Painting pictures of God’s Kingdom

This morning I took part in the monthly meet-up of Northwest Hothouse. Hothouse is a group of pastors, para-church ministry leaders, and community organizers who come together to explore what it means to live and lead missionally in our particular contexts. A lot of inspiring ideas and experiences are shared in these meetings. Dynamics like that of Hothouse — intelligent, imaginative collaboration — get me all the more excited about life in ministry.

 

One of the big questions — it was more of a dilemma, really — that arose this morning was this: What does it mean to appreciate missionality that is “slow steeping” and relational (not an imperialistic take-over), while recognizing that people have urgent, immediate needs to experience communion with Christ?

 

This is my attempt to answer that question.

 

First, I think it is important to give Jesus the respect of focusing our attention where he asked us to place it — on the Kingdom of God. It is the Kingdom, not a cosmic transaction, that is at the heart of the Christian story. The latter relates to the former as a means to an end. To say it differently, any truthful soteriology is entirely grounded in truthful eschatology. To say it differently still, the big picture is about the resurrection and reconciliation of creation, not “soul-winning” and an escapist afterlife.

 

We live in a Kingdom of God story. The Kingdom has come, and the Kingdom is coming. In New Testament studies this is referred to as “the already-but-not-yet.” To reverse the order, what we see around us is not as good as it gets, but it is the current creation which God has covenanted to resurrect. Creation matters because it’s creation that has been, is, and will be the project of God.

 

Like I said, it’s a Kingdom of God story we are part of. And the future of this story requires both announcement and fulfillment — pictures painted and promises kept. There is rootedness to this idea. We see the interplay of announcement and fulfillment in the words of the prophets and the teachings of Jesus — an urgent announcement to transform our ways immediately so that we can join in the gradual, progressive entrance of God’s Kingdom. Whether along the rivers of Babylon or during the Sermon on the Mount, new pictures of the Kingdom have been painted, and those pictures have inspired, befuddled, and expanded imagination. Picture are painted (immediate action) about a new reality that is being created (gradual, sequential movement). But we would be off the mark to divorce the picture-painting act from the larger sequential movement.

 

When we paint pictures, we are doing more than more than simply describing something that will someday be. Our descriptions are entities in their own right. Pictures are real. We can hold them on various levels. Pictures have thingness, yes?

 

Because they have thingness, they also have an irrevocability to them. When we see important images, they stick with us. They delight us. They haunt us. They inspire us. They speak of new realities while being themselves a new realities created. When the pictures we paint are real and true, the audiences to our picture-painting cannot help but own them in an irrevocable way. Even if we paint an image of the future, that future has just happened in that it is now been seen or heard. That is the in-breaking of the future into the present. The future exists in that its picture has been called into existence.

 

Some of the most powerful moments within our Kingdom of God story have come about when the future is called into the present through picture-painting. Again, I think of the prophets of an exilic Israel sitting along the rivers of Babylon and being filled with the dream of universal exile — a sensus plenior exile. I think also of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Did the future of which King dreamed exist at the time of that speech? We might be inclined to say that it hadn’t or even still hasn’t. There were countless race riots yet to come after that speech, and some racial tension remains today. But I imagine that if we asked those who were there in person to hear King’s dream, they would tell us that something that hadn’t existed prior to that speech suddenly did as King spoke. A new reality came into existence. And many events that have helped to fulfill that dream since the day of the speech happened only because the dream was announced.

 

Pictures create futures.

 

An unimagined, unannounced Kingdom never comes. 

 

We live in a culture that believes talk is cheap. We form a dichotomy between words and actions. Falling to the temptations of our distrust toward the spoken word, we leave little room for speech-acts — for words that not only describe future realities, but also are, in and of themselves, immediate realities. We need to reclaim the speech-act as an essential, prophetic component to our Kingdom of God story.

 

Sometimes picture-painting happens in front of a large crowd (like King’s dream), but more often it happens in family rooms, coffeehouses, and bars, with a handful of people or just one person at a time. When the picture is beautiful and real and true, there is nothing those small audiences can do but grapple with the picture’s irrevocability and possibly begin to draw that picture, or a continuation of it, themselves. 

 

As Kingdom of God pictures are painted, we experience an in-breaking of tikkun olam in two ways: our description of where the story is heading is itself an invitation to join the story, and new reality is created because we have chosen to paint.

 

It is amazing how many people — whether self-proclaimed Christians or people who are unfamiliar with God’s story — well up with hope when they hear the good news about God’s commitment to, and intentions for, creation. While it is possible to dream aloud this good news and still be met with hostility or rejection, I believe that real good news is generally better received than the incomplete good news, the news that explains a cosmic transaction but does not explain where the story is heading. As I said earlier, all truthful soteriology is grounded in truthful eschatology. 

 

When the story as a whole is told, most neighbors who disagree with us are still generally glad to be our neighbors. We can be very “Abrahamically effective” like that, when we tell the whole story, the real good news.

 

So how do we face the balance of being an incarnational presence for the long-haul in our ministry context while acting on our concern for so many who have not received what God has for them? We dream out loud. We paint pictures about God’s covenant faithfulness to creation, the Kingdom that is growing, and God’s continuous tikkun olam mission. We demonstratively look forward to a bright future, and in so doing create new present realities that cause people to hope in a way they’ve never hoped before. 

 

John Piper’s determinism

Rather than exhaust myself in responding to the latest John Piper mishap in which his Calvinism impacted his interpretation of current events, I’m going to re-direct to people who’ve already articulated well-thought responses — Julie and Greg Boyd, as well as Bill Birch’s thoughts on determinism in general.

To all of that, the only thing I want to add is this: leave room for nuance. Is God capable of authoring that tornado in the Twin Cities? Yes, God can create tornados. But, as Boyd points out, we have a Mark 4 account of Jesus needing to rebuke a storm.

I would feel differently about Piper’s latest incident if he had come forward as a prophetic voice, saying that he discerned that God’s correction was the cause of this particular storm. But my interpretation of this incident is conditioned by Piper’s gibberish about the crash of the I-35 bridge (two years ago in this same area) also fitting into his controlling meta-narrative. 

Piper is being guided by his Calvinism, which is a deterministic meta-narrative — not only a large meaning-of-it-all story (overarching or grand narrative) but a larger meaning into which every small story and incident feeds. In other words, to Piper or any thorough Calvinism, there is no such thing as a storm that lacks meaning. 

So why, then, does Jesus rebuke the storm in Mark 4? And why does he pray for God’s will to happen on earth as it does in heaven? If we’re all puppets within a controlling meta-narrative, there’s no purpose for that prayer (or any other prayer, for that matter).

Leave room for nuance. Brace yourself for a reality in which free will and spiritual warfare are practical realities in our midst. Leave room for God to be the author of various incidents — even incidents over which we feel hurt or confusion. Leave some room for “the devil did it,” because every now and then it’s true. And leave room to grasp that we are free to love and be loved (as well as to abuse that freedom), and storms might just happen because they happen.

We can ask for discernment, seeking the Spirit’s guidance for answers and understanding. But we don’t always need it, and we certainly don’t always receive it. And in those cases when disaster strikes, and the cause could be any number of things and we simply don’t know which it was, we can do better than to settle for deterministic meta-narrative.

Helpful ministry resource: Organic Community

This past weekend I read Organic Community by Joseph Myers. The book was released in 2007, so I’m probably a bit late to the party, but after breezing through this compelling book I have to say better late than never. 

Myers’ book is separated by chapters that describe eight different characteristics of an environment in which community develops organically — patterns (descriptive, not prescriptive), participation (individual, not representative), measurement (story, not bottom-line), growth (sustainable, not bankrupt), power (revolving, not positional), coordination (collaboration, not cooperation), partners (edit-ability, not accountability), and language (verb-centric, not noun-centric).

While Myers stresses that he’s not writing a “how-to” book, his book is filled with examples that are practical enough to be used by most anyone, never slipping into ideas that are either too vague or too specific to transcend context.

One of my biggest disappointments with a lot of the church planting or church model books that circulate is the theological views from which they’ve been written. Myers’ book, however, is rooted in sound theology. His central point is to move away from a “master plan” approach to ministry, toward responsible and flexible preparation that  partners with God to engage possibilities and develop the future.

Overall, the book was quite a helpful challenge to me — reminding me that people are to be held with an open hand. They may or may not fit cleanly into ministry models and strategies, and in those cases it’s the models that need to budge.

The combination of practical suggestion and thoughtful theology in Organic Community was refreshing enough that I’m adding the book to my recommended “curriculum” for people with whom I’m ministering (along with Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and Tim Keel’s Intuitive Leadership).

What’s a sustainable faith project, anyway?

From the Paradigm site:

What does it mean when we say that Paradigm is a “sustainable faith project”?

 

In order to understand what Paradigm is all about, we need to know a few things about systems and connectedness.

 

A lot of things in this world operate as systems — they’re systemic in nature. Economics. Environmental degradation. Disease. The impact that broken families have on multiple generations. Physical abusiveness. Marital infidelity and sexual corruption. Substance abuse. The list goes on.

 

To focus on one as an example, think of economics. Individuals are free to make their own financial choices with their money. And we’d agree that an individual’s own decisions have a tremendous impact on his or her financial well-being. We’d also agree, however, that, regardless of how much or how little we have in our piggy banks, we’re affected by wide-scale peaks and recessions. And peaks and recessions don’t happen out of nowhere — they’re the result of a series of individual decisions.

 

Individuals create systems, and systems impact individuals. Just ask the children of abusive parents or divorcees. Or the family of a pornography-addict or drug user. Or a kid who’s growing up in the midst of AIDS and genocide. They’ll all tell you that individuals contribute to systems, and systems shape individuals.

 

The great myth within humanity is that any of us are ever alone, that we can do whatever we want because “It’s not going to hurt anyone else.” It is the central deception of sin, isolation. But the truth is that we cannot get away with doing, thinking, or saying a single thing that isn’t going to impact someone, somewhere down the road.

 

We are connected.

 

It’s clear in the stories of Scripture: sinfulness led to deadliness, which brought about more sinfulness yet. The cycle continued — a momentum of corruption and decay. But as people who believe in Jesus as Messiah for the world, we believe that his death and resurrection inaugurated a new Way. The Apostle Paul candidly writes about this in the fifth and sixth chapters of his letter to the Romans: the cycle of sin and death have been replaced with a cycle of faithfulness and life, and Christ’s followers are to further the new cycle of living. 

 

When asked by a student if Christ-followers are at liberty to contribute to the old cycle (beginning of Romans 6), Paul goes on a tangent that can pretty much be summed up as, “Absolutely not! If they do, there was no point in anything Jesus did.”

 

We know all about how cycles of sin corrupt friendships, families, cities, and people over generations. But what does it look like when the cycle that Christ began is continued today? What does it look like for people to care for the environment in a way that makes their neighbors do the same? Or for a man to respect and empower women in a way that causes his sons to do an even better job of it than he does? What if a group of people stepped back from materialism and pooled their finances to create an orphanage in an area of need, and that orphanage went on to care for generations and generations of children who need love and care? And what if children who were seemingly destined to be aborted were instead allowed to live through adoption, and became the very leaders of this movement?

 

And what if the people who were engaged in such a movement weren’t acting out of empty human-centrism or political agenda, but were letting it be known that the gospel of Jesus is the driving force behind the change? What if it was announced that this movement was about God’s plan coming about on Earth as it does in heaven? What if the participants of this new life were constantly being nourished by the words of Scripture, dwelling in prayer, and taking part in life-giving spiritual practices? What if these people had the opportunity to be discipled by spiritual directors whose interest was for them to fully realize their identity as Christ-followers, and all of the acceptance and forgiveness that comes with that?

 

What if all of that came to be?

 

Well, we might call that a sustainable movement. We would recognize that what we were seeing was the sort of faithfulness that spreads life and hope in the lives of friends and neighbors and families. Remember how systems work, how individual lives are always influenced by systems around them? This cycle of faithfulness and life would inevitably improve the world of these friends, neighbors, and families. Those people, in turn, would have the chance to join God’s people, take up Jesus’ Way, and join the mission. (Maybe if people saw how beautiful Jesus’ Way can be — what a difference it can make in the world — more of them would take seriously who Jesus claimed to be and the movement he claimed to start, don’t you think?)

 

In the end, what we’d have is this: Christ’s faithfulness creating an invitation to his Way for each of us; our faithfulness modeling that new life in Christ’s Way and tangibly spreading the invitation as we better the lives of those around us; and others accepting that invitation to the Way, faithfully participating in it, and bringing about yet another stage in this ever-growing movement. And so on and so forth.

 

It’s a sustainable faith project.

 

It’s ridiculously simple, yet it’s radical and difficult in that it calls people to actually obey the instructions of Christ. It takes leaving a life of selfishness. It requires shaking off the myth that we’re a bunch of little automatons whose actions don’t contribute to one of two systems — the cycle of sin and death, and that of faithfulness and life.

 

That’s the Paradigm vision: to faithfully live out true life in the Way of Jesus, inviting those we impact to freely choose to acknowledge Jesus as Messiah and join the mission. It’s a gift that keeps on giving, this sustainable faith project of ours.

 

The plan for bringing this about in our area of North Seattle is to tell and learn the message of Scripture in our gatherings, deepen our understanding of God and our relationships with others in communities, and to act out the redemptive message of Christ through local involvement. 

 

Is Paradigm a “church”? Yes and no, depending on what you associate with that word. If someone is looking to be part of a church, Paradigm could be a viable conclusion. But a person who is already involved in a church is welcome to take part in any or all of the three things we do (gatherings, communities, and local involvement). And a person who dislikes church might enjoy Paradigm (though we acknowledge that some people dislike pretty much everything, and it’s only a matter of time before they dislike us too). 

 

We are asking people who join Paradigm’s core team to make Paradigm their primary spiritual community and to participate in each of the three events involved in our mission, but we have no form of “membership” beyond that. We accept donations in our gatherings and through mail, and people who tithe are welcome to direct that giving toward our mission.

 

In all, we hope the project is a success, that faithfulness leads to life, and life to faithfulness.

Julie addresses the link between complementarianism and Calvinism

Calvinism and complementarianism are the focus of Julie’s latest blog post. She writes from the experience of someone who has emerged from the portrait of determinism’s god, into a relationship of true interaction with a God of pathos. You should take a moment to reflect on her perspective.

Interacting with Justification by N.T. Wright – Chapter Three

Wright’s third chapter in Justification, “First-Century Judaism: Covenant, Law and Lawcourt,” is an attempt to explain that first-century Jews (the main characters and audiences of the New Testament) were more concerned with experiencing deliverance from exile (an exile the Jewish people had been experiencing even after returning to their land, as they were still under Roman occupation) by way of David’s promised son. While first-century Judaism was not ignorant to ideas of transcendence and afterlife, those issues were being overshadowed by more pressing physical, political concerns. In other words, first-century Jews, unlike many Christians today, were not simply trying to find their ticket to heaven. They expected God to move within history, within their world.

Wright notes that first-century literature illumines us to the fact that Judaism was not a monolithic religion before, during, or after the time of Christ. He speaks of Variegated Nomism – the multiplicity of ways in which first-century Jews were interpreting Israel’s law, constructing theologies of grace, resurrection etc. 

I find this much clear: first-century Judaism was far different from the works-not-grace caricature of Judaism that Martin Luther so unfortunately concocted in order to read the biblical text into his own sixteenth-century world. There is a cost when we use the biblical text so liberally as to form the biblical narrative and characters in our own image, so that they are living out our story rather than us living continuing their story faithfully in our day. Disregard for historical context, authorial intent and the like can lead us in directions as dangerous as the Lutheranism-gone-awry that was experienced in the Holocaust in the early-to-mid-twentieth century – a mere sixty years ago.

Within the “Judaisms” of the first century, there were some who aimed to calculate the moment when God would deliver Israel from exile. Wright notes many of them leaned heavily on Daniel 9 – a prophecy of the end of exile in which an angel tells the main character that exile would not be for the simple seventy years he read about in Jeremiah, but seventy weeks of years (70 X 7). (pgs 57-59)

This, Wright says, is the social milieu into which Paul writes – a group of people who felt that they were living a continued biblical narrative, still in exile but hoping for the end of exile as described in Daniel 9. Yes, these Jews were back in their land, out from captivity in Babylon. Jews were “enslaved” to pagan cultures and customs.

Here the Bishop lets out some of his frustration with Piper and his “ordinary folk”:

“. . . for many, perhaps most, contemporary Western readers of the New Testament (John Piper’s ‘ordinary folk,’ perhaps), the effort required to think into a worldview where people were thinking to themselves, When is God going to do what he’s promised? is all too much, and they shake their heads and settle back into the comfort of a non-historical soteriology the long and short of which is ‘my relationship with God’ rather than ‘what God is going to do to sort out his world and his people.’ Or, alternatively, the question, when will God do what he’s promised? splurges back onto the theological scene in the form of lurid speculations about the Rapture: drive eschatology out the front door, and it will break in through the back window. And with all of these strategies we thereby put ourselves in the position of musicians who, finding the score of a Beethoven symphony, reckon that because the only instruments they possess are guitars and mouth-organs, that must be what Beethoven had in mind. Or, if you like, that because the only music they know is a collection of songs none of which last longer than four minutes, that must be what Beethoven actually intended.” (pg 61)

Can you tell he’s had it with Piper and his “ordinary folk,” and their commitment to make ordinary what should be a very inordinate use of Scripture?

One of the ways in which Wright’s view of justification succeeds is in its incorporation of the New Exodus motif woven throughout the entirety of Scripture. In Chapter Three Wright exegetes Daniel 9 (remember, this is a text that first-century Jews were leaning into for a variety of reasons), and two things become very clear: “righteousness” in this passage is interchangeable with covenant faithfulness, and God’s covenant faithfulness allows Him to stand as “right” (faithful) when His covenant people are not (allowing the curse of exile as promised in the covenant) as well as to declare “right” (lawcourt language) an unfaithful people (allowing exodus) – on the basis of God’s own covenant faithfulness, not the people’s.

That doesn’t sound much like Luther’s caricature of works-righteousness, does it? No, this is about a God who is covenantally faithful to the extent that He allows consequences of the covenant (exile) but ultimately restores the covenant on the basis of His own covenant-keeping (allowing exodus). This is the hope of first-century Judaism, and the center of Paul’s writing, that God would declare His people right – an act that, to them, was connected to the political ramification of exodus and the ongoing of narrative of human history.

Wright proceeds to shed light on Piper’s big motif for understanding righteousness and justification, God’s concern for God’s own glory. Here’s one part of Wright’s review of Piper that I found to be particularly funny (and refreshing):

“there is a huge mass of scholarly literature on the meaning of God’s righteousness, and Piper simply ignores it. I am not aware of any other scholar, old perspective, new perspective, Catholic, Reformed, Evangelical, anyone, who thinks that tsedaqah elohim in Hebrew or dikaiosyne theou in Greek actually means ‘God’s concern for God’s own glory. . . . Piper’s attempt to show that there must be a ‘righteousness’ behind God’s ‘covenant faithfulness’ is simply unconvincing. It begins to look as though Piper has simply not understood what covenant faithfulness means, and its enormous significance throughout Scripture.” (pgs 64-65)

Also to my amusement, Wright notes that even J.I. Packer – a notoriously Reformed scholar – slips into the New Perspective when he notes, “The reason why [Isaiah and Psalms] call God’s vindication of his oppressed people his ‘righteousness’ is that it is an act of faithfulness to his covenant promise with them.” (pg 64)

The Bishop proceeds to discuss the role of Israel in God’s plan to put the world to rights. God does not give up on Israel. God does not replace Israel. It is precisely through Israel that God will put the world to rights. Wright notes Piper’s decision to not engage Romans 3 and 4 (chapters centered on Abraham and God’s still-applicable commitment to bless the world through his people). This is consistent with Piper’s evasion of Deuteronomy 27-30, Daniel 9, and the whole of Genesis 15. Piper is not engaging the texts that best clarify that God’s righteousness is His covenant faithfulness.

And it is at this point that I, as a reader, become frustrated on Wright’s behalf. Piper and others within the old perspective have accused Wright of proposing a “complicated” gospel. The danger of that accusation is the implicit notion that Wright is weaving complexities into the biblical narrative. The reality, it seems, is quite the opposite. Wright is merely guilty of engaging more of the biblical narrative in his exegesis and theology. We would do better to call Wright and his gospel “hard-working”or “supremely literate.”

The chapter proceeds with Wright discussing Piper’s construction of a theology of God’s righteousness for God’s own glory. Wright acknowledges that such theology portrays God as Divine Narcissist. In reality God is not a self-absorbed being concerned with making sure that His creation lauds Him; He is an outward-focused giver of love whose tsedaqah elohim is His generous faithfulness to undeserving people who have not been anywhere near as faithful to Him.

The role of Israel and Torah in God’s saving plan is the final theme of the chapter. Wright notes the similarities between E.P. Sanders’ covenantal nomism and Calvinism’s emphasis on covenant and “being in Christ.” Wright esteems the Reformed view for agreeing with Sanders’ take far more than Lutheran exegetes and their construction of Judaism as a religion of works-righteousness.

While often falling in the Reformed camp on many issues, Piper’s handling of Israel is fairly Lutheran; he and his “ordinary folk” may find it easier to create a caricature of Judaism to fit their purposes rather than to study the variety of beliefs within Second Temple Judaism (it seems that Piper is suspicious as to whether much reliable knowledge can be gained from that wealth of material). 

Here Wright chops away at both the old perspective’s antinomianism with which I am so amused and the replacement theology over which I completely fume:

“According to the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said that he had not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it. A Calvinist will find that much easier to grasp than a Lutheran – though it would be interesting to hear an old perspective expositor explain how Jesus’ brisk commands in that great sermon are to be obeyed by his followers without any sense of moral effort, synergism and so on.”

This is where the New Exodus motif within the Pauline corpus becomes so important: it is the blood of the Lamb over our doorposts that spares us and declares us “right” (initial justification), yet we still need to follow God on the path of liberation and deliverance, the Way that brings us from a former identity (Egypt, Eden) to a new humanity (Promised Land, New Jerusalem/complete Kingdom of God). This is covenantal nomism! Following the law (whether it be Torah or that which the Spirit writes on our hearts) is not what makes it possible for us to be part of God’s people, but it is the guideline for how to get from Egypt to the Promised Land, from a humanity that lives to propagate systemic sin and death to a humanity that lives to participate in the systemic faithfulness and life. This is synergy! And compared to it, monergy is shown to be nothing more than an inferior half-gospel that leaves everyone standing under a blood-covered doorpost, but never leaving their house for the Promised Land!

As Wright is making abundantly clear, there is no such thing as a soteriology that is divorced from eschatology – God is not rescuing people from the unfolding history of His creation; He is acting within the grand narrative of His creation to save it. Wright says it well when he talks about God’s single plan to save the world through Israel, and when he acknowledges Jesus as the uncompromised “Yes!” to God’s covenant with Israel. Jesus is every bit as much the Son of David as he is the Son of God, and until we come to terms with that Israel and Torah will be a source of confusion in our theology of escapist eschatology. But if we can come to terms with our favorite first-century Jewish carpenter, then we can see what it means that Gentiles join Jewish followers of God in their mission to bless the world.

That mission requires obedience and synergy, covenantal nomism. Jesus paid it all, and now we walk in his Way.

Reviewing Wright’s Justification: Introduction and Chapter One

Justification, N.T. Wright’s latest book, is the Bishop’s seemingly irritated response to John Piper, pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minn., and a figurehead of the “neo-Reformed” sect of Christianity. Wright clarifies that, already balancing a full schedule of pastoral and academic assignments, writing a rebuttal to Piper (who himself wrote The Future of Justification: A Response to N.T. Wright after Wright’s Paul: In Fresh Perspective) is necessary because of the subject matter and its implications. 

This isn’t back-and-forth for the sake of getting petty or something about which Christians should “agree to disagree.” To Wright, there’s simply too much riding on justification.

“. . . the question is about the nature and scope of salvation. Many Christians in the Western world, for many centuries now, have seen ’salvation’ as meaning ‘going to heaven when you die.’. . . In the Bible, salvation is not God’s rescue of people from the world but the rescue of the world itself. . .  Some Christians have used terms like justification and salvation as though they were almost interchangeable, but this is clearly untrue to Scripture itself.” (pgs 10-11)

Wright cites Piper’s theology of justification ignoring Paul is four main areas: the work of Jesus as Israel’s Messiah, its covenant nature (bringing about the end of exile), the lawcourt metaphor (in which God finds Himself “in favor” of those who follow Jesus; not merely allowing Jesus to transpose his moral achievement to his followers), and eschatology (a full narrative understanding of what God is doing in the entire world). (pgs 11-12)

“What’s All This About, and Why Does it Matter?” is the first full chapter of Justification, Wright comes out of the gate with frustration that Piper and similar theologians demonstrate a concern for “God’s glory” while espousing an eisogeted theology of justification that is centered on individuals finding their ticket of escape from the world. Wright does not discount the value of personal salvation but scoffs at a concocted theology that places mankind at the center of the universe (with no regard for a more universal eschatological plan). (pg 23) 

“. . . the real point is, I believe, that the salvation of human beings, though of course extremely important for those human beings, is part of a larger purpose. God is rescuing us from the shipwreck of the world, not so that we can sit back and put our feet up in his company, but so that we can be part of his plan to remake the world.” (pg 24)

This is no petty argument or nit-picking theological tangent. The nature and scope of salvation have been misstated, leading people to a Westernized individualistic construction in which the “sinner’s prayer” is an end-all-be-all ticket to otherworldliness, with little or no place give to participation in God’s great exilic work in the universe. Of the overall aim for Justification, Wright says, “I hope that the next generation, without preexisting reputations to lose and positions to maintain, will get the message.”

Piper, as well as some early reviews of this book, have accused Wright of constructing a “confusing gospel.” Wright responds to such a mentality toward him and the New Perspective:

“Sometimes, faced with a jigsaw puzzle, one is tempted to make it apparently easier by ignoring half the pieces. Put them back into the box! I can’t cope with that many! The result is of course that the puzzle is made harder, not easier. However, one can imagine someone, having made this initial disastrous move, trying to remedy the situation by brute force, joining together pieces that don’t quite fit in order to create some sort of picture anyway.” (pg 31)

The old perspective on Paul tossed out critical “pieces” of Paul’s theology: “Abraham and the promises God made to him, incorporation into Christ, resurrection and new creation, resurrection and new creation, the coming together of Jews and Gentiles, eschatology in the sense of God’s purpose-driven plan through history, and, not least, the Holy Spirit and the formation of Christian character.” (pgs 31-32)

Wright calls out Piper for completely sidelining passage such as Romans 2.25-29 and Romans 10.6-9 in his treatment of Paul and for picking out Paul’s Genesis 15 reference without consideration for the meaning of the full text toward which Paul was directing his readers. “When Paul quotes Scripture, he regularly intends to refer, not simply to the actual words quoted, but to the whole passage.” (pgs 32-33)

Of the impact of a narrative, covenantal approach to Scripture, the Bishop says:

“God had a single plan all along through which he intended to rescue the world and the human race, and that this single plan was centered upon the call of Israel, a call which Paul saw coming to fruition in Israel’s representative, the Messiah. Read Paul like this, and you can keep all the jigsaw pieces on the table.” (pg 35, italics his)

Re-examining justification

Ben Witherington III has a review of N.T. Wright’s new book that I am absolutely begging you (whether you’re a close friend or a total stranger) to read. In my opinion, BW3’s review sums up Wright’s theology in language that is far easier to understand than Wright’s own voice, but these are theological advances that could help us emerge from a Reformed framework of salvation (while Wright is considered Reformed, by “Reformed framework” I’m referring to the conclusions of American Evangelical Reformed “gatekeepers” like Don Carson and John Piper), back to the justification viewpoint held by the Apostle Paul and many of the Early Church leaders.

To put it ever-bluntly: If Wright is correct – and I wholeheartedly believe his theology of justification is an improvement on the typical Reformed view – then many Christians have been misguided and misrepresenting the gospel when answering the question, “Who are the people of God?” 

Please take time to read the entire review.

The Resurrection, fatalism, and the problem with the Church calendar

Good words from N.T. Wright:

“To preach the Resurrection is to announce the fact that the world is a different place, and that we have to live in that ‘different-ness.’ The Resurrection is not just God doing a wacky miracle at one time. We have to preach it in a way that says this was the turning point in world history.”

Amen and Amen.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the difference between a linear Hebraic approach to history and time over-against the circular mindset that Israel’s pagan neighbors and the Hellenistic philosophers demonstrated toward history, and how these preconceptions influence the way we celebrate holidays – the ways we remember our story. 

Biblical Israel celebrated their feasts with devotion, partly because God commanded them to remember the situation from which they arose (particularly in the case of Passover as remembrance of their emergence out of Egypt). But it was in the context of a people who understood that history is linear, that they weren’t designed to return to that from which they were freed. It is abundantly clear, in the instances when Israel does forget their story and re-enters bondage, that this is not God’s plan for them. The purpose of remembering the story was not to re-live its highs and lows in a circular way, but to remember all the reasons why they should continue going forward in the ways of God.

Remember captivity – don’t re-enter captivity – so that you can walk in freedom. 

Fast-forward to Christianity, which suffers still today from the Early Church’s concessions to Hellenistic philosophy and pagan ideas regarding fatalism and circular history (the gods are going to do what the gods are going to do, and everything comes around…). How does a circular view of history shape the way people remember their story?

Many churches today celebrate a “Church calendar” that includes Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Holy Week, Easter, and Pentecost. By no means is there anything wrong with observing these moments within Christian history. It’s great that people want to be well-versed in each and every phase of their faith history (though they don’t even do that really; most Gentile Christians disregard any and all traditions and celebrations carried over from Judaism, which is a sorry disregard for our rich inheritance as those adopted into Israel). What I really want to call into question is the role a circular, fatalistic view of history plays in our approach to holidays.

When we approach holidays with a fatalistic understanding of history, we don’t merely recognize each season of Christ’s journey or our own history as a point along a line, something out of which we emerge, but rather as an endless cycle in which we are trapped. In this cycle there is no differentiation among the holidays. We aren’t living in Easter or Pentecost any more than we are living in Lent. Our celebrations become continuous dramatizations of the same cycle (a treadmill and not a trajectory). It’s different than to say that we live in a point of tension between two seasons along the linear model of progressive time (the already-but-not-yet of the New Testament and the in-breaking of the Kingdom of God); no, this is truly the antithesis of eschatology – there is no expectation for change within ourselves or within our world.

We just go round and round. Bound to the cycles of history. Pushed around by the gods.

Again, this is in clear contrast with the Hebraic understanding of linear time. Again, there’s a difference between remembering you were set free from captivity in Egypt and trying to simulate that captivity. Going further, there is a danger in simulating that captivity: you could very easily begin to define yourself presently in the images and terms of that captivity. 

This is what happens to the Church calendar when approached from a circular, fatalistic lens. It’s no wonder that a Hellenistic, fatalistic, circular view of history leads to a diminished expectation toward Christ’s impact on humankind (am I making up a term to say “Christoanthropology”?), such as that which was held by Augustine, who was certainly trapped in a circular view of history.

A person’s view of history seems to, by necessity, correlate with his/her thoughts on the potential for humanity (not the necessary trajectory of humanity but the possibilities for humanity’s trajectory).

Let me put it differently: say a person undergoes a three-month period of real darkness in his life – maybe extreme substance abuse or something along those lines – but breaks away from that darkness and is now staying clean. It’s possible that, in stopping his abuse, a lot about his lifestyle changed – the clothes he wears, the music he listens to, his sleep schedule, etc. It might be a good idea for him to set aside a concrete time when he can give recognition to the fact that he came out of hardship (maybe he’d celebrate the yearly anniversary of cutting off the substance abuse and living clean).

But wouldn’t it be weird as hell for that person to devote a three-month period of his year to commemorating his emergence from his old life by going back to his old clothes, music, sleep schedule, etc.? None of us would think that was a good idea. What if he went around telling people he is, in present time, an addict? What if he actually went back to the drugs? None of us think that’s a healthy way to “remember,” do we? There is a huge risk in self-definition if he goes through with any of these bad ideas, and we’d all agree that it’s overkill.

Where I’m going with this is that we are, as Christians, Easter people. And we’re invited to be Pentecost people. These are things that are true of us and our reality in real time. A lot of things are valuably true about our past, but these things are intended by God to be part of our present-tense lives.

In real time, we aren’t waiting for a Messiah. In real time, he came.

In real time, we’re not merely Incarnation people. In real time, we’re people who incarnate the beginning of realized Easter hope. And we are meant to have the tools of Pentecost at our disposal as we live incarnationally in real time. 

Now I’m all about giving our history due diligence. As a matter of fact, maybe the most widely read thing I’ve ever written is an article about not reading Easter into the Christmas story, but celebrating Incarnation for Incarnation’s sake. So I’m not being a hater here. It’s just that it seems we get into trouble when we can’t celebrate the past without understanding that history (and, by result, our self-definition as Christians) is to be understood in potentially-progressive linear terms.

Otherwise the Church calendar only fuels our spiritual impotence. We become people who neglect the faculties and possibilities of Easter and Pentecost because we are too busy playing fatalist dress-up.

The resurrection stops being central to our story because, in needing to define ourselves in the terms of Advent, we center our story around the hope of a returning Messiah (rather than taking up the invitation of an already-here Messiah to build his Kingdom).

Rather than seeing Lent as a season out of which we’ve emerged, we define our present lives in its language. So when trouble hits, we muster up some motivational speech about finding solidarity in a Suffering Servant while giving no attention to the idea that Pentecost provided us a Helper to overcome at least some types of suffering. I’m not saying that we never suffer, or that solidarity with Christ is entirely unimportant. But thank God we have more than solidarity with a dead, decomposed Suffering Servant. 

But isn’t that where a lot of people are in terms of self-definition? The hope of Easter and the strength of Pentecost are matched, if not outweighed, by a whiny emo gospel in which we have no victory over sin and death, just a heroic martyr to identify with as we celebrate our frailty.

Even within missional-emergent circles there is a reluctance to really live in the real-time events. I’ll prod and maybe make enemies by going ahead and saying that I think the reason for this failure is due, in large part, to low pneumatology and connected fear of looking more ecstatic than hip. It’s as much of a control game as anything we saw in modern (as opposed to post-modern) forms of church.

In a culture that loves self-promotion and dreads embarrassment, maybe emergent Christians don’t want to risk the diminished mystique of fully abandoning themselves to the work of the Spirit. It goes against our culturally-conditioned obsession with all things moderate and mild-mannered. 

There’s safety in going round and round in a cyclical calendar with our fatalistic assumptions. We don’t have to be torn away from that which used to define us (we’re like the passed-over Israelite who decides to return to Egypt, or the recovering addict who goes back to his old habits to give recognition to that chapter of life).

And no one will mistake us for being radicals. Our persona is in-tact.

I’ll come back to my opening quote from Wright:

“To preach the Resurrection is to announce the fact that the world is a different place, and that we have to live in that ‘different-ness.’ The Resurrection is not just God doing a wacky miracle at one time. We have to preach it in a way that says this was the turning point in world history.”

Or, to put it differently, we might consider some words from the Apostle Paul (Romans 6.4-11): 

Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin; for he who has died is freed from sin. Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him, knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, is never to die again; death no longer is master over Him. For the death that He died, He died to sin once for all; but the life that He lives, He lives to God. Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.

I affirm what the Apostle Paul and N.T. Wright are saying: the resurrection and its ensuing Pentecost are our defining moments. We have a rich history worth acknowledging – filled with important moments of expectation and suffering. But history is not a circular mechanism, nor are we defined equally by all of these events. 

The possibilities, energy, equipment, faculties, and potential of Easter and Pentecost are readily available to all who want to follow Christ out of unnecessary cycles and into a linear trajectory toward something beautiful.

Making sense of perceived fractures within the emergent movement

Mark Sayers wrote a really interesting piece the other day about what he sees as division and redistribution among those in the emergent-missional movement. Sayers sees the emerging missional church fracturing into several “mini movements,” which he categorizes as Neo-Anabaptist, Neo-Calvinist, Neo-Missiololgist, Neo-Clapham’s, Digital Pentecostals, Neo-Liberals, and Blenders.

It’s an assessment with which I partly agree and partly disagree. (How’s that for vague?)

Ecclesiology and church history are both topics of interest for me – and, though I’m probably in the minority on this one, I think they’re vital components of a larger pursuit of living/practical/applied theology. I’m glad that Sayers shed so much light on this topic and I want to chime in and share a couple thoughts I have about his claim of a fractured “emerging missional church.” 

I’m not attempting to cover this with much authority, just as someone who’s participated in a few of the groups represented in Sayers’ categorization, been educated by another camp, known plenty of people in each bundle, and tried to observe historic and contemporary ecclesial happenings because, like I said, it’s interesting and part of a larger, more important picture.

My first and foremost friendly critique of Sayers’ piece is that he puts these various groups under the “emergent missional” umbrella and compares them to a Protestantism that, after first breaking off from Catholicism, endured several splits into smaller factions that make up most of our denominationalism today. But maybe we should consider whether at least one of the groups Sayers lists, Neo-Calvinism (which is not very “Neo” anything; it’s Calvinism, as immovable as Calvin’s God), better parallels the Catholicism of the Protestants’ day – an ‘old guard’ that enjoyed entitlement and prestige within the previous technological-epistemological epoch, strongly resistant to a new epoch’s potential contributions to the epistemology, theology, and doctrine of the Church. In our modern-day reformation, the Reformed are playing the role of sixteenth-century Catholics.

Reading though Sayers’ piece, I also wondered where to locate someone like Rob Bell within Sayers’ blurbs (Neo-Clapham?). Bell doesn’t share the house/simple church schtick of Frank Viola or Alan Hirsch, yet his missional theology has a led a mega-church full of people to live missionally while still gathering with a large ecclesial body.

While Sayers’ intrigue is with perceived fracturing of emergent-missional camps reflective of Protestant divides, there’s something to be said of postmodern Christians being pre-Catholic and pre-Western – finding a wealth of truth in Eastern Orthodoxy as well as Judaism. Maybe postmodern Christians – many of whom were likely raised in Protestant settings – are still predisposed toward division. I can’t disprove that. But maybe their break from Westernized Christianity is not for the sake of division and re-categorization; maybe its a move toward and with something (some gems within Eastern theology) which, by necessity, pull them away from fully identifying with Westernized Christianity. That’s how I see it, at least.

At first I was surprised that Sayers described Digital Pentecostals as adopting Neo-Clapham thought, but the more I think about it, the more I see what Sayers is saying. I wonder if this is where Sayers would locate someone like Leonard Sweet, who has strong pneumatology along with a zest (understatement) for visual media and multi-sensory worship experiences. 

I assume that Digital Pentecostals have an easier time with the postmodern shift than other Christian groups because their epistemology is relatively robust (at least in the U.S. and U.K. many of them are coming from a Wesleyan-Holiness church history lineage that is closer to Eastern epistemology than the anti-experiential sola scriptura stance esteemed by many Western Christians).

As far as a Neo-Liberal group goes, I agree it exists, but I hope that Sayers is wrong in placing most “Emergent” (I assume he means Emergent Village) leaders under this umbrella. It makes a bit of sense that liberals within Mainline Protestant churches jumped on the emergent bandwagon – the Mainline churches’ ship has been sinking for awhile and emergent churches provided younger Mainliners a generally innovate methodology for worship while (typically) not shoving a dictated style of inspiration, patriarchalism, and a low eschatology onto anyone’s theological plate. While I’m glad to be in a faith community with Mainliners, I hope that the Church is headed toward something beyond Mainline Protestantism and liberalism. I hope we can find a right tension between a social gospel and a holiness gospel (see Wesley, Finney, and the Booths).

That said, I’m not too worried about our Church in transition settling into the path carved by Mainline Protestantism because, like I mentioned earlier, what I see currently is a reclaiming of Eastern thought (pulling from Judaism and Eastern Orthodoxy) that is more substantive and of greater implications than the Mainline’s back-and-forth reactionary relationship with Fundamentalism.

Brian McLaren put it well when he compartmentalized Christian groups’ approach to change in four ways: 

1. Low change in method; low change in message

2. High change in method; low change in message

3. Low change in method; high change in message

4. High change in method; high change in message

For those emergent-missionals who have discovered and reclaimed Christianity’s Eastern roots, it is clear that they belong to either the third or fourth category on this chart. No, they’re not inventing theological statements that have never before existed, but they are returning to some thoughts on God that pre-date the foothold of Hellenistic philosophy and the Augustinian tradition that so greatly influenced both Catholicism and Protestantism. 

There is a difference between novelty movements and lasting change, and I believe lasting change will be found in the shift toward a Church that is both post-Western as well as pre-Western. In terms of worship expression that might manifest in very historically-rooted ways (category three) or multi-sensory, hi-tech ways (category four) – unless, of course, you’ve been raised in Eastern theology, in which case you’re hanging out in category one or two and finding that you’re suddenly everyone’s new best friend.

For this reason, I’m really interested to see what comes of the people Sayers locates in his Blenders category, those who seem to advocate for alternative worship in a larger ecclesial setting (Sayers notes their resistance toward the stripped down church models of the Neo-Missiologists) but who have yet to demonstrate considerable interest in moving beyond Western theology into something that is pre- and post-Westernized Christianity (I would say pre- and post-Augustine).

There are certainly shifts going on within the demographics that have been labeled emergent-missional. I don’t believe people are returning to a handful of Protestant sects, though – at least not those who are quadrant three or four emergents by McLaren’s terms. I think the movement taking place is people finding their place along McLaren’s quadrants – determining whether they were serious about theological recovery and progression, or if they’re fine with the status-quo and just like candlelight/beat tracks/organic food/etc. 

A century from now, I believe it will be those quadrant three and four Christians who change the Church for the better. We’re in the midst of another great shift in Church history, similar to the West’s break from the East, and the West’s internal break (Catholicism-Protestantism). What we see now is an emerging generation of Christians moving away from their Protestantism and the West for the sake of rejoining the East. For as much as breaking and division is part of my forecast for twenty-first-century Christianity, there will be just as much reuniting, reclamation, and communion.