Tag Archive - cruciformity

CT on Mohler (and me on the gospel story)

September 28, 2010 in Academia, Church with 21 Comments

Today I got an e-mail informing me that I could now access the latest edition of Christianity Today online in a cool, magazine-layout format. I confess to opening the ezine with some trepidation, inasmuch as the cover story was “Reformer”, and the subject was Al Mohler, president of Southern Seminary.

I grew up Southern Baptist. As I was coming through elementary school and into high school I heard of how things were going at the annual Southern Baptist Convention–complete with rumors about bussing people in to stack the key votes.

I lived in North Carolina and so got to hear tales of “the revival at Southeastern Seminary”, which was the winning side’s way of talking about “the fundamentalist takeover” that the losers mourned in retrospect.

So I was worried about whether this article, bearing a title that struck me as positive, might be unduly adulatory.

But it wasn’t.

Nor was it unduly condemnatory.

It struck me as striking just the right tone, in fact. It highlights Mohler’s reformed commitments (hence “Reformer”), speaks to how these are crucial in his theology, and allows for other voices to distance themselves from that as a baptist commitment.

The article talks about Mohler’s early seminary years in which he had been willing for a time to embrace an egalitarian position on gender–until he got caught not being able to give a biblical defense of it. It outlines how this and other interpretive decisions are wedded to his commitment to inerrancy.

The article also speaks of Mohler’s commitment to reading and learning and offering a thoughtful, articulate response to the challenges our culture is facing.

I know that you are all going to find this hard to believe, but I do get worked up about some things pretty easily. One of those things is when Christians engage in power-grabbing. This ruffles my feathers to the right and to the left.

Although the article did not major on the dynamics of the Mohler-led house-cleaning at Southern or the precedent conservative takeover of the SBC, both of those rankle me. (And yes, I know that folks on the left do and/or attempt the same things in various ecclessial contexts and that ruffles my feathers just as much–but this article was about Mohler within the SBC!)

And this is where the questions about our commitment to the gospel get deadly serious for me.

When Jesus predicted his death, the next thing his disciples would do, inevitably, would be to shove that aside and start working out other paths to glory. “Which is going to be greatest?” they argued. “Can we sit at your right and left?” they asked. “Never Lord, you can’t die–God rebuke you!” Peter protested.

And, each time, Jesus said to them, “The cross is not just about me, it’s also about my followers.”

More than any theological system might uphold or implicitly deny the gospel, I worry that our pursuit of power by means other than the self-sacrifice–the kind of cruciform life that even allows our enemies to think that they have won–corrodes the faith, indicating that, in fact, the faith which we are living is not the following of Jesus to which we’re called.

While Mohler’s colleagues voice concerns about his Calvinism and its effects on evangelism, and while Mohler worries about their non-Calvinism and the intellectual integrity with which they can consistently articulate the gospel, I worry that the actions of pursuing power by the means of the world blows over the whole house.

This is not to question Mohler’s salvation, or that of the other architects of the SBC transtion over the past 30 years, but to suggest that we in America have certain ways of getting our gospel story wrong. And Jesus-backed power grabbing seems to be one of our collective, besetting sins.

The Cross: Putting It All Together

September 19, 2010 in Bible Thoughts, Church with 5 Comments

I’ve been hanging around 1 Corinthians a bit lately. The Corinthian correspondence is a tremendous resource for the church in my part of the world. Divisions? We got some of that. People rallying to some teachers over against others? We got that. People venerating folks who have “arrived” according to the standards of our society? We got that. Separating ourselves from folks who are on the lower rungs of the social pecking order? Alas, we got that as well.

Now the question that I hope haunts us as we reflect on all this: why does Paul keep turning to the cross in 1 Corinthians to address parallel realities in the first century? How does “the word of the cross” give him leverage to address the same types of issues that characterize our own contexts (sometimes on a much larger scale)?

Image: Unity by Monica Stewart

In 1 Corinthians 1 the issue is division.

Paul here brings out the “word of the cross” as what is preached–and what should unite the Corinthian factions. Because there is one message, there should also be only one group of people proclaiming Christ together. No one should identify based on a teacher. To self-identify based on a teacher is to wrongly tell the story of the gospel itself.

“Each one says ‘I am of Paul,’ ‘I am of Apollos,’… Has Christ been divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Were you baptized into the name of Paul?”

The story that we tell is the story of Christ crucified, and to tell our particular story as the story of a great teacher is to get that story wrong.

The story that we tell is the story of Christ crucified. Entry into this story is through baptism that unites us to the crucified Christ. We are not baptized into the name of our great teachers, into the name of our particular theological traditions.

The only way to get our story straight is to continually tell our story as the story of Christ crucified, not as the story of our particular branch’s history or theology. While there is wisdom in learning our traditions, while there is wisdom in learning the history of the church, and while we will all identify more closely with some branches of the church than others, I see in these words of Paul a call for a holy circumvention of our histories.

To be transformed by the renewing of our minds is to have our identities cast, first and foremost, by the affinity we all have with one another as those who have been baptized into Christ. This requires an active work of reconfiguration of our identities: I am not first Baptist or Presbyterian or Methodist or liberal or conservative or evangelical or fundamentalist or progressive or big tent or small ghetto.

The saving story is not the story of my branch of the church, the saving story is the story of the crucified messiah. My salvation is not the story of being scripted into the post-conservative evangelical world of post-modern American Christianity. It is being cast into the Christian drama by being united to the crucified Christ through baptism, Spirit, and faith.

In case you didn’t notice, this is really, really hard.

As someone whose theology is moving from right to left over the past 15 years, I struggle to look to the more conservative expressions of Christianity and embrace those movements as brothers and sisters. I don’t want to be identified with them. And yet, that is part of my “in Christ” family.

The cross should be putting us all together–because it is our story.

We often make the mistake of thinking that we need to get our story straight, and then we need to learn how to apply that story in various ways. But what I learn from 1 Corinthians is that the way we live out our communal Christian identity is, itself, a reading of the story that is to some degree faithful, and probably to some degree faithless to our story.

In the sermonette I linked here last week, I talked about one thing I believe God is doing in the world. It went something like this: in the era of Christendom, we had the luxury to assume Christianity and therefore draw people to ourselves by showing that we are more right, that we have better theology.

In the post-Christendom world, our bluff is called. There is no persuasiveness in the claim to have a better theology if that better theology is not making us better, more loving and unified people. In fact, if we are not loving, if we are not coming together in greater unity, we are not getting our story straight at all.

What? Was Al Mohler crucified for you? Or were you baptized into the name of Tony Jones?…

Reflecting on House Church

September 2, 2010 in Church, Culture with 19 Comments

My friend (and not just on Facebook!) John Armstrong has posted a couple of thoughts about “the home church movement”, the first listing some of its draw and the second outlining some of his concerns.

Since I attend a house church, I thought I’d weigh in on his thoughts with some of my own thrown in for good measure.

His first post outlined a number of the “draws” of home churches, as he put it. I might even say that some of these are strengths.

A number of his points have to do with the way that the structure and/or feel of such a group is transformed by the absence of a professional minister and formal leadership. Not only is there a more relational feel, but there is more sharing in the ministry and worship and business-like or political power structures are less of a driving dynamic.

Here, John nails one of the “negative” components of my own move away from denominational church settings into the house church world. Traditional churches tend toward the acquisition of power, the exercise of control, and the focusing of the ministry on a few.

In denominational churches, this is often associated with power in the bureaucracy. Power and control are exercised through regional bodies that oversee how you can and cannot deal with pastors, pastoral calls, ordinations, teachings that cut against the grain of church teaching, etc. I am convinced that the pastoral transition process in the one mainline denomination I have been part of was created for the sole purpose of making sure that before another permanent pastor can resume leadership of a congregation that said congregation will be as dead and demoralized as possible. That way, if the new pastor succeeds it will only be because the God who gives life to the dead is at work in her or him.

I do fear that these bureaucratic developments are inherently antithetical to the economy of the Kingdom of God. I worry about their tendency to embody the disciples’ plea to be allowed to call down fire from heaven on anyone who happens to reject our message. I worry about their tendency to embody the disciples’ requests to sit at Jesus’ right hand and his left.

In house church, there can be no illusions about “greatness on earth” being God’s will for his pastor, despite the way that such greatness undermines the story of the cross. I don’t think that everyone needs to be in a house church, and I don’t think that denominational or more formal churches are inherently bad. But, I do think that there needs to be a constant witness of each to the potential pitfalls of the other. In the case of the deceptive allures of power, and the easy tendency for strong leaders to turn the worship of God into megalomaniacal self-promotion, I think the home church has the power to testify to the kingdom whose economy declares that the first shall be last and that the least is greatest.

Or, to put it more simply: you can’t control the work of God or confine it to your system. And, God will work things in surprising places that seem incapable of doing the great things open to those with more resources and prestige.

One thing John doesn’t say in his post that was a crucial factor for me, and related to the issue of power, is that of money. If power was one negative force, repelling me from denominationally associated churches, money was the other. Yes, there’s the business of upkeep of buildings and pastoral paychecks that make the church itself part of the money suck. And, yes, I’ve been through fund raising efforts for buildings that turned my stomach a little.

But the point at which I was pushed over the edge was when I was having a conversation with someone who wanted to appeal a Presbytery’s decision about something. The cost? Getting a team of churches together who would agree to cover the legal bills that were anticipated to be well in excess of $100,000.

That conversation was where I said, “I cannot be part of [this] denomination. Jesus cannot be happy that we are spending his money this way.” The issue wasn’t whether or not her particular appeal was warranted or important. The issue was the way that the denominational and bureaucratic structure sucked money away from the mission of God. And no, I will not agree that fighting a court case within your denomination’s judicatory is an expression of the mission of God.

Add to that the idea of funding professional, full-time ordained “pastors” to administer the local, regional, and national denominational bureaucracy, and I was at the end of it.

So now, rather than support a church building and staff and denominational politics and judiciaries, we have picked up a couple extra missionaries to support on a monthly basis, we give money to the local food pantry, and otherwise invest our ministry dollars in people and institutions that have made a more compelling case that they are working with God for the sort of Kingdom on earth that we pray for in reciting the Lord’s prayer.

This went on a bit longer than expected! Come back tomorrow and I’ll engage some other issues. Here I’ve laid out some of my the repulsions that pushed me away from big church, but there are also some positive draws that pull me toward the house church we’re part of. I’ll cover those in a subsequent post or two, and also engage some of John’s critiques/words of warning/growth areas for house churches.

Biblical Roots of Beck’s Civil Religion

August 31, 2010 in Bible Thoughts, Culture with 19 Comments

As I’ve caught various whiffs of Glenn Beck’s calls to America to turn back to God, I’ve simultaneously felt the biblical currents that enliven such a dream. Thought it is sometimes hard to see, and requires a little bit of reconstruction, Beck’s vision of a Christian nation is a thoroughly biblical idea.

We catch sight of it when Jesus comes proclaiming the reign of God–that it has come near, is here on earth already. The indications of its arrival are not lost on Jesus’ followers.

When Jesus is riding into Jerusalem, they proclaim him king: Hosanna! Here comes David’s kingdom!

When Jesus asks the disciples who they say he is, they answer quite clearly: You are that coming Christ!

Indeed, the disciples are not only the ones who confess this about Jesus, they are willing to lay down their lives for it. When Jesus is about to be arrested in the garden, a disciple (Peter) pulls out his sword and slices off an arresting agent’s ear.

When Jesus looks forward and sees death they help him find his way: No, Jesus! I rebuke you, said Peter.

Great, Jesus, interesting story about that coming death thing. Now, when you come in glory can brother here and I sit at your right hand and left?

The disciples continue to show us the importance of the nationalistic vision of the reign of God when their post-resurrection knowledge of the Messiah draws them to ask, “So, is this the time when you’re going to restore the kingdom to Israel?”

Yes, the civil religion of Glenn Beck has a rich, apostolic pedigree. It has behind it the apostles’ confessions, their swords, and their earnest expectations. God, the all powerful protector of the nation was their god as well. Civil religion is clearly a biblical idea.

Of course, Jesus responded to this idea, found in the Bible, with: “Get thee behind me Satan,” “you don’t know what you’re asking,” “put the sword away,” and “just go wait in the city until the Spirit comes and you finally understand what I’m talking about,” but that’s neither here nor there.

Authority, Compassion, & Kingdom

July 30, 2010 in Bible Thoughts, Culture with 0 Comments

Yesterday’s post on the pragmatic nature of love in the Kingdom of God raised some good questions, and provoked a couple further thoughts for yours truly. (Incidentally, this is one reason I blog: not because I have something to say all the time, but because often if I just say something there will be a conversation that furthers my own thinking, pushes me to explore a new crevice, shows me the limits of my own understanding.)

The very good question was raised about individual salvation, and the possibility that someone might gain the whole world and yet forfeit his soul.

This got me thinking a bit about who comes to Jesus, and what such an approach might signify.

The main thrust of my reflections from yesterday was, essentially, that Jesus [almost] never does a bait-and-switch. If someone comes in asking for healing, he doesn’t tell them that what they really need is to have their soul set right with God. He seems to trust that they have actually come to him to have their real problem dealt with.

We evangelicals are often much less comfortable with such attention to worldly needs, fearing that providing for them might get in the way of supply what’s truly needful; or, using such provision as a bait-and-switch for the “real” thing, which is the message we bring with us.

But that got me thinking, Who are these people who come to Jesus? Why are they coming to him? Is there something in their coming that might indicate some level of faith? In fact, it got me thinking: why do people come to Jesus and who would we need to be in order for people to come to us?

Jesus’ inauguration of the Dominion of God indicated at least two things: (1) he had power/authority to control the world in which we’re living–changing it for the better, beating back its evils; and (2) he had the compassion to help those who would come to him with their need.

As I’ve been thinking about the failures of Christian love over the past couple of days, I’ve been honing in on 2 as the principal area in which we are failing to image Jesus for the world in which we live. And I find myself asking questions that would draw out answers to the question, “What kind of people would we need to be in order for even our apparent enemies to come and ask for help in time of need?”

If a Roman centurion would come to Jesus and ask for help in healing his servant, this tells me that he not only knew of Jesus’ great authority, but that Jesus’ use of that authority was not restricted to the insiders. I think we have failed here.

But here’s where some of the rub comes in–that centurion is still coming to Jesus with faith that Jesus is a man of sufficient authority to heal his ill servant. Not even in Israel has Jesus seen such faith. So even in the coming there’s a faith in the person of Jesus as Lord.

But that brings me back again to us. As those who bear Jesus’ name, who are called to extend his mission into our own time and place, do we so act that the world around looks at our deeds and says, “There is a place where great power is at work to transform the world for good”?

Do we so act that people see the power of the Spirit of the resurrected Christ flowing through us such that they would come to us to aid them in those places where they see that the world is not as it should be, in need of transformation?

And do we so act that the world, watching what we do, knows that it can come to us and find us, as those who act like our heavenly Father and firstborn brother, to be an ever present help in time of need?

Pragmatics of Love

July 29, 2010 in Bible Thoughts, Culture with 6 Comments

In something of a follow-up to yesterday’s post on homosexuality and justice, I had a few thoughts on the pragmatic nature of my argument about endorsing civil liberties as an expression of love. To be sure, there was a bit of a theological component as well, an appeal to Jesus’ commands to love our neighbor, but when it came right down to it, I argued that people know, to a certain degree, when they are being met with love and when they are being met with… well… something else.

Yesterday I alluded to the Good Samaritan story as one depiction of the pragmatic nature of love. But I think the thread is even more extensively woven through the Gospels narratives.

When we see Jesus encountering the world around him, we find him willing to respond to and rectify the ills of the felt needs of the people around him.

We cannot love without pragmatism. What we see in Jesus is that, for all that he was advancing an agenda to proclaim and inaugurate the reign of God, he was ever submitting himself to the agendas set by the people who came to him.

What this tells us about the Kingdom of God is that it is more extensive than the agenda of proclamation and conversion that we as Christians will always, to some extent, carry with us. Once we recognize that the Kingdom of God is not just about the saving of souls, or the sanctification of the church, but the wholesale reordering and rectification of the cosmos, then we realize not only the possibility but the responsibility to work for holistic restoration of the space within which we find ourselves.

Or, to put it more simply: I am as much an agent of the Kingdom of God when I work for accessible healthcare and when I proclaim that Jesus died for our sins.

When the gospel is big enough to rectify not only the sinful and enslaved condition of individual human hearts but the brokeness of human bodies and the corruption of human systems then we can see that the gospel itself gives us space to act as agents of the good news even where those who would benefit are not interested in bowing their knees to the resurrected Lord.

It’s when we apprehend the breadth of the gospel that we are free to serve and to love–being willing to respond to the needs of the people around us rather than leading with an agenda of conversion.

It’s then that we can see that holding onto a gospel call to faith and repentance is no enemy of agitating for the civil liberties of those who do not affirm the Lordship of the one who is giving them liberty.

Mark 10: The Heart of the Story

July 25, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 5 Comments

If I had to pick one passage of scripture that encapsulated the entirety of the Christian message, I might very well pick Mark 10:32-45.

I return to this passage repeatedly in my classes and in my reflections on what it means to live faithfully as a Christian, because here the story unfolds to show us not only what Jesus came to do, but also what it means for how we are, in turn to live. But that’s not all. The passage finds much of its power from its unveiling not of Jesus but of the human heart that hears and yet refuses to hear his call.

The first scene is Jesus’ teaching to the twelve: for the third time Jesus is predicting that what awaits in Jerusalem is his own rejection, death, and resurrection.

And, for the third time, the disciples respond in such a way as to show that they do not yet get what Jesus is on about.

James and John come asking for seats of glory: one at Jesus right hand and the other at Jesus’ left in his glory. Jesus then draws them back to his passion prediction: can you drink my cup or be baptized with my baptism?

And here is where we have to keep coming back over and over because it never seems to sink in. To be part of the kingdom that comes by way of the cross is to accept the cross as not only the saving event that occurred to Jesus but also the way of life to which w ourselves are called.

The cross is the narrative of Christianity, and our calling is to play out that narrative in the various worlds in which we find ourselves.

As if the story of James and John were not humiliating enough, the other disciples hear of it and grumble! Jesus’ response indicates that the source of their agitation is not that James and John have so clearly failed to apprehend the call to discipleship; instead, they are angry that James and John sought to edge them out for the prize that all of them wanted.

And so Jesus tells them all, again, that his cruciform ministry, if true, means that a new economy is in play; the way of power and glory as articulated by the Powers of the earth is being undone. Yes, of course, those who want to be great among the gentiles lord their power over others and wield the might of their authority…But…

But…

“But it shall not be thus among you.”

Did you get that part?

“But it shall not be thus among you.”

There’s your half-verse to memorize today.

There is a different way of living, a different way of understanding greatness, a different path of power that comes with the advent of the dominion of God: “Whoever wants to be great among you, that person must be y’all’s servant; and, whoever wants to be first among y’all, must be servant of all.”

On what basis can Jesus make such an absurd claim about power and glory?

On the basis of his own mission: “For even the son of man did not come to be served but to serve…” Note how his own mission forms the texture of the call to discipleship. Jesus is the servant to show his followers what their lives of service should look like.

You might also note the surprise of this claim. In Daniel 7, all dominions serve the son of man. Jesus inaugurates his reign by doing exactly the opposite.

The self-giving service of this son of man, the sacrifice of his life, yields the fruit of a redeemed people, a people ransomed from their slavery to the opposing forces we’ve seen throughout the Gospel. There, at last, is your interpretation of the cross as well: this self-giving service brings freedom.

So why would I pick this passage as one of my short list of possible passages that tell us everything we need to know?

(1) It tells us what Jesus did for us and what that means. He died and rose again–and this giving is an act of freeing, of ransom.

(2) It tells us what that means for our lives. Jesus served unto death, therefore we are to serve one another.

(3) It shows us how our hearts can confess Jesus as sovereign master, acknowledge even that he had to die for us, and yet fail altogether in drawing the conclusion that we are thereby freed to pursue greatness along the road of self-giving service. Instead, that creeping normalcy self-serving “giving” turns even our following of Jesus into an idol for our own selfish advancement.

Community: Faith’s Proving Ground

July 22, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 0 Comments

First John is replete with confident claims. Claims that those who really are part of the people of God won’t sin. Claims that those who do sin aren’t part. Claims that those who are part of the people will agree with what the author and community say. Claims that those who don’t listen aren’t truly born of God in the first place.

I find all this deeply challenging. It conjures up images of Gary Birdsong, the “pit preacher” I encountered at UNC Chapel Hill who used a verse from 1 John to claim a sinless life even while he stood pompously denouncing every individual at UNC for being steeped in sin–and the Christian groups not least of all.

I read it as part of my canon and recognize the voice as the voice of the faithful community that had been left by those who would not continue in the love to which they had been called–and yet at the same time I realize that if anyone today claimed that adherence to their own voice were such a sufficient proving ground for fidelity to God that I would (and have) run in the opposite direction as fast as my out-of-shape lungs would allow my legs to carry me.

And yet, there is a theological beauty in to the letter’s claims.

The letter understands that our relationship to God is not about a detached judicial standing (a trap we too often fall into in the post-Reformation west), but about transformative engagement. To be in the family of God is to bear anew the family likeness.

If we are followers of the righteous one, then we, too, will be righteous. When we see him as he is, then we will finally know what we, too, are destined to be. In beholding his light, our faces shine with the same, reflected hue.

And so the letter draws our attention quite close to home, to the family of believers as the proving ground for our faith. Because our story, the story of our God, is one in which love itself is made known in God’s sacrificial love.

What, then, does it mean to act in accordance with the family likeness?

If God so loved us that he gave his son for us, if the son so loved us that he gave his life for us, then we, too, ought to love one another with the same self-sacrificial love.

And here is where the saying that the one who does not love his brother whom he can see cannot love the father whom he can’t see. The family of God around us is this Father’s family. We are called to love as God has loved, and God’s own love is a love that we ourselves have received, a self-giving love of which we are to deem our sisters and brothers worthy as well.

But more than this, to know the one who is in the light is to walk in the light. To know the one who is righteous is to be righteous. And so, to be in the community of light, life, and righteousness, and to fail to love those whom we encounter there is to fail to love the God whose presence the community is making known.

What is the Bible and What Are We Supposed to Do With It?

March 19, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 21 Comments

In yesterday’s post I made reference to a thousand years without doctrinal statements. What I was referring to was the ways that Jewish theological reflection is demonstrated to us in the Old Testament and the ways that it is shown to us in the New. For all the things that we can and cannot say about the Bible, and for all the difficulties inherent in trying even to talk about “the Bible” as a singular entity, some labels clearly do not fit and this is significant.

One, the Bible is not a guide to living. Yes, there are rules and instructions, but that’s not what the Bible is. Yes, we are to apply much of the wisdom it contains to our lives, but even its commands are tied to particular people in particular moments. Meat sacrificed to idols? Not a big deal (Paul)? Or damnable offense (everyone else)?

Two, the Bible is not a work of doctrine or systematic theology. Yes, it does contain theological claims. But how are those claims expressed and what does that tell us about what we should be doing with the Bible?

One route has proven to be a dead end, and I’d suggest it must inherently be seen as a dead end because it depends on a mistaken idea of what the Bible is. The idea promoted by J. P. Gabler in his famous “Oration on the Proper Distinction between Biblical and Dogmatic Theology and the Specific Objectives of Each” is that the task of Biblical theology is to distill the timeless truths from the Biblical texts and hand these to the theologians to order into their proper logical sequence and results.

This is a bad idea on several grounds.

First, it presumes that the point of biblical theology is to create something else. Yesterday I voiced some hesitation about the idea that we should see systematic-type theology as an inherent product of Christianity. That presupposition has been too often accepted without question. In fact, the Bible is neither a systematic theology nor a refrigerator full of ingredients placed there for the purpose of being made into a theological cake.

The true end of Biblical theology should be to articulate a theology that corresponds to the historical and narratival dynamics that make theology biblical. In Biblical theology, God must always be the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God and Father who raised Jesus from the dead. God need be neither of those things in systematic theology, where timeless truths are the order of the day.

Gabler plays into the mistake that in order to be “true” something must be “timeless”. The abstracted is therefore to be prized as the “goal” of such investigations. But again, what the Bible actually is argues strongly against such an idea. We have stories of Jesus–told four times over without any concern for distilling a timeless truth from it. No, it seems in fact that biblical theological reflection moves in much the opposite direction–recontextualizing the message in order to show how it is true rather than decontextualizing it.

What is the Bible? I am committed to a generally narratival shape to scripture: it is a dynamic story that moves from creation and fall through Israel’s story of patriarchs and law and judges and kings and exile and failed return and messiah and church and return. I am committed to this, not because I think it is a problem-free story that runs easily from start to finish, but because even where we find theology and instruction and wisdom and law it is all deeply shaped by the moment of the story within which it is found.

The whole points in one direction: the Bible is storied. Therefore, our calling is to tell the story well so that we learn to live and love and worship well within the narrative that determines our identity.

The question I’m perennially wrestling with is this: is there a way to do theology that will conduce to faithful living? Is there a storied theology that can succeed in drawing people along the way of the cross, a way to express theological commitment that would never, for example, allow someone to claim the church’s blessing on a vision that said, “By this cross you will conquer”?

To be continued…

Being Handed Over, Being a Child, Being Exclusive

February 24, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 12 Comments

I confess: it takes a lot sometimes for me to see what Luke’s up to in the way he strings together the Jesus stories. But today I’ve been pondering a possible thread through three pericopes: Jesus’ passion prediction, the disciples subsequent arguing over greatness, and their confession about stopping a guy from exorcising (all in ch. 9).

First, in a striking juxtaposition, Luke tells us that Jesus responds to everyone being astounded at all the things he was doing by saying to his disciples, “Listen carefully to these words, ‘For the son of man is about to be given over into the hands of people.’” Greatness is going to be turned on its head. The mighty, powerful one will be handed over to sinners.

It’s worth pondering whether Jesus said, “Listen to these words” prospectively (“what I’m about to tell you,” NIV) or retrospectively, (“Listen to what these people are saying, and hold it together with the next part of the story.”). The latter, incidentally, is how Peter preaches Jesus in Acts 2.

But in any event, Jesus’ falling into the hands of sinners is set in striking juxtaposition with people’s glorification of him. And, the disciples’ deafness to the calamity is put on display by their own visions of glory.

The disciples get into a dispute about greatness. Interesting, isn’t it, that division arises when people are pursuing greatness? There’s a connection here between unity and humility. A call to oneness will only be successful when that oneness is predicated on the gospel narrative that turns the world on its head: the narrative of the handed-over Messiah as God’s agent who embraces the world.

<aside> Incidentally, this is why I’m quite sure that a narrative hermeneutic is more fundamentally Christian than a Trinitarian hermeneutic. A Trinitarian hermeneutic, or even one that simply reads the stories as telling us about “God” does not contain the inherently self-emptying dimension of the cruciform narrative of Jesus. If you want to say that this is exactly the kind of God who exists as 3 in 1, I’ll not fight with you on that, but only point out that such a claim entails a cruciform, narrative hermeneutic to interpret God. The narrative is the thing, the description trails behind. But a Trinitarian hermeneutic, could very well leave the disciples’ quest in place as inherently legitimate, a questing after the sort of greatness that God has put on display in his acts of creation and providence. </aside>

Jesus takes a child and puts it in their midst, telling them that to receive such a one in Christ’s name is to receive not only the child but Christ and the Father as well. The “name of Christ” will recur in the next story as well. The question for me is why is receiving such a child a sign of greatness and a creator of unity with God?

My initial thought is that this is, itself, an enactment of the reception God brings to us in the gospel of Christ. It is a reenactment of the narrative. Note how it turns the expectations of the disciples on their heads. They are, rather Corinthian-like, thinking about their own greatness in the kingdom. The child is a reminder of the opposite. Moreover, to accept the child is to associate with the child, spurning the pursuit of greatness and the halls of power. It is to become the least by embracing the least. This is the way to greatness.

Ok, Jesus, so we can be like you, receive people in your name, and then we’ll be great. Got it. So, just checking here, this still means folks have to be with us, right? I mean, we’re the center of blessing and everything, so we still control the boundaries, right? So, like, this guy we saw casting out demons in your name, we were right to put a stop to that since he’s not following with us, right?

*sigh*

No. Wrong again. Part of the point of this whole thing is that Jesus, not the disciples, is the set-binder. To act in his name is to be on the mission of God. To act in his name by receiving a child, or to act in his name by casting out a demon. Unity is found in the gospel narrative which places Jesus at the center of kingdom of God.

As the intramural oneness was undone by hoping that, as an individual, the disciple is greater than the next guy (thereby failing to live into the narrative of the humble messiah), the inter-group oneness was undone by hoping that, as a group, the disciples were greater than the next guys (thereby failing to live into the narrative of an all-determining Jesus). The former is failure of the individuals to live into the gospel story, the latter is the failure of the group.

Indeed, the surprising turn of phrase that caught me off guard in 9:50 was when Jesus said not “whoever is not against us is for us,” but instead, “whoever is not against you is for you.” Your good is assessed, Jesus indicates, by seeing how my work is being done in the world–whether by your hands or not.

And, we’d all better hope, there seems to be a lot of “or not” going around.

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