Saturday, April 28, 2012

A "Call to Faith by Breaking Faith," by Ross Douthat, NYT




From the tenor of this article it seems that postmodern Christianity has a lot of issues to work through - its history, its message, its mission, its ministries, it teachings. One that will require the many hearts, hands and minds of Christiandom around us. And that fact alone makes me confident in Christianity's future after coming through so large a parade of this past 20th Century's (including modernism's!) foibles and follies. Rather than despair at the great task set ahead of us it should be look upon as one of providential opportunity and blessing. One filled with possibility and encouragement. For there can be no despair for the world - nor for Christians specifically - when Jesus is the focus of our discussions and our relationships with one another. Surely, the only despair can come from our errant perceptions and idolatries surrounding Jesus in what we deem Christianity to be - or should be - rather than what it really is, and can be. Let us learn from the past, listen to today's critics, and discover a more substantive faith that can comport with today's global environment and mutli-cultural issues, problems and greatness.

We need Christians who can re-vision the world around us - not Christian revisionists who stick their heads in the proverbial sand like an ostrich and refuse to update their faith and their people! People of God who understand how to minister and preach to the needs of humanity without losing the soul-and-spirit of the biblical themes of God's love and redemption, and the grace and forgiveness found in Christ Jesus our Savior and Lord. Several of the people we have been following here in this web blog are mentioned below (sic, Dr. Roger Olson and Miroslav Volf). And it is to this wisdom of God's discerning body of believers that will come the Church's future directions and goals through providentially placed thinkers and contemporary theologs.

Be at peace then and know that God is bigger than us. That God's Kingdom will surely invade the Age of Man to lead humanity out from its sin and woe by a heavenly Child come to be our Savior-Messiah. Be as little children then. And be at peace in your child-like faith. For God is great and can do marvelous things beyond our imaginations.

R.E. Slater
April 28, 2012





Breaking Faith

‘Bad Religion,’ by Ross Douthat
April 27, 2012


From “God’s Controversy With New England,” Michael Wigglesworth’s 1662 call to repentance, to the latest campaign autobiography by a presidential aspirant, the jeremiad has been one of the most durable literary forms throughout American history. Typically, the author identifies some golden age, one just now dissolving in the rearview mirror; recounts the slippery path of declension; and then prescribes an amendment of ways in order to avert further disaster.

Ross Douthat’s contribution to this genre, “Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics,” laments the departure from what he calls “a Christian center,” which “has helped bind together a teeming, diverse and fissiparous nation.” Absent a national church, he argues, Christianity “has frequently provided an invisible mortar for our culture and a common vocabulary for our great debates.”

Douthat’s halcyon age is the postwar period, especially the 1950s. Mainline Protestantism was flourishing, and Roman Catholics, having demonstrated their patriotism in World War II, enjoyed new status as part of Will Herberg’s ­“Protestant-Catholic-Jew” America. “A kind of Christian convergence was the defining feature of this era,” Douthat asserts, and he cites the work of Reinhold Niebuhr, Billy Graham, Fulton Sheen and Martin Luther King Jr. as evidence that “the divided houses of American Christendom didn’t just grow, they grew closer together, re-engaged with one another after decades of fragmentation and self-segregation.”

Or did they? Niebuhr snubbed Graham during that evangelist’s storied 16-week revival at Madison Square Garden in 1957, and Graham did not participate in any of King’s civil rights marches or demonstrations. Bishop Sheen’s television popularity notwithstanding, Protestants continued to take shots at Catholicism; witness the runaway success of Paul Blanshard’s “American Freedom and Catholic Power” (11 printings in as many months) and the religious opposition that very nearly cost John F. Kennedy the presidency in 1960. Douthat, an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, extols Dwight Eisenhower’s laying of the cornerstone at the Inter­church Center in Upper Manhattan on Oct. 12, 1958, as “a celebration of Christian convergence and institutional vitality,” but he neglects to mention the temple bombing in Atlanta earlier that same day, a tragedy that even the president managed to acknowledge amid his platitudes about religion as the “firm foundation” of the nation’s character.

But a jeremiad, almost by definition, will not let thorny details stand in the way of a good romp, so let’s set aside these cavils and play along. Douthat locates the end of “the postwar moment” in 1963, just after King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. American Christianity, the author says, was at the height of its influence; Richard Russell, the segregationist senator from Georgia, would complain that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed only because “those damn preachers got the idea that it was a moral issue.”

Douthat’s narrative of decline implicates the sexual revolution; globalization (by which he means exposure to non-Christian religions); and the Vietnam War, which bifurcated American Christianity. Seminary enrollments declined, denominations faced budgetary stringencies and the elites “understood that the only reason to pay attention to traditional Christianity was to subject it to a withering critique.” Add to that the ordination of women, the growing acceptance of divorce and the destigmatizing of homosexuality, and you have a traditionalist’s nightmare.

Douthat, himself a conservative Catholic, believes that evangelicals generally hewed to the resistance model. By the 1980s, he insists, “what vitality remained in American Christendom was being sustained by the unexpected alliance between evangelicals and Catholics,” although he acknowledges that the religious right’s identification with George W. Bush tarnished its reputation.

The plunge into heresy, Douthat believes, can be traced to theological developments like the revisionist Jesus Seminar and the unlikely trinity of Elaine Pagels, Bart Ehrman and Dan Brown. Douthat accuses them of discrediting Christian orthodoxy in the interests of remaking Jesus in their own image, often for political ends. Debunking the debunkers, Douthat concludes that “they speak the language of the conspiratorial pamphlet, the paranoid chain e-mail — or the paperback thriller.” The currency of these ideas has given rise to what the author calls the “God Within” movement. “A choose-your-own-Jesus mentality,” Douthat writes, “encourages spiritual seekers to screen out discomfiting parts of the New Testament and focus only on whichever Christ they find most congenial.”

The “God Within” malady has infected evangelicals as well, as seen in the so-called prosperity gospel. Douthat harvests a lot of low-hanging fruit in this section, and who can blame him? The pablum peddled by Joel Osteen, Joyce Meyer and countless others surely represents an adumbration of Christian orthodoxy, but Douthat also criticizes Michael Novak’s defense of capitalism for being a betrayal of traditional Catholic teachings. All of this leaves us sinking into a morass of gluttony and narcissism, which has been inflected into the political arena as American ­exceptionalism.

Although Douthat’s grasp of American religious history is sometimes tenuous — he misdates the Second Great Awakening, mistakes Puritans for Pilgrims and erroneously traces the disaffection of American Catholics to the Second Vatican Council rather than the papal encyclical “Humanae Vitae” — there is much to commend his argument. Yes, the indexes of religious adherence are down, and the quality of religious discourse in America has diminished since the 1950s, in part because of the preference for therapy over theology. Theological illiteracy is appalling; many theologians, like academics generally, prefer to speak to one another rather than engage the public.

But the glass-is-half-full approach, to borrow from the famous Peace Corps ad of this era, looks rather different. I’m not sure that the enervation of religion as institution since the 1950s is entirely a bad thing; institutions, in my experience, are remarkably poor vessels for piety. An alternative reading of the liberal “accommodationists” Douthat so reviles is that they have enough confidence in the relevance and integrity of the faith to confront, however imperfectly, such fraught issues as women’s ordination and homosexuality rather than allow them to fester as they have for centuries. I suspect, moreover, that Douthat has overestimated the influence of intellectual trends like the Jesus Seminar. The thinkers he quotes are important, but I would also recommend the lesser-known work of writers like Roger Olson, Jean Sulivan, Doug Frank, Miroslav Volf and David James Duncan as evidence of the vitality of Christian thinking; they may occasionally poke provocatively at the edges of orthodoxy, but most do so from well within its frame. Finally, the fact that we are having this conversation at all (much less in the pages of this newspaper) is testament to the enduring relevance of faith in what sociologists long ago predicted would be a secular society.

Like any good jeremiad, “Bad Religion” concludes with what evangelicals would recognize as an altar call. Douthat invites readers to entertain “the possibility that Christianity might be an inheritance rather than a burden,” and he elevates such eclectic phenomena as home schooling, third-world Christianity and the Latin Mass as sources for renewal.

Religion in the rearview mirror never looked better.


Randall Balmer, an Episcopal priest and a professor of American religious history at Barnard College, is the author of a dozen books, including “Thy Kingdom Come” and “God in the White House.”



Repost: Matthew Harding - "Let Us Dance!"

"Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, 'Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.' " (Rev 21.1-4)


Let Us Dance!
by Matt Harding

2008





2012






"This is now an older video but it works still, for me, as a powerful visual metaphor for the 'new heavens and new earth,' the biblical notion that this whole earth will be restored and renewed under God’s eschatological loving care.

To be fair, it wasn’t the original intention of the video, which is pretty cool all on its own (apart from the analogical connection to eschatology), but set it alongside the vision of Rev. 21 and you have a picture of: Dancing. Joy. Happiness. Reunion. Health. Solid, beautiful earth. Reconciliation and Peace. The 'coming of God.' The New Jerusalem joining the present world. The coming Kingdom. Of Christ who is all in all. Maranatha! "

by Kyle Roberts, Bethel College
http://kylearoberts.com/wordpress/?p=446



When I first saw this video I didn't know what to expect and the longer I watched it the more my heart was moved by its incredible vision. It brought tears of joy to my eyes, and my heart just wanted to burst with its beauty, as I thought of God's love for us and this wonderful life made so beautiful when we all join in. Come, let us Dance! Let us Celebrate t-o-g-e-t-h-e-r in this thing called Life!

R.E. Slater
May 15, 2011




On Things that Last - Revival, Relationship, Faith

"I Used to Be On Fire for God"

Jordan White
 
Me and Britt
It started junior year of high school when I went to my friend’s charismatic youth group. The room was dark, the music was loud and there was a lot of dancing. People were crying on the floor, shouting unintelligible languages and jumping.

It was the weirdest, most electric thing I’d ever experienced. I was "on fire" for God.



I was raised almost completely out of church by completely Christian parents. I’ve only recently come to understand what it was that hurt them about church and why they can’t bring themselves to go back. It’s an unspoken bond not unlike people who’ve experienced something traumatic like a car accident. The connection is in the eyes, in the way we talk about who we were as compared to who we are. When I was in high school and on fire for God, I thought my parents were scared. Little did I know, God is scary.



The problem with revival is that it is a fleeting notion.



While in high school and on fire for God, I was a leader for a campus ministry called CRASH. The name came from a group of rhinos running into buildings or something Christian-edgy like that. We met once a week on Friday mornings before school, and it was my job to lead sermons for the 15 or so students brave enough to show up before school and worship. When I didn’t sleep through my alarm, I dragged my younger brother to school at six and planned out lessons five minutes before I was supposed to deliver them.

I was really terrible at leading CRASH. My ego and self-confidence levels were at an all-time high with practicality trailing enormously behind me. That was a serious problem with my brand of Christianity. It was more about me believing unwaveringly in my own enlightenment than it was about sharing God’s love. I saw myself as a revolutionary Christian leader whose stories were sure to circulate for millennia to come. It was all about the sexiness of healings and loud worship and not at all about listening. But one time, I did do something right. “Right,” meaning "impactful."



Our group met in the old theater of the high school. Our small following didn’t come close to filling the 1,000-seat auditorium, but occasionally that worked in our favor. On this particular morning, I was talking about how we shouldn’t be scared to spread the Gospel to each and every person we meet. I’m sure I quoted (potentially misquoted) the verse about how if we deny God before man, then Jesus will deny us before His Father.



From the stage, I asked for a volunteer to come stand on a box. After a long pause, I got one. He slowly approached the steps to the left of the stage and stood next to me. Then I asked him what he was passionate about. I had also been talking about how God works through our passions and that we should be bold about those as well. Like a good revolutionary, I took this simple question and made something radical and showy out of it.



I jumped off the stage and ran toward the back of the auditorium. By the time I got to the door, my participant, viewers, fellow leaders and church instructor were all very confused. From the back of the auditorium I shouted at my participant and asked him again what he was passionate about. He responded, but I couldn’t hear him—or rather, pretended not to. I kept having him repeat it at increasing decibel levels until the boy was screaming from the box. I felt like Brad Pitt in Fight Club.



Everyone laughed as I walked back up, and the electricity of emotion overwhelmed the group. People were nervous (and maybe a little bit excited) about the concept of yelling in front of their peers.



“If you can’t yell about God here, in an empty auditorium with all of your friends, how are you going to preach the Gospel out there [I pointed to the rest of the school] in the real world?” I baited them.



One by one, students walked up to the box and yelled at me. Like I said, this was the highlight of my CRASH career. At the end of the meeting, our church advisor, Paul, talked to me about the lesson. He was a youth pastor at a local Baptist church and much shyer than any of us.



“I’m not sure I could have done that, man. If you would have called me up there, I’m not sure I could have yelled like that. That would be way out of my comfort zone,” Paul said. 

I could barely hear him talking over the sound of my already bulbous ego being further inflated with the hot air of spiritual elitism. I was more spiritual than a grown man who was working as a youth pastor! That was worth, like, 3,000 revival points!



The problem with revival-driven ministry, as I’ve come to understand it, is that it leaves its believers high and dry when they run out of steam. It’s a dangerous act of creating unrealistic expectations and glorifying actions. Or at least, that’s what I’ve seen in my friends from my old church who don’t go anymore. 

That’s how I felt after I cooled off for God and realized I’d been placing all the importance on the “acts of God” as opposed to a relationship with God. I felt like I’d been chasing healings and miracles and revivals for so long that I’d forgotten how to be a normal person. I also felt like normality was defeat, that if I wasn’t speaking in tongues during algebra, I wasn’t pleasing to God.



One of my friends listens to a pastor who says that the opposite of Christianity isn’t atheism, it’s idolatry. I think he’s right. The tricky part is that we make idols out of some really cool things sometimes. Whenever the mission becomes more important than the person for whom we’re doing the mission, we get in trouble.

Accepting grace is probably one of the hardest things for humans to do, especially in a culture where we’re made so very aware of our shortcomings. But just like anything else, accepting grace is a balancing act. The charismatic church I attended through high school was focused on just that. We were good at accepting grace. Weirdly enough, that was kind of our thing. We were so good at accepting grace and believing ourselves to be revivalists that we didn’t really have room for the guilt of our transgressions.



If there’s anything I’ve learned about God, it’s that all my formulas fall short. Grace is so strange because it doesn’t fall into the natural cause-effect relationship of our Earth. I’m starting to think the relationship is what’s most important—that no matter how many healings I’ve seen or auditoriums I’ve yelled in, quality time is what’s most important.

Jordan White started writing in the sixth grade when he told a girl that he wrote poetry in order to make her like him. Turns out, she wanted to read some of his poetryso he started writing and never looked back. Read his blog here.

 

Of God's Love & GateKeepers of Another Sort - How Does God Love? "...If Not More"

Three little words about how we are loved raises a bigger question
Published: Friday, April 27, 2012, 9:37 AM
Kathy Higbee
IMG_4722.jpeg

GRAND RAPIDS, MI -- Some powerful voices shared the air at a breakfast this past week to help extend the reach of Hope Network's pastoral services.

But it was a three-word interjection from a woman in a wheelchair who stole the show, or at least helped drive home a point that perhaps all of us should stop to consider from time to time.

"If not more," said Kathy Higbee, just loud enough to be heard, but in a tone so reverently put that it raised both mild laughter and goosebumps.

Kathy was listening to Chuck Ely describe how God loves us all, and how that includes the likes of Kathy, people with special challenges whom we too often relegate to a back burner.

Because they look or sound or feel different from the rest of us "normal" people, we consciously or unconsciously tend to subjugate them to second-class status, and that's dangerous territory, especially from a spiritual standpoint.

Chuck was reminding those at the breakfast that Our Lord loves those with limitations just as much as everyone else.

And that's when Kathy piped up with "If not more."

You can slice and dice this a lot of different ways, of course. You could blame Kathy for a haughty attitude, daring to assume that the Creator plays favorites, that his chosen ones use wheelchairs and crutches and braces. That they require special therapies, feeding tubes.

But maybe he does. And wouldn't that be a wonderfully startling thing, to see Heaven's gatekeepers adorned in halos of another sort?

I first met Kathy last year, while writing profiles of people who make Hope Network the force that it is for people both struggling and soaring. It's an organization that works tirelessly to help 23,000 people a year harness their gifts, to reach their potential, no matter their lot in life.

We're talking ex-offenders and kids with autism and people fighting back from traumatic brain injury. People with needs the rest of us could only imagine, elements capable of humbling us each and every time we sweat the small stuff that makes us look, well, small.

Kathy Higbee is part of a prayer group that Chuck Ely helps direct at one of Hope Network's many sites. And I still have in my notes the first words I heard her utter, responding to the prospect that handicapped people raise their voices in song:

"The Lord doesn't mind how we sound."

How profound. Although that's not my first impression of Kathy, because I am ashamed to say that when I first laid eyes on her, my mind registered "Gal in wheelchair."

Kathy Higbee never asked for that. If it weren't for a motor vehicle accident some 20 years ago that robbed her of the ability to walk and talk without a slight slur -- that caused injury to her brain at the age of 19 -- I might have met her and thought "Engaging woman in her late 30s…nice hair."

With three words, though, Kathy helped me to see well beyond that and wonder if those with so-called limitations have a special place in the Savior's heart. And why not, given Jesus' propensity to break bread with the untouchables of his time on earth.

With three words, a woman who's been ignored and passed over and misunderstood raised the consciousness of a roomful of men and women who didn't come to hear her speak.

But I'm guessing that, thanks to Kathy's impromptu lesson, more than one of us walked away to question how warmly we embrace all God's children.

If not more.


Feel moved to help advance the mission of Hope Network? Visit them online.
Email: rademachertom@gmail.com



http://www.hopenetwork.org/