Tag Archive - mission

Response to Emerging Church: Sanity Is Possible

August 27, 2010 in Church, Culture with 4 Comments

I was heartened to day to read the Church of the Nazarene’s statement on Emerging/Emergent churches.

This is one of the most balanced responses I have seen, and coming from a somewhat conservative ecclesiastical body I am even more impressed with its balance and winsomeness.

The statement acknowledges those among the church’s number who are concerned about theological error in the ECs, but also those within its number who think this is one way to faithfully explore what it means to be a follower of Jesus in our postmodern contexts.

Thus, while warning everyone to steer clear of, and to clearly distance themselves from, what the church considers theological error, it also affirms this:

The involvement of many Nazarenes in this conversation reveals a sincere desire to embrace our missional objectives. They are attempting to reach the emerging cultures around us while clearly articulating an orthodox interpretation of Scripture and theology.

Kudos to the Church of the Nazarene for acting on the godly impulse that people within one denomination can differ on ecclesial and missional praxis while still affirming a common theology and working together for the Kingdom of God.

Well done.

Mission and Purity

January 28, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 1 Comment

This weekend our church was looking at Mark 7. This is a challenging chapter on numerous fronts. It shows Jesus in a controversy over purity rituals in which he argues for upholding God’s law rather than setting it aside in favor of human tradition. And then, in the explanation of purity issues to the crowds and disciples, Mark tells us that Jesus sets aside the Law as it pertains to dietary restrictions.

The reorientation of purity is telling: the story of Israel is being transformed. With the advent of the Kingdom of God, the posture of the people is being definitively defined as a people whose purity can be maintained without retreating from the world, a people who look within for the sources of impurity and are thereby freed to mingle themselves freely with the world without fear of contagion. In fact, as the larger story shows, the people of God are being prepared to carry on Jesus’ mission of reversing contagion: when pure and impure touch, the power of purity proves to be the greater.

The stories on either side of this purity episode frame the narrative so as to provide an alternative vision of the power of purity in God’s dominion.

The antecedent story is a short, summary narrative describing Jesus’ healing power. In contrast to the concerns to keep one’s hands to oneself and carefully cleaned that we see in Mark 7, this story at the end of Mark 6 is one of abundant contact: people wanted to touch Jesus, even the hem of his robe, and as many who did found healing. This is a picture, however underdeveloped, of an alternative story of power from the story of segregation for purity’s sake. Whereas the latter trades on a vision of uncleanness as the greater power against which the people of God must huddle together and from which they must flee, the story of healing by touch tells a story of a greater power than the power of uncleanness, sin, death, and decay. The power of God is at hand.

Subsequent to the story of uncleanness, Jesus goes into the region of Tyre and Sidon and, what do you know? actually runs into a woman from that region! We are told that Jesus wanted to remain unknown, but that he was not able to hide. Of course he couldn’t hide! The light has been lit, not to be kept hidden–nothing is hidden except to be revealed. The power of the kingdom cannot be contained, the story of separation and segregation is giving way to the mission of God.

The interaction between Jesus and the woman is deeply troubling–doesn’t he basically call her a Gentile dog? “It’s not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs,” he says to the woman who is calling for aid for her daughter. But when this faithful woman is willing to appeal for the crumbs from the table, Jesus grants the request. And then? The conversion. The healed one is no longer dog, but child (τὸ παιδίον)–like those at the table (τῶν τεκνῶν).

How do we understand the story of the mission of God? It demands to be understood as a story that turns the narrative of the world on its head. Too often, those who proclaim faith in Jesus view our position in the world as the small, persecuted, powerless minority, striving as best we can to plug our little Christian narratives into the overwhelming narrative of sin, death, and corruption. And when we see ourselves as so small, and our power as so slight, we perceive our calling as one of making holy enclaves, to protect ourselves from the impurities and powers of the world.

How different is our posture when we see that the big Story, the True Story, is the story of a kingdom come with power–a power that does not succumb to the powers of the world, either by imitation or by retreat. We do not come as agents of a small story into the overwhelming true story of the real world; no, we enter as agents of the true story, messengers of the true king, whose story ultimately determines the outcome of the little stories of power, separateness, and segregation.

If we touch the other, what will happen? Will we become impure, or do we trust that the healing and embracing power of God will go forth?

World Upside Down (part 2)

January 27, 2010 in Book Reviews with 4 Comments

Continuing our review of C. Kavin Rowe’s World Upside Down, we come to the synthetic chapter (chapter 4, where he works through a narrative in tension between the church being a catalyst for instability and its innocence in Roman court) followed by a final chapter that works out the theological implications of the study.

Chapter 4 bears the title of the book, “World Upside Down,” and uses the Jewish charges against the Pauline mission in Acts 17 as its springboard. He traces three interrelated characteristics of the early church: they proclaim Jesus as universal king; this, in turn, sets the church on a universal mission; and that mission is generative of communities that are, in some sense, set apart from their surrounding cultures.

Rowe argues that the charges brought against the Christians accurately reflect Luke’s theological assessment of the early Christian movement: “these men who have turned the world upside down have come here, too…. They are all acting against the decrees of Caesar, proclaiming that there is another King, Jesus.” He maintains that there are three points aimed at one overarching charge of sedition: “by proclaiming another king, the Christians act against the decrees of Caesar and thereby turn the world upside down” (95-96).

Rowe goes on to say that “Jesus is king” is a confession that sets up a rival to Caesar. Moreover, Jesus’ kingship is embodied in a this-worldly transformation: it impacts the world within which we live. The force of Jesus as rival to Caesar is underscored by Luke’s use of κύριος as a title for each (106). A rivalry is created: Christians must deny what Caesar claims for himself and hence his authority on earth. Jesus comes to establish a rival peace as a rival king by rival means (in particular, suffering and death, 115).

Finally, it must be remembered that it is Jesus’ resurrection that is the impetus for mission: Jesus as Lord of all is the reason that a mission that extends to all generates communities to the ends of the Roman empire. (Some of my readers will be surprised not at all by the fact that this portion of my book has lots of “Yes!” in the margin.)

The final chapter draws some theological conclusions. It is no accident, Rowe claims,  that when a whole set of practices constitutive of pagan culture are called into question (such as sacrifice, magic, temple-based economics) that the culture is confronted with possible collapse (146). “To see the potential of the Christian mission for cultural demise is to read it rightly. Indeed, this is but the flip side of the reality that God’s identity receives new cultural explication in the formation of a community whose moral or metaphysical order requires and alternative way of life” (146).

In Luke’s telling of the story, the formation of alternative communities, with alternative cultures, is inseparable from the reality of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead to be lord over all. Moreover, the existence of such communities, with their alternative forms of life, become the context within which the truth can be spoken and known (161). Thus, the Christian claims are “madness”–but only to those without eyes to see (162).

But this inability of the outsider to see is one part of a story told for the purpose of demonstrating the inherent necessity of Christian mission. All, even Rome, need conversion so as to understand the true story of Jesus. This, though, is not a coercive narrative, for “Acts narrates the life of the Christian mission as the embodied pattern of Jesus’s own life… Put succinctly, according to Acts, the missio Dei has a christological norm” (173).

The final part of the final chapter, where the missional implications of the Christian message are explored, are worth their weight in gold. Rowe has written a bold piece of theology.

Of course, I do have a couple of quibbles, and since I don’t want you to think that either my free book or my friendship with an author has overmuch colored my opinion, I offer a disagreement for your consideration. I am not as persuaded as the author that “Lord” (κύριος) is a cipher for the God of Israel, such that calling Jesus lord equates him ontologically with God–Jesus is God of all if Lord of all. Rowe references some of his earlier work, in which he has argued that the use of κύριος language in Joel, quoted in Acts 2, identifies Jesus with the God of Israel.

To my reading of Acts 2, this imports too much into the text that stands in tension with the actual things Peter says about Jesus and God. Jesus was a man testified to by God through signs and wonders. The distinction is important. Moreover, I notice Rowe saying that the resurrection confirmed or affirmed Jesus as lord, but Peter in Acts 2 (like Matthew 28 and Romans 1, etc.) that at the resurrection God made (ἐποίησεν) Jesus Lord and Messiah. Something happened to Jesus at the resurrection, he became something he was not before–he was made Lord of all, his name became the name by which salvation is made known.

But this disagreement, I think, detracts little from the meat of the work, which offers a bold new thesis on the purpose of Acts and will surely provide fodder for considerable debate in the future. (For example: at an SBL book review session in Atlanta…)

What I like most about this book is how it moves from historical exegesis to theological imperative, angling itself against the idea that we read disinterestedly, and uncovering false visions of “inclusiveness” that have no room for the sorts of sweeping claims made by the early church. The theology, in particular, merits sustained attention.

Disclaimer: Like every academic who reviews a book for a journal or online venue, I received a complimentary copy of Word Upside Down from Oxford University Press.

World Upside Down (Part 1)

January 26, 2010 in Book Reviews with 2 Comments

Last week I read C. Kavin Rowe’s World Upside Down and wanted to say a few things about it here. As I indicated in my brief mention of the book last week, the book is a great “fit” for the Storied Theology theme that I hope somehow will (loosely) hold my blog together.

Rowe declares that it’s high time to reassess the notion that Acts is written, in large part, as political apologia, storying the compatablity between Rome and the church. And yet, he does not want us to fall off the horse on the other side, either, and turn Acts into a tract for political liberation through resistance movements.

Instead, Acts is “a highly charged and theologically sophisticated political document that aims at nothing less than the construction of an alternative total way of life–a comprehensive pattern of being–one that runs counter to the life-patterns of the Graeco-Roman world.” It is thus “a culture-forming narrative” (4).

The book is structured so as to, first, give attention to the collisions between Acts and pagan culture. In chapter 2, “Collision,” Rowe highlights the ways in which the narrative of Acts serves to undermine the reading which assumes that the church is not a threat to the Roman culture. The “new cultural reality” established by the church means that the sorts of uprisings we see in Lystra, Philipi, Athens, and Ephesus are not narrated simply to be dismissed, but are indicative of the impact of an alternative reality bumping up against “business as usual” in the pagan world. In this chapter, the exposition of Paul’s encounter with the philosphers on Mars Hill and the uprising in Ephesus are particularly instructive.

The next chapter gives attention to the passages that play well for the traditional reading of Acts. In particular, this chapter, “Dikaios,” chronicles Paul’s trials and vindication before the Roman authorities. This chapter is particularly instructive in the ways that it leads us through the story of Acts as a developing narrative. The trial scenes are not only to be read one by one, but in order, with an eye toward a development in Rome’s response to Paul. Ultimately, Paul’s vindication at the hands of the Romans becomes a tacit confirmation of the “otherness” of the church and its mission–the Romans do not have the epistemological tools to understand the gospel. The resurrection inaugurates a new reality that they cannot grasp.

One of the strengths of Rowe’s approach is that it enables us to step back and see yet another way that Acts depicts the early church as embodying the ministry of Jesus: as he was one in whom the Romans found no guilt, and even at the end pronounced dikaios, just, at his moment of death, and yet was opposed by those who would not accept the transformation of their vision of the kingdom of God, so also goes the church. Yes, Jesus does something new and subversive, but it’s not directly oppositional or antagonistic or seen to be a threat by the Romans (who don’t understand it at all).

In running through some of Rowe’s arguments with a friend who’s working on Acts, he’s wondered if looking to Rome isn’t looking too far afield. Is the purpose of Acts to be found more close to home, in the tensions between the early church and non-Christian Judaism (or even all types of Judaism including the conservative Torah-keeping Judaism with which the non-Jewish church struggles so much)? That’s a question worth pressing further.

Next time I’ll talk about the chapter where Kavin presents his suggestion for reading in light of the tension between collision and innocence and where he goes with the theological implications of his work.

World Upside Down by Kavin Rowe

January 21, 2010 in Book Reviews with 1 Comment

What does narrative theology look like?

What might it look like to take rigorous historical critical scholarship (or believing criticism) and not stop with exegetical details but move into rich theological exposition?

It looks like this:

I just finished this book a few minutes ago, and the culminating chapter, with its theological reflections, is strewn with marginal comments such as “Yes!” “Yes!”, a bit of “*”, and lots of “YES!”

This book works through the Gentile mission, in particular, in the Book of Acts. It strives to come up with a paradigm for understanding both that the gospel generates social upheaval and that the early Christian movement is proclaimed not worthy of death by the Romans.

I’ll work my way through the book, maybe starting tomorrow, but wanted to give you a heads up and a chance to check it out of your library, try to swing a review copy, talk your librarian into buying it, or shell out 50 bucks for your own copy.

[As required by federal law I hereby inform you that mine is a gratis copy from OUP. Yet I consider it my academic responsibility to give honest reviews, even of books I receive for free.]

Story of the Universe–Part 2: The Father-Creator

January 19, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 7 Comments

Otherness. Distance. Unbridgeable gap. Creator.

Humans. Proximity. Creatures.

In the world structured by the transhistorical law of the King Who Is Other, we start off in quite a hole with respect to God: all is duty and obligation by the order of creation, and a special act, an added gift is required, if God is to overcome the fact of our creatureliness and allow us to enjoy the benefits of his love and kindness.

If my representation of this seems stereotyped or clunky, here’s another way of putting it: “The distance between God and the creature is so great, that although reasonable creatures do owe obedience unto him as their Creator, yet they could never have any fruition of him as their blessedness and reward, but by some voluntary condescension on God’s part, which he hath been pleased to express by way of covenant” (WCF 7.1).

On the one hand, I think that this way of putting it displays at the outset a faulty presupposition that the only way to really be blessed by God is by being rewarded for keeping the Law. But putting that quibble aside, the stories of creation are stories of the Father God creating Children–relationships that entail experiencing full blessing appropriate to the relationship apart from an externally imposed covenant to make way for enjoyment of God in return for our servitude.

To confess belief in “God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth” is not just a claim about the God Who Is Out There, but about God as God stands in relationship to humanity.

Genesis 1:26-27: And God said, “Let us create humanity in our own image and in our own likeness and let the them have dominion…”

1. In creating people, God begets children. The closest parallel text for seeing the connection between the language of “image and likeness” and “sonship” is Gen 5 (likely from the same source as Gen 1): God created Adam in the image of God, and Adam then has a son, Seth, in his own image and likeness. This is relational language: we can have “benefit of God as our reward” not because God imposes something to overcome the creator-creature distinction, but because God has created us to be God’s children. (Of course, the fall changes things, but we’re at the beginning of the story here, so bear with me.)

“Image of God” indicates a functional identity for humans: we are created with the purpose of representing the rule of God to the world. I would say that a truer representation of the story than what we read in WCF 7.1 would go something like: “Although God created all the creatures and ordered their lives for their own good, they would know nothing of the continuing sovereign reign of God were it not for God’s giving them an earthly representation of God’s own rule–which he has done by way of humanity.”

Getting caught up in our need to fulfill God’s rules of the cosmos, in our need to find something yet to come in our relationship with God, we too easily lose sight of the fact that we had everything, and that we were God’s gift to the world. Which brings us to…

2. In creating people, God displays his missional character. Again, I’m looking at how we know God though the dynamic and deeply contingent realities of how God has worked in history. And in this culminating act of creation (creating people) we discover that God sends a representative, bearing his authority, to represent God to the world. Humanity is created to act for God, to speak for God, to rule over the world that is God’s sovereign prerogative to rule on His own. The plan for people, and their unique commission, is to be God’s emissaries.

When we begin the story, we are not on the outside in need of getting in. When the story starts we are not confronted with a cosmic set of structures put in place with the hope of sending us into the orbit of eternal beatification. When the story starts we are not lacking in the benefits of God’s blessing and “reward.”

In the beginning, God creates a family: princes and princesses who are charged to keep up the King’s work of bringing fruitful life and flourishing to the King’s Dominion. In the beginning, God is Father–of humanity. In the beginning God is the Sender–of humanity. In the beginning, God ties Himself to creation not through a legal code or covenant, but through His image-bearing sent ones ourselves.

Story of the Universe–Part 1: A Storied God

January 18, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 8 Comments

(The following is an encore presentation of a post from the dearly departed Sibboleth blog. The series, posted here this week, will serve as an introduction to the project of this particular blog: what it’s called “Storied Theology” and what it means to speak of a “story-bound God”.)

When our idea of the fundamental fabric of the universe is law (as has been the case in numerous traditions throughout Christian history), we end up with saying some strange or, better, all-too-familiar-but-not-exactly-Christian things about God. When we think of God, what really starts to matter are eternal, unchanging attributes; descriptions that articulate in the clearest way possible that God is other; and, as we’ve discussed with law itself, quite earthy depictions of God get catapulted up into the realm of ideal, trans-historical norms.

An anecdote that lodged itself in my mind: a Turretin scholar was doing a presentation to some pastor-types on God’s self disclosure to Moses in Exodus 34:6-7: “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, 7 keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.” The punch line of the presentation? “This is God revealing to Moses who God is in Himself–this is who God is in His ontology.”

When everything that really matters is outside of space and time (covenants, law, grace) then divine self-disclosure, showing us what really is true of God must also be outside of time. Of course, I find this claim concerning ontology to be ridiculous. But it is a way of thinking about God that fits perfectly within the system. And in this, the Reformed Tradition is not any more or less guilty than any other–it has adopted a large swath of the church’s posture in thinking that what really matters about God is that God is infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, etc.

All of this assumes that we know who God is and that our real challenge is to figure out what God is. The implication, though, is that what God is will tell us what God is like. And once we’ve gotten to that point, I’d argue that we’ve gone down the wrong trail altogether. To find out what God is like, we need to get our minds around who God is.

And here’s the punchline: the most pervasive way of saying who God is in Scripture is tied to this-worldly particulars: YHWH is the creator, but one who creates in a certain way and not in another; YHWH is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The whole point of the Exodus narrative is to “introduce” Pharaoh to this God that Pharaoh does not know (and to show how YHWH’s power stacks up to the powers of other gods). God is “the Holy one of Israel”, such that the fate of Israel is reflective of God’s own character and standing in the world.

And, as Christians, our confession about God is tied up with the Christ event: we say that God is the One who justifies the ungodly; we say that God is the One who gives life to the dead and calls into being what does not exist; we say that God is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

We have not spoken of the Christian God when we have spoken of a “spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.” We have talked about an ideal for a divinity. We speak of the Christian God when we speak of the God who has acted to send His own Son, to give that Son up for us all, to raise that Son from the dead, and to see to it that the message of this son is sent to the ends of the earth. (You may have read something like this somewhere.)

In other words, one of the most important pay-offs for being willing to have our transhistorical theological categories exchanged for the biblical categories is that it creates space to reconceive of the identity of God as put on display in the biblical narrative itself: a God who is relentlessly on mission to draw the world to Himself.