The Industrial Eden

“For a long time now we have understood ourselves as traveling to some sort of industrial paradise, some new Eden conceived and constructed entirely by human ingenuity.

And we have thought ourselves free to use and abuse nature in any way that might further this enterprise.

Now we have overwhelming evidence that we are not smart enough to recover Eden by assault, and that nature does not tolerate or excuse our abuses.

If, in spite of the evidence against us, we are finding it hard to relinquish our old ambition, we are also seeing more clearly every day how that ambition has reduced and enslaved us.”

- Wendell Berry “Nature as Measure” in Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food

The Bible as Meta-Narrative

Saving the Theological Cat

http://newwaystheology.blogspot.com/2011/04/saving-theological-cat.html

by Mason Slater

April 28, 2011

If the bible is a story, or more accurately a library of storied testimonies which together tell a Story, that should shape how we study it, teach it, and live it. Right?

What would that look like though? Because it doesn’t seem like it would all that closely resemble the way we tend to approach the Bible today.

Sure, there are a few scholars who are trying to work out a storied approach to the Scriptures, and a number of pastors who are shifting the art of the sermon in response to this way of understanding the Bible. For that I’m thankful. They do seem to be in the minority though, and I’m not sure even those steps are enough to grapple with the paradigm shift this sets up.

See the concept of “story” is central to me for another reason as well, the role it plays in writing. As I’ve made my faltering attempts at putting down something worthwhile on paper or screen I’ve jumped at anything (books, blogs, disciplines) that could refine my writing. In the process I’ve noticed something.

People who tell stories professionally approach the task quite differently than (most) people who teach the Bible professionally.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, each has its strengths and weaknesses, but it is worth noting. Much professional study of Scripture feels highly scientific, filled with lengthy footnotes, parsing Greek verbs, and charts (Oh the charts!). Those things are needed, and actually there is a science to storytelling as well.

The difference seems to be this: storytellers learn the method and then tell stories (or teach English to apathetic high schoolers), whereas theologians often learn the method and then spend most of their time talking about the method. This seems to somewhat miss the point.

I know I’m painting with broad strokes here, and there are plenty of exceptions in both theology and storytelling. But on the whole, it seems to fit.

So I’ve taken up reading books about storytelling. This began as a way to help sort out my writing, but it has ended up being a valuable theological practice as well.

Right now it’s Save The Cat! (thanks to a recommendation by Don Miller), which is directed at screenwriters and focuses on issues like plot, characters, and archetypes. Besides being a great read, it also has helped me as a reader and teacher of Scripture. Next up will be James Bell (the less heretical of the Bells) with Plot & Structure .

Theology matters, but it matters as a tool. As N.T. Wright puts it, theology is a convenient shorthand for different elements of the story. We need the shorthand to speak coherently, but we also need to be able to unpack the story itself.

How might a storied reading of Scripture change how we do theology?

What resources could be helpful in that shift?

Bonus unfiltered musing: Is it possible to do theology as story? Jesus seemed to in the parables...

Calling All Artists, Monks and Storytellers!

 http://newwaystheology.blogspot.com/2011/04/future-of-evangelicalism-artists-monks.html

The Future of Evangelicalism:

Artists, Monks, and Storytellers

by Mason Slater, April 2011

"What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music." - Soren Kierkegaard

As I look over my bookshelves I’m struck by the thought that Donald Miller was right.

Yesterday Miller wrote about how the Western church is in essence “a robust school system created around a framework of lectures and discussions and study... Churches are essentially schools. They look like schools with lecture halls, classrooms, cafeterias and each new church program is basically a teaching program.”

It’s a fair point, even if he pushes it a bit further than I would. After all, turn over almost any book on my shelf and what does it inform you of? The author’s academic credentials. If they went to the right schools and got the right degree they have legitimacy, if not, well they get categorized under “inspirational”.

Even the fact that books are the medium of choice in Western Christianity is telling. Why books? And why books which, often, read like textbooks?

Nothing against books or scholars, I have a incredibly deep love for both and think both have a vital role to play. But theirs is not the only role.

If the Evangelicalism of our generation is going to be able to reach the world we find ourselves in, to address pressing issues of justice, or to retain some level of unity, we cannot rely only on scholars.

What we need are more artists, monks, and storytellers.

We act on the assumption that the textbook communicates more truth than the novel, that the lecture conveys more deeply than the painting, that a conference is more meaningful than street theater. That assumption was almost certainly misguided before, but in our present context it’s absolutely deadly to the church.

So we need artists (of every sort, writers included) to share our message in a way people will truly hear it.

We talk about justice, well some of us, but if all we do is talk that is no witness.

So we need communities like the new monasticism to give us a picture of what our faith could look like if we were the hands and feet of the gospel we pontificate about.

And finally, speaking of that gospel, we take the rich and messy story of the Bible and spend so much time debating and dissecting it that in the end we either have a reductionist four point track or a massive list of what constitutes the orthodoxy you must hold to be ‘in’.

So we need storytellers who can share the Story without either flattening it out or missing the forest for the trees. Storytellers who can make a point of doctrine come alive, and who can also present a way of talking about our faith which is harder to turn into team X vs. team Y.

When the story starts “once upon a time” it lends itself less to taking sides.

Do scholars and the academy have a place in the future of Evangelicalism? Yes! Absolutely! We need deep and critical thought, we need people who have devoted themselves to studying the history and theology (at least I hope so, or a lot of what I’m doing with my life is going to be a bit pointless).

But that isn’t all we need.

Maybe one way the future of Evangelicalism could look a little brighter is if we stopped deferring only to the scholars and instead had the scholars sit down at the table as equals with the artists, the monks, and the storytellers.

At least that sounds like a more hopeful starting place to me.

Grace and peace.

Why Pick Sides When You Don't Want To?

http://newwaystheology.blogspot.com/2011/04/future-of-evangelicalism-in-which-im-on.html

The Future of Evangelicalism:
In which I'm on nobody's side.

by Mason Slater, April 2011

"Pippin: "And whose side are you on?"

Treebeard: "Side? I am on nobody's side, because nobody is on my side, little orc."

-The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien

This sums up rather well how I feel when I look at the fissures in the Evangelical community.

We have this impulse to define ourselves in opposition to others, to reduce the messiness of the life of faith into a question of this side or that.

There are plenty of examples of this, such as the recent obsession with [the newly released book,] Love Wins . It’s telling that, in many of the reactions, there was little room left in the middle. Either Rob was a heretic, or he was a hero tearing down an oppressive false Gospel.

Those who felt neither of those was the case, which is where I found myself, were left in the uncomfortable position of trying to hold out an alternative which those on either side of us had little interest in entertaining.

I understand that there are important issues at stake, but the more I look at the church the less that splitting into our own sub-communities seems like any sort of solution.

Yes, there are Emergent thinkers. Yes, there is a resurgent neo-Reformed movement that often feels like a new fundamentalism. But maybe tribalism in either direction isn’t the answer.

Because it’s too easy.

It’s too easy to split.

It’s too easy to turn life into a dichotomy where one side is all wrong and the other side (my side) is all right.

It’s easy to pick a side, because once you do you can stop thinking. You decided on your team, and now your team can make all your decisions for you. Word comes from on high to tell us what books or theological positions we should be excited about, and which ones we should attack (along with a helpful list of talking points for why author X is brilliant/a tool of the devil).

What’s difficult is being willing to read both McLaren and Driscoll and find things of value in both, while being discerning enough to critique both as well.

It’s not about sides we can split into life and theology are not that simple.

Sometimes I look at evangelicalism and I feel far older than I should have to feel. more worn, more bruised, like - in another Lord of The Rings reference - too little butter scraped over too much bread.

There is this constant move towards division and strife, and everyone is convinced it’s us or them, with me or against me.

In the meantime thousands of us who want to imagine a Church where unity is maintained amid the diversity [that is] left to the sidelines. Because we’re on nobody’s side, and so, sometimes, it feels like nobody is on our side.

Why Rob Bell is(n't) a Universalist

http://newwaystheology.blogspot.com/2011/03/rob-bell-isnt-universalist-review-of.html

A Review of Love Wins
by Mason Slater
March 23, 2011

I suppose I’ll start where the controversy centered. Is Rob Bell teaching universalism in Love Wins?

Yes.

Or, maybe not.

It sort of depends actually. It seems we decided before hand that Rob must of course be addressing universalism one way or the other, but I don’t think he’s interested in doing that.

So Love Wins then becomes something of a theological Rorschach test.

If you want to read it as promoting universalism you can certainly find ideas and arguments which lead in that direction. If you’re looking for nuances which can frame his argument as being for something besides universalism (like inexclusivism) you can find that as well. Because Love Wins isn’t really about universalism.

Instead Rob is interested in provoking a larger conversation about how we understand heaven and hell, and how that understanding shapes the way we live out our faith today.

Much of the early section of the book is an argument for seeing our hope not as disembodied bliss, but as a new restored creation in which heaven comes to earth and God dwells with us - as seen at the end of Revelation. It certainly has a Bell-like flair, but for the most part the content here is quite familiar to anyone who has read Wittmer’s Heaven Is a Place on Earth or Wright’s Surprised by Hope.

Though never stated directly I think much of his later wrestling with hell has to do with this model of new heaven and new earth. If heaven is a ethereal realm in the clouds where we engage in an eternal church service, then our traditional understanding of hell fits right in as the counterpart. But, if heaven is conceived of as new creation, a future this-worldly life with God which also breaks into the present in all sorts of ways, what does that do to our image of hell?

This impulse, coupled with a pastoral instinct and a new perspective impulse to read passages as radically context bound (including hell/Gehenna passages) leads to a reimagining of what the biblical picture of hell might be.

It also leads to a reimagining of who might be there.

And this is, for many, the controversial part. Because we’ve seen recently that saying heaven will be full of surprises and might just include more people than we’ve been taught is deeply offensive to a number of Christians.

I understand why to a point I suppose, it’s not what most of us have been taught, it doesn’t fit with our theological constructs, and so it challenges us at a level of identity not merely intellect.

Still, it’s saddening to see how many people are angry at the idea that more people could be saved in the end then they had assumed. Disagreeing with it is one thing (I personally wouldn’t go as far with it as Rob seems willing to go, and like any book there were arguments I'd push back on), but why would we act as if we don’t even want it to be true?

I suppose that’s part of the point of Love Wins, Rob is attempting to articulate a better story than the one we’ve been told. I don’t always agree with his retelling, but he’s right to challenge the story we’ve been given because it is often deeply unbiblical and incredibly destructive.

By the end of the book we see that the reason Rob is(n’t) a universalist and the reason that the strongest reaction against him has come from the neo-Calvinist crowd are one and the same. Human freedom. Rob puts a high priority on freedom being an essential part of real love. If God loves us and we choose hell he will let us have it (very C.S. Lewis-esq) but to Rob that isn’t the last word.

Drawing on a number of biblical passages, and some East Orthodox theology, Rob makes the suggestion which allows many to read universalism into the text. What if death isn’t our last chance?

It’s a good question really, and one the Bible isn’t nearly as clear on as we’d like to think. The idea that God wants to save you now, but if you die before you are saved He instantly stops loving you is distasteful to say the least, and more importantly not very fitting to the story we’ve been told about this God.

And this is why people assume if you follow the conclusions Bell comes to it ends in universalism. If we are always given more chances to repent, eventually wouldn't everyone repent? I actually think that no, many wouldn’t (and I think Rob can see this as well in many points in the book) but it certainly is enough to cause some heads to turn.

In a recent interview with CNN Bell stated “I never set out to be controversial, I don’t think it’s a goal that God honors. I don’t think it’s a noble goal.” I think he’s being honest there. Rob has a massive church, numerous best-selling books, the Nooma videos, it’s not like he needs (or seems to want) more attention. In fact, early in Velvet Elvis, he shares a story of how difficult it was for him to process the success of Mars Hill and that he almost left when it became a phenomenon.

Rob no doubt knew that he’d get this sort of reaction from certain figures in the church, but I don’t believe he was attempting too.

This book will cost him. Yes it will end up on the New York Times bestseller list, but in the process he will lose relationships, lose the respect of many evangelicals, lose a hearing with a large part of the church.

Apparently, knowing what would be lost, Rob decided to go forward with this book anyways. Already suspect to many, Rob had to know he would only get one shot and decided to use it on this. Because he thinks opening up the conversation is worth the personal repercussions.

So if these are questions you’ve wrestled with, I’d recommend Love Wins as a starting place, a way of putting it all on the table. However, once you start reconstructing what you do believe about heaven and hell I wouldn’t rely on Bell alone, there are better resources (which I know he'd readily admit). Personally N.T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope would still be first on my list.

Love Wins is classic Rob Bell. So in that sense, it’s the sort of thing you’d like if you like that sort of thing. Personally I thought it was an excellent read, a provocative bit of theologizing, and a good start to a conversation which we need to be having. It's not the last word, but it's a good first word, and I think that's what Rob intended.