story of Us.

Today was Torah day. Or, as Sean Gladding put it: Community. The community God charters at Sinai.

Gladding draws our attention to the historical prologue: the recounting of what the great king has done for the people that underscores for them why the king is worthy of their loyalty.

I am YHWH your God who brought you up out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.

Jekuthiel Sofer Decalogue, Public Domain

The reason the Decalogue must be obeyed? This God has rescued this people and then given them these commands. Israel’s eternal summons to obey Torah is reestablished as it says year after year, in the Passover celebration, “We were slaves in the Land of Egypt, but God brought us out…” (Deut 6).

Not “they.”

“We.”

And, therefore, YHWH gets to command us to obey (Deut 6).

And, therefore, when our story is defined by a different moment, our entire ethic is transformed.

We are not the Exodus people. We are the Christ people.

Our story is that when we were enslaved, the Son of Man gave his life as a ransom for all; God did not spare God’s own son but delivered him up for us all.

Therefore, to love the Lord our God with all our heart means to receive and submit to the King whom God has enthroned.

Therefore, to love our neighbor as ourselves means to walk in the way of the greatest love: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

To be the Exodus people meant to obey the Decalogue as a summary and promise of adherence to all 613 commands.

To be the Jesus people means that we walk in the way of the cross, following Jesus and thereby honoring God.

Hermeneutics and Ethics

August 12, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 9 Comments

A day or two ago I talked a bit about how we might think through the human origins question.

To me, the most important issue confronting Christians is not what answers we give to questions but how we handle them. That’s one of the most significant factors behind my “Storied Theology” project: I want us to reconceptualize what Christianity is, so that we will not only interpret the bible differently, but act differently as well.

This is not because I don’t think that answers matter, or because I have some morbid, academic interest in the ways we carry out theological debate and want to write a book on argumentation.

I want us to think, interpret, and act differently because I have high levels of frustration at the pervasive failure of Christians to act Christianly toward one another or toward the world outside the church.

And I do mean that we have not acted like Christians. But of course, this means that I have to have some idea of what defines Christianity, which means that I probably have a different idea about that than the people who are defending their actions in the name of Christ.

And this is where the whole bounded-set, centered-set, river analogy comes in.

For the folks who are demanding that Adam is a do-or-die figure for Christianity, Christianity is a set of persons or beliefs bounded by a string of theological commitments. This means that anyone transgressing those theological borders must either be shot while trying to escape or else sealed off from the sheep whom those borders are erected to protect.

Image: renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net


The ethic of bounded-set Christianity is service to, and preservation of, the tradition of the church. This was so when Irenaeus was propagating the rule of truth as the measure for biblical interpretation, and it is so for the Christians who would bite, devour, and consume one another due to variance in theological commitment.

We have to think of the place of Christian theology in more dynamic terms–not so that we can embrace every whim of passing theological fancy, but so that we can act as though (1) variation in theology does not threaten the integrity of Jesus Christ who is, himself, the Truth, and thus (2) conversation about new ideas will not bring the church to ruin.

The church is not doctrine.

The church is the body of the crucified Christ.

Therefore, we do not read scripture to preserve doctrines.

We read scripture to discover what it means that the crucified Christ is the resurrected Lord over all.

Therefore, we do not act as though preserving doctrine is our highest calling.

We act as though the truth of Christ is preserved through a people enacting upon the world the saving narrative of the crucified messiah.

Christ is All: Entry and Continuing

July 24, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 1 Comment

Continue as you were called. This is the admonition in Col 2:6ff.

And it underscores how important it is that we get our story straight right from the beginning.

The way that we come to faith, the story about Jesus that we hear and believe and fall in love with, is going to exercise a considerable power over our understanding of what the rest of our life might look like. And rightfully so.

The portrait of salvation in Christ that Paul depicts in Col 2 is full of indications of how we might misstep in walking after Christ, ways that our following might depart from our embrace by God.

The first admonition to allow deep roots and growth in Christ to overflow with Thanksgiving. Paul will go on to describe roadblocks to faithful Christian life–roadblocks, in essence, to thankfulness. A thankful spirit arises from knowing that the story with which God embraced us is the reality of our life in the present.

When we’re confronted with traditions of people–be they God’s people such as Israel or our Christian theological traditions–or the philosophies of other people, we are not in the presence of something that must be mastered in order to be fully embraced in the family of God. God has accepted us in Christ. Full stop. Thus, it is only in Christ that we continue with God.

Not only are philosophies and traditions “of people,” they hinder our thankfulness for this very reason. They raise a specter that must be conquered before one can “really” know God. They vacate the truth of our identity as God’s beloved children.

Christ is great: greater than any ruler or authority. And, this greatness is the source of our own life. We are in this great one, and therefore not in need of anything else to be esteemed in the eyes of God. We continue in him as we have learned him: Jesus is the supreme Lord of all, the one in whom God receives people to Himself.

Co-crucifixion with Christ has marked us out as God’s covenant people. We are in him. This means that both the guilt and the power of sin are done away. “God made you alive with Christ and forgave all the things you had done wrong” (Col 2:13, CEB).

The positive life we need to embrace is ours in union with the resurrected Christ. The life of sin and guilt and shame we need to leave behind is left behind in that old humanity who died with Christ on the cross.

We come to God only in Christ; and thus we continue only in Christ.

And, with such a holistic embrace by God, our lives are stirred to thanksgiving. We already have all that we need.

Don’t let anyone hoodwink you.

What Threatens the Chuch?

July 23, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 24 Comments

In the wake of the Rob Bell controversy, his editor at HarperOne, Mickey Maudlin, wrote a reflection on what transpired.

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.

From Love to Love

July 18, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading, Bible Thoughts with 10 Comments

If people are found by God, if God reveals Godself to them and draws people into relationship, then we can embark along the road of asking what life in such a relationship might look like. Karl Barth, true to form, begins with the given, with the confession that God has revealed, that God by the Spirit has drawn people into God’s family, that God has first loved us.

And from here, he invites us to consider what the life of the children of God is to be like–a life of love, and a life of praise (Church Dogmatics §18).

In wrestling with the topic of love, Barth gets off to a promising start (§18.2). He insists that we not allow our own vague notions of love to be our standard for the love that God demands of us. Instead, we come to the drama of salvation and learn from this what the love of God is. And then we know what this love is that we are called to emulate.

We know love, Barth insists, only in light of the “outwardness” of God’s love to us–the occurrence of love in revelation (which would mean, in Jesus Christ). This is exactly right.

Then things go downhill.

What we learn from this love toward us, Barth asserts, is “the inwardness of God,” that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and therefore God is love in himself before people ever come on the scene.

But when Barth turns to establish these points, the texts all point in the same direction: not toward love as some transhistorical, Trinitarian reality, but as the reality we know–and that IS–simply as the work of God in Jesus Christ to rescue humanity.

The great claim, “God is love,” is substantiated by saying that love is not our love for God, but God’s love in giving his son as a sacrifice for our sins; it is backed up by saying that love is God’s sending of the Son so that we can live through him.

God’s love is known in the giving of Jesus on the cross.

Barth’s eagerness to transpose this into Trinitarian eternal realities bodes ill for the remaining part of the chapter, also. The whole of this section wanders from Barth’s own stated premise: that God’s love for us first shows what our love in turn is to be.

Where this should have taken Barth was in realizing that God’s love in the giving of the Son is the Son’s love in giving of himself that we are called to execute in our love for one another. It should have led him to work out a paradigm of loving God that entails participating in the mission of God by giving ourselves so that others might live in this new human family that God is creating.

Instead, Barth gets mired in a debilitating theological program of saying that love to God is merely recognizing again and again that we seek God as those who know we will be found by grace. The notion that we are always sinners, always received only by grace, creates a vision of Christian love that is thin, at best: always attempting to relive the reality of being found afresh by God as a sinner saved by grace.

This is not the picture of love that the saving cross of Christ generates. We love not merely as recipients of grace, but as those who enact the saving story of Jesus in communities that bear Jesus’ name.

There is a certain genius to Barth’s system: with a definition of love that simply means coming to be received by God’s grace, he cuts off the possibility that we have to confess that someone outside of Christ is, in fact, loving God or loving neighbor better than we who confess Christ’s name.

To my mind, Barth’s solution is too easy.

I think it is important to say, instead, that to love God and love neighbor looks like living the self-sacrificial life of the cross, and that, therefore, Christians will always be confronted with those who are not “in Christ” who appear to be living the story better than ourselves. And, these should be the impetus for us to renew our repentance and renew our love rather than redefining love such that we can privately seek God’s face without allow any conviction to develop in the face of our failure to love.

Life Verse

July 18, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Spirituality & Prayer with 5 Comments

Sometimes people ask if I have, or had at one time, a “life verse.”

I say no.

I’m not a “life verse” kind of person. In confronting this question I usually feel like I’m being asked a version of that recurring query from childhood, “Who is your hero?” I never had a hero–not in the form of a human being real or imagined, and not in the form of a Bible verse.

I did come close, though, when I worked at a Christian summer camp. Since I knew that it was quite pious to include references to Bible verses at the end of one’s letters, I would frequently add, after my signature, “Gal 6:11“.

I’m so pious.

But I might have to repent of my adamant declaration that I have no life verse. This thought occurred to me after posting yesterday about my kids’ desire to be in charge, to lead, to run out front.

Once upon a time, about five years ago, I was wrestling with the culmination of a series of deep disappointments. Things weren’t going as I had hoped and dreamed and planned. I was wrestling deeply with questions of what it looks like to be faithful to God in the face of doors that had been shut–but which I had only been attempting to walk through because I believed I was so called.

Image: africa / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

In the middle of all that disappointment and discouragement, I read in Mark 10 (or perhaps Matthew 20), “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise power over them, but it shall not be so among you.”

That last bit: it shall not be so among you, οὐχ οὕτος ἐστιν ἐν ὑμῖν, has since summed up for me the difference between walking in the way of Christ and walking in the way of the world. Jesus goes on to say that the alternative vision of “greatness” he brings into the world is the one in which the Son of Man serves and gives his life as a ransom for many.

The way of Jesus is the way of the cross. So when confronted with visions of glory–either as a temptation or in the disappointment of not getting what I’d hoped, I hear those words in the back of my head: οὐχ οὕτος ἐστιν ἐν ὑμῖν. And I am reminded, as if against my will, of the way of Jesus.

A life verse has imposed itself upon me.

Despite my best efforts.

I’m in Charge!

July 17, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Spirituality & Prayer with 7 Comments

Sometimes my kids s
how me everything I hope to one day be. In the love they show and stir up in me I catch glimpses of what true and unselfish love might look like.

Sometimes they open my eyes to how much the gospel demands that we be transformed into who we are not.

Nobody has to teach a child to scream and hit either to get what they want or simply from the caprice of the moment. Turning the other cheek will require a profound conversion of the mind and heart.

The other day six year old was in a shouting match with no-quite-four year old younger brother. The point at issue? Who gets to lead, who gets to be in charge.

In this case, the leader was in charge of the parade.

And, of course, being in charge meant being at the front of the line and determining all the songs and beats and parade route that would wind through the highways and bi-ways of our 1100+ sq feet of “sprawling” San Francisco town house.

To lead was to be in charge. To be in charge was to command and issue orders. To command and issue orders was to go first and be followed.

And for a second I caught a glimpse of the massive work of conversion that the Spirit of the Crucified must perform in God’s people if we are to lead after the manner of the Servant.

If taking the form of the servant is an obedience in leadership and “being in charge” that is to typify the people of God, then it must put to death the leadership and being in charge that demands. It must put to death the sort of being in charge that places itself in front at all times.

Neither of my kids wanted to be in charge in order to create space for the other to thrive. Both wanted to be in charge in anticipation that there, at the front of the line, as leader of the band, was the only way to have themselves duly celebrated.

In their play, they were perfect disciples, squabbling with one another and angling with Jesus for positions of greatness, to sit at Jesus’ right hand and left. They, like the Lords of the Gentiles, were attempting to Lord their little position of power over one another.

And I saw in that squabble a mirror of my own all-too-imperfect human heart.

And I heard the renewed call to repentance from the mouth of Jesus: “It shall not be so among you.”

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