A New Reformation? Emerging Theology is shaking Christianity, says Pastor Paul Nuechterlein of Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Portage
http://www.mlive.com/living/kalamazoo/index.ssf/2010/03/a_new_reformation_emerging_the.html
Published: Saturday, March 27, 2010, 7:00 PM Updated: Tuesday, March 30, 2010, 4:29 PM
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Studying the gospel: The Rev. Paul Nuechterlein, senior pastor of Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Portage, conducts a Bible study on the Gospel of John at his church on a recent Sunday morning.
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KALAMAZOO — Nearly 500 years ago Martin Luther posted his 95 theses in Wittenberg, Germany — a move that set off a shakeup in the Christian Church that became known as the Protestant Reformation.
Now there’s another movement brewing that could change Christianity just as dramatically, says a local pastor whose denomination takes its name from Luther.
“It’s 8.8 on the Richter scale,” says Pastor Paul Nuechterlein, of Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Portage. “If the last huge change in Christianity was at the time of the Reformation, it looks like we’re going through that kind of change again.”
If you’re a biblical scholar, this change probably isn’t news to you — “I think it’s been under way for 50 to 100 years,” says Nuechterlein — but if you’re a Christian sitting in a pew of your local church, it might be.
The change Nuechterlein is talking about is a change in how some Christians view the meaning of an event at the heart of Christianity — Jesus’ crucifixion.
While Christian theology is, of course, a complex subject that takes way more than a newspaper article to address, here’s an attempt to summarize traditional thinking on the crucifixion: Jesus died on the cross to save human beings from their sins. God is a just God who would have had to punish us for our sins unless he sent Jesus. But God is also a gracious God, and Jesus stepped in and took the punishment for us, sacrificing himself and thereby atoning for our sins. If we believe in Jesus, we’ll be spared eternal damnation and go to heaven when we die to be with him.
Nuechterlein (pronounced NECK-ter-line) has a shorthand phrase for this interpretation — he calls it the “turn or burn” message. And he says it can be traced historically to the atonement theology of Saint Anselm, who lived in the 11th and early 12th centuries.
Nuechterlein and others in the world of emerging or emergent theology hold a different view that “flips atonement upside down,” Nuechterlein says.
“Christ came to end that sacrificial logic (that God required a sacrifice for our sins),” Nuechterlein says. “It’s not God but we who are wrathful and punishing. God offers a lamb so we might see (our) sin and accept God’s alternative, which is goodness and grace and mercy.”
Jesus, as the lamb of God, intentionally walks into “what are essentially our engines of punishment” and shows us that “God is love, that God is not about violence at all,” Nuechterlein says.
“When John says God is love, he doesn’t say, ‘And sometimes wrath and anger.’ Love — that’s the power that sustains the universe.”
Nuechterlein’s view is echoed in a piece by Abbot Andrew Marr in this year’s Easter newsletter of St. Gregory’s Abbey, a Benedictine near Three Rivers affiliated with the Episcopal Church. “The Gospel record and the apostolic preaching in Acts suggest that Jesus’ death says a lot more about human beings than it does about God,” writes Marr. “ ... Jesus did not come to die; he came to give life and to give it abundantly.”
A merciful God
So what does Nuechterlein make of those Old Testament stories that refer to an angry God?
Now there’s another movement brewing that could change Christianity just as dramatically, says a local pastor whose denomination takes its name from Luther.
“It’s 8.8 on the Richter scale,” says Pastor Paul Nuechterlein, of Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Portage. “If the last huge change in Christianity was at the time of the Reformation, it looks like we’re going through that kind of change again.”
If you’re a biblical scholar, this change probably isn’t news to you — “I think it’s been under way for 50 to 100 years,” says Nuechterlein — but if you’re a Christian sitting in a pew of your local church, it might be.
The change Nuechterlein is talking about is a change in how some Christians view the meaning of an event at the heart of Christianity — Jesus’ crucifixion.
While Christian theology is, of course, a complex subject that takes way more than a newspaper article to address, here’s an attempt to summarize traditional thinking on the crucifixion: Jesus died on the cross to save human beings from their sins. God is a just God who would have had to punish us for our sins unless he sent Jesus. But God is also a gracious God, and Jesus stepped in and took the punishment for us, sacrificing himself and thereby atoning for our sins. If we believe in Jesus, we’ll be spared eternal damnation and go to heaven when we die to be with him.
Nuechterlein (pronounced NECK-ter-line) has a shorthand phrase for this interpretation — he calls it the “turn or burn” message. And he says it can be traced historically to the atonement theology of Saint Anselm, who lived in the 11th and early 12th centuries.
Nuechterlein and others in the world of emerging or emergent theology hold a different view that “flips atonement upside down,” Nuechterlein says.
“Christ came to end that sacrificial logic (that God required a sacrifice for our sins),” Nuechterlein says. “It’s not God but we who are wrathful and punishing. God offers a lamb so we might see (our) sin and accept God’s alternative, which is goodness and grace and mercy.”
Jesus, as the lamb of God, intentionally walks into “what are essentially our engines of punishment” and shows us that “God is love, that God is not about violence at all,” Nuechterlein says.
“When John says God is love, he doesn’t say, ‘And sometimes wrath and anger.’ Love — that’s the power that sustains the universe.”
Nuechterlein’s view is echoed in a piece by Abbot Andrew Marr in this year’s Easter newsletter of St. Gregory’s Abbey, a Benedictine near Three Rivers affiliated with the Episcopal Church. “The Gospel record and the apostolic preaching in Acts suggest that Jesus’ death says a lot more about human beings than it does about God,” writes Marr. “ ... Jesus did not come to die; he came to give life and to give it abundantly.”
A merciful God
So what does Nuechterlein make of those Old Testament stories that refer to an angry God?
Essentially, those stories reflect a limited understanding of God and project human flaws onto God, he believes.
The Exodus story, for example, has God slaughtering the firstborn children in Egypt through a plague, he says. “You could compare that to Pat Robertson saying the earthquake in Haiti is punishment from God for the Haitian people selling their soul to the devil centuries ago,” Nuechterlein says. “Most people say, ‘That god is not my God.’ That interpretation in Exodus is a Pat Robertson sort of interpretation. ... Jesus is trying to help us unlearn that.”
In others cases, people misinterpret or miss the point of an Old Testament story, Nuechterlein says, as with the account of Abraham going up a mountain to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac. “In Hebrew, the god who asks Abraham to do that is Elohim, and that’s the garden variety word for god,” Nuechterlein says. “The one who stops him is the angel of Yahweh. The true God is stopping us from following the old god who demands sacrifice.
“That is not what the true God is about. All of the prophets say God doesn’t want this. God wants justice and mercy.”
Valuing the Bible
Nuechterlein, who turned 54 earlier this month, grew up with “the standard kind of atonement theology,” he says. But “the best of Lutheran theology is uneasy with that,” he adds.
Nuechterlein credits, among others, French biblical scholar Rene Girard and British bishop and theologian N.T. Wright with helping him develop his newer way of thinking. He also noted that author and pastor Brian McLaren is bringing “emerging” thinking to a wide audience.
“He is helping us to understand that this is a big time of change,” Nuechterlein says.
Nuechterlein’s perspective — like that of other “emergent” thinkers — entails a view of the Bible that some would say is more sophisticated than seeing it as inerrant in every word. Others, though, would say he doesn’t take the Bible seriously enough, and Nuechterlein knows that. But he begs to differ.
“A different sort of faith would say I don’t value the Bible, but I value it very much. It’s the key and center to my faith,” says Nuechterlein, who has spent 25 years in the ministry.
“Here’s how I look at the Bible,” he says. “... If there is a true God, how would that true God ever get through to us? I think the Bible gives us the picture. God chooses Abraham and Sarah (and their descendants). He has a covenant relationship with that people over centuries. It will take centuries for the true God to get through to us so we will get it. ... Christians have just as famously missed the point [of God's revelation] as so many stories in the Old Testament did.
“The point of scripture is to take this journey where God helps us learn who God truly is.”
Judgment and hell
As opposed to traditional views of salvation and judgment, Nuechterlein has “more of a sense of universal salvation — that God came to save the whole creation.” But he acknowledges that “a lot of this is a mystery. We just don’t know exactly what’s going to happen.”
Nuechterlein says he has a problem with the Reformation concept of justification by faith — the idea that one gains salvation and eternal life by believing in Jesus rather than by doing good works. For Nuechterlein, it’s neither belief nor good works that bring salvation.
“One thing that happens with the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith is that believing becomes its own works righteousness,” Nuechterlein says. “(The apostle) Paul’s message is unconditional grace. It’s not about my belief, but about Jesus’ faithfulness. God in Jesus Christ has a rescue mission. God sends Jesus to unconditionally save us from the powers of sin and death. ...
“We’re already rescued, and it’s an unconditional rescue mission. Some of us would probably not want to be saved from the powers of sin and death, but God did it anyway.”
Biblical language about judgment and hell, in Nuechterlein’s view, is about the consequences of our sin. “When Jesus says, ‘Those who live by the sword die by the sword,’ he’s saying that violence and accusation and punishment bring their own kind of judgment,” Nuechterlein says.
“Someday violence will just kind of sink down into its own hellhole,” he adds. And “if I continue to live my life according to violence, I miss out on what life is all about.”
A gospel class
Nuechterlein is currently teaching a class at his church that incorporates some of these ideas about salvation and judgment. He says his ideas are received “fairly well” by his congregation.
“I’m not aware of any movement to oust me yet,” he jokes. Getting more serious, though, he adds, “When someone does have a negative reaction, that provides an opportunity to talk and learn together.”
For his class, which is focused on the Gospel of John, he’s using a book by Wright, “John for Everyone.”
While Wright’s views have influenced Nuechterlein’s thinking, the two differ on some matters. Unlike Nuechterlein, Wright presents a view of Jesus as God’s agent of final judgment and rejects the idea of universal salvation.
“Judgment is necessary — unless we were to conclude, absurdly, that nothing much is wrong or, blasphemously, that God doesn’t mind very much,” Wright says in his book “Surprised by Hope.”
But Wright talks of the final judgment as a time to be longed for and celebrated, a time when “the creator God will set the world right once and for all,” bringing it back to a state of justice and truth through Jesus.
Wright is reluctant to consider whether some people won’t be part of God’s transformed creation. But he suggests that maybe those who persistently refuse God’s love and rescue will one day, after death, end up no longer bearing the divine image at all and will exist in “an ex-human state.” But he says he doesn’t want anyone to suppose he knows much about this subject or enjoys speculating about it.
In Wright’s view, as in Nuechterlein’s, God’s purposes are bigger than the issues Christians often focus on.
In thinking about God’s purposes, says Wright, our challenge is “to focus not on the question of which human beings God is going to take to heaven and how he is going to do it but on the question of how God is going to redeem and renew his creation through human beings and how he is going to rescue those humans themselves as part of the process but not as the point of it all.”
For Nuechterlein, one of the implications of believing in a redeeming, nonviolent God is this: “It helps me orient my life around life, not violence and death. That I can live in that spirit today makes a huge difference in my life.”
The Exodus story, for example, has God slaughtering the firstborn children in Egypt through a plague, he says. “You could compare that to Pat Robertson saying the earthquake in Haiti is punishment from God for the Haitian people selling their soul to the devil centuries ago,” Nuechterlein says. “Most people say, ‘That god is not my God.’ That interpretation in Exodus is a Pat Robertson sort of interpretation. ... Jesus is trying to help us unlearn that.”
In others cases, people misinterpret or miss the point of an Old Testament story, Nuechterlein says, as with the account of Abraham going up a mountain to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac. “In Hebrew, the god who asks Abraham to do that is Elohim, and that’s the garden variety word for god,” Nuechterlein says. “The one who stops him is the angel of Yahweh. The true God is stopping us from following the old god who demands sacrifice.
“That is not what the true God is about. All of the prophets say God doesn’t want this. God wants justice and mercy.”
Valuing the Bible
Nuechterlein, who turned 54 earlier this month, grew up with “the standard kind of atonement theology,” he says. But “the best of Lutheran theology is uneasy with that,” he adds.
Nuechterlein credits, among others, French biblical scholar Rene Girard and British bishop and theologian N.T. Wright with helping him develop his newer way of thinking. He also noted that author and pastor Brian McLaren is bringing “emerging” thinking to a wide audience.
“He is helping us to understand that this is a big time of change,” Nuechterlein says.
Nuechterlein’s perspective — like that of other “emergent” thinkers — entails a view of the Bible that some would say is more sophisticated than seeing it as inerrant in every word. Others, though, would say he doesn’t take the Bible seriously enough, and Nuechterlein knows that. But he begs to differ.
“A different sort of faith would say I don’t value the Bible, but I value it very much. It’s the key and center to my faith,” says Nuechterlein, who has spent 25 years in the ministry.
“Here’s how I look at the Bible,” he says. “... If there is a true God, how would that true God ever get through to us? I think the Bible gives us the picture. God chooses Abraham and Sarah (and their descendants). He has a covenant relationship with that people over centuries. It will take centuries for the true God to get through to us so we will get it. ... Christians have just as famously missed the point [of God's revelation] as so many stories in the Old Testament did.
“The point of scripture is to take this journey where God helps us learn who God truly is.”
Judgment and hell
As opposed to traditional views of salvation and judgment, Nuechterlein has “more of a sense of universal salvation — that God came to save the whole creation.” But he acknowledges that “a lot of this is a mystery. We just don’t know exactly what’s going to happen.”
Nuechterlein says he has a problem with the Reformation concept of justification by faith — the idea that one gains salvation and eternal life by believing in Jesus rather than by doing good works. For Nuechterlein, it’s neither belief nor good works that bring salvation.
“One thing that happens with the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith is that believing becomes its own works righteousness,” Nuechterlein says. “(The apostle) Paul’s message is unconditional grace. It’s not about my belief, but about Jesus’ faithfulness. God in Jesus Christ has a rescue mission. God sends Jesus to unconditionally save us from the powers of sin and death. ...
“We’re already rescued, and it’s an unconditional rescue mission. Some of us would probably not want to be saved from the powers of sin and death, but God did it anyway.”
Biblical language about judgment and hell, in Nuechterlein’s view, is about the consequences of our sin. “When Jesus says, ‘Those who live by the sword die by the sword,’ he’s saying that violence and accusation and punishment bring their own kind of judgment,” Nuechterlein says.
“Someday violence will just kind of sink down into its own hellhole,” he adds. And “if I continue to live my life according to violence, I miss out on what life is all about.”
A gospel class
Nuechterlein is currently teaching a class at his church that incorporates some of these ideas about salvation and judgment. He says his ideas are received “fairly well” by his congregation.
“I’m not aware of any movement to oust me yet,” he jokes. Getting more serious, though, he adds, “When someone does have a negative reaction, that provides an opportunity to talk and learn together.”
For his class, which is focused on the Gospel of John, he’s using a book by Wright, “John for Everyone.”
While Wright’s views have influenced Nuechterlein’s thinking, the two differ on some matters. Unlike Nuechterlein, Wright presents a view of Jesus as God’s agent of final judgment and rejects the idea of universal salvation.
“Judgment is necessary — unless we were to conclude, absurdly, that nothing much is wrong or, blasphemously, that God doesn’t mind very much,” Wright says in his book “Surprised by Hope.”
But Wright talks of the final judgment as a time to be longed for and celebrated, a time when “the creator God will set the world right once and for all,” bringing it back to a state of justice and truth through Jesus.
Wright is reluctant to consider whether some people won’t be part of God’s transformed creation. But he suggests that maybe those who persistently refuse God’s love and rescue will one day, after death, end up no longer bearing the divine image at all and will exist in “an ex-human state.” But he says he doesn’t want anyone to suppose he knows much about this subject or enjoys speculating about it.
In Wright’s view, as in Nuechterlein’s, God’s purposes are bigger than the issues Christians often focus on.
In thinking about God’s purposes, says Wright, our challenge is “to focus not on the question of which human beings God is going to take to heaven and how he is going to do it but on the question of how God is going to redeem and renew his creation through human beings and how he is going to rescue those humans themselves as part of the process but not as the point of it all.”
For Nuechterlein, one of the implications of believing in a redeeming, nonviolent God is this: “It helps me orient my life around life, not violence and death. That I can live in that spirit today makes a huge difference in my life.”
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