What Is Radical Theology?

WHAT IS RADICAL THEOLOGY?

R.E. Slater

Radical Theology at its most radical extreme would promote the death of God in all things, instances, and being within society and without. That theology in its most radical form is a theology that is an anti-theology. In essence, not simply saying "there is no God" but that "the God who exists has left us with only the residual effects of His image and being still lingering in its latency."

Meaning, that as the Creator-Redeemer, when God died on the cross of Calvary He purposely, and affectively (not effectively), left mankind to its memory, and lingering effects, of Himself. A memory now clothed upon by creation itself and by humanity itself. In this way, all traces of God still linger in God's creation without the actually presence of God Himself within that creation. In effect, God has been reborn into His creation as part of His creation in a more intricate way than before His death.

So that in God's absence rest His divine DNA - or imprint - upon a world that struggles to reconcile itself with the fact that it alone now stands in the place of God as remnants - or testimonies - to once was before God's transformance as Spirit to Incarnated Spirit.

In another sense, the eternal God not only "left" Himself as He once was before He died, but was substantively transformed by His "divine death" to be "resurrected" from His divine "otherness" into a divine "oneness" with a creation which was once excluded from His holiness and divinity. Meaning that the God who might have been separate from His creation in some sense by His very nature is now more a part of that creation by resurrection and transformance than ever before.

In essence, Christianity awaits a future resurrection in Christ that has already occurred within Christ Himself personally. Ontologically. Metaphysically. Within very God Himself. That God's own death eventuated into His immediate transformance by resurrection within, and into, the very world He created and was separate from. Thus, the Redeemer is transformed by His own death and resurrection which same event now resurrects and transforms this very world we live upon. Even ourselves.

And so then, the disturbance we feel within our spirits is to the "void of God's absence" to His other presented-ness is now a fuller, truer disturbance to our very selves and this very world. That God has died but has also been transformed, or raised, within the very creation He to and for - to effectively create both a void and to fill it in the same instance with Himself.

Thus, leaving creation and mankind with the awesome, and very disturbing, task to "fill that void" by acting as God in the place of God who fills us with His absence, and resurrected presence, into a world once separate from God.

Not that we - or creation - have become God ourselves. But that in the vastness and the diversity of the world as we know it, God's image PERSISTS in some sense of an INSURRECTED form. A form that would resist sin while aslo transforming creation as a holy residence for God's holy spirit that pervades itself very nature with the God that was and is and is now becoming. Not simply become... but becoming. With us. And with this world.

Thus, filling the Christian image of "renewal by rebirth" or "salvation by being born again" with a more profound meaning than when we first thought. That God has birthed Himself within His created world. Making sin and death even more pregnant with meaning because of His very presence that sin and death would struggle against to refuse its fundamental transformance of the constitution of our intent and promise as transformed creations of God.

So who do we pray to if God is dead? A mystery that is marked as a paradox  wrapped up in an enigma to the Christian man or woman seeking a God no longer "out there" but "within here"?

Are we praying to ourselves? To a created world/creation as an incorporate entity of divinity? To a collaboration of the past, present, and future "NOW" of  synthetic and pervasive redeemed event?

Or, better yet, "Where is God?" If He is no longer here with us as an anthropomorphosized "personable" God of spirit? Or no longer here with us as a Greek/Hellenized subject of deified heavenly Being? As finite beings we find God's "otherness" to our "humanness" unnerving and  much misunderstood.

Or, asked yet another way, "Was this God of Christianity that we worshipped ever as separate and other from us as we once had thought?" Which gets to the ideas of panentheism v. pantheism. The former attests to God's separateness from creation but joined-ness to creation by presence and image (basic Christianity). The other attests to God's unreality and that creation was ever its own creation and divinity (basic Hinduism).

Purposely, Radical Theology addresses these questions by questioning our very epistemologies and theologies we have grown up with. It is an anti-theology to our Christian traditions and classic doctrinal statements. But at its heart is the very Christian doctrine of redemption and resurrection that says "If ever God was once separate from His creation He can be no longer (or is no longer)." That by His salvific death through Jesus God has been transformed within His very being to become us even as He Himself as died to Himself. This is radical theology's radical message.

So, who do we pray to? We pray to God who has become part of us, and with us, and in us, and of us ourselves.

Is humanity divine? In a sense, yes. We are filled not only by God's image, and by His presence, but by His very Self both in Spirit, in purpose, and in redemption.

Was God ever separate from His creation? Perhaps yes and no. Yes, as its creator. And no, because creation was ever an instance of God become "unspirit" to a created world given volition by His decree. And separated from its Creator by this very divine fiat that gave to it its volition. A volition that chooses both life and death. Good and sin. Holiness and evil.

And lastly, for an atheist to claim "There is no God" is the very same reason an atheist will doubt just as the Christian will doubt. Each feels God's absence "in their bones" but each come to differing testimonies and conclusions.

Perhaps the point of agreement between both is God's absence and what this now means. For the atheist it means God is here amongst us in our midst in a radically transformed way that we don't even realize.

For the believer that God is also here amongst us in our midst in a radically transformed way that we don't realize by our classical statements, doctrines, and theologies.

For a radical theologian to say God is dead is not the complete statement of radical theology's belief. It must also say that God is here amongst us in our midst in a radically transformed way that we don't even realize. An event that has historically occurred with fundamental future consequences like yeast is to bread, fire to our spirits, and blood and water to our rebirthing in God.

R. E. Slater

October 19, 2014

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The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby1

Introduction by Peter Rollins

The People are Naked… Don’t tell the Emperor!

http://peterrollins.net/2014/09/the-people-are-naked-dont-tell-the-emperor/

by Peter Rollins

September 9, 2014

One of the popular trends within the church today involves affirming that doubts are a part of faith alongside the claim that God is faithful to us throughout these doubts. The most recent example of this comes from the Archbishop of Canterbury who said that he sometimes questions whether there is a God. In the same interview he goes on to claim that his faith is not however about feelings, “it is about the fact that God is faithful,” indeed he goes on to claim, “the extraordinary thing about being a Christian is that God is faithful when we are not.”

What we see here initially strikes us as incoherent, for the Archbishop effectively questions whether God exists, while at the same time believing in the “fact” that God does exist. As such, this could be laughed off as the dying attempts of a religious individual to maintain their beliefs (or their job).

However the approach taken by the Archbishop might actually expose a much more ubiquitous structure, one that operates widely within both theist and atheist camps: a structure that the practice of Radical Theology seeks to free us from.

To begin with, let us call the God that the Archbishop continues to affirm (following Lacan) “the Big Other.”

The Big Other is a slippery phrase, one that is initially hard to get one's head around. So let us create a scenario that might make this term a little easier to understand. Imagine being in a teeming nightclub at three in the morning. Looking around the room it appears that everyone is having a great time. There is energetic music, dancing, drinking, flirting and animated conversation everywhere.

Yet, as you look more closely, you begin to suspect that some, many, or even all, of the people in the room are actually concealing a lack of enjoyment. Indeed it feels like there is a veil of fun covering the room that is obscuring another dimension, a veil that seems to be getting thinner and thinner as the night wears on. As you stand in the middle of the room you can’t help feeling that everyone in the club has agreed to keep up a façade. In fact, as you stand there, deep in thought, a series of people become agitated and say things like, “cheer up,” “smile,” or “have another drink.” It is as if you are breaking some kind of taboo by looking pensive.

This fictional scenario is obviously very possible; indeed it might even be very common. While thinking about it, two questions immediately arise,

Who is everyone trying to fool?

What is the point of the pretense?

It is possible that people are trying to convince their colleagues that they are having a good time. But most of us are dimly aware that everyone else in the room is as insecure and awkward as we are. So it starts to seem like we are all actually trying to fool someone else who isn’t in the room.

Those in the nightclub can be said to be engaged in a structural deception of the type found in church. When people sing contemporary worship songs that proclaim “all they want is Jesus,” they are obviously not claiming what is being sung (after all they want lots of other things). Instead they seem to want to convince the God they are singing to that they are the type of person who only wants Jesus (affirming what is called their “Ideal-ego”). In the nightclub the same logic is at work in that some outside god is being treated as a figure that we must attempt to fool by our actions. Of course no one in the nightclub actually believes in such a figure. Yet the belief functions in a material way regardless. There is a subject who must remain fooled by our actions, a subject whose ignorance causes us to avoid a confrontation with our own struggles.

This is a version of the Emperors new clothes, except that we, the people, are naked. Maintaining the illusion only as long as the Emperor [within us] is fooled.

This, in a nutshell, is an example of the Big Other. It is that non-existent entity that we submit to in order to avoid a confrontation with our own internal crisis.

What we witness clearly in the interview with the Archbishop is a doubt over the God proclaimed in the actual existing church, which is cloaked in a belief in a Big Other. For simplicity's sake we can say that there are broadly three possible positions he could take about the God proclaimed overtly in church,

I believe

I doubt

I don’t believe

But none of these need touch his more fundamental commitment to the Big Other.

In the same way, someone could affirm one of these three positions while rejecting the Big Other. Indeed I would say that this is the project of Radical Theology.

The point of all this is to say that an atheist could very well claim “I don’t believe in God,” while still making the move of the Archbishop: unconsciously affirming a Big Other who is able to protect them from accepting the consequences of their position. Just as we witness in the nightclub example, such a belief in the Big Other always betrays itself in some way (such as prayer, listening to religious music, supporting ones parents beliefs etc.).

This is why Radical Theology makes the claim that popular atheism is not atheistic enough. For it only attacks the easy target that is the anthropomorphic God of contemporary Christianity. It has nothing to say about the Big Other. Radical Theology, on the other hand, seeks to expose how the Big Other – that protects us from confronting our own personal, religious and political crisis – is a fiction. Indeed Radical Theology is a project that claims this assault on the Big Other is the core message of Christianity.

What would have been more scandalous and insightful than this interview with the Archbishop would be to hear a high profile church leader saying, “I happen to believe in God much of the time, but I know that, in those moments, the God who would protect me from myself does not exist.”

Today's Postmodern Church... Is It Something That Jesus Would Recognize?

Darren Aronofsky's Noah by Jennifer Connelly and Russell Crowe

"In its early stages, religion means certainty about many things.

But... he is most religious who is certain of but one thing,

the world-embracing love of God." 

- Charles Hartshorne

Several years ago I began this blog in the hopes of sorting myself out from my past religious background. A good background to be sure, but one still needing sorting out in a very personal way from its institutionalized, religious self.

One that could better represent a very ancient Christian faith much in need of theological renewal, better relevant expression, and a more generous missional outreach to today's postmodern world.

To that end I needed to re-measure the voices in my head-and-heart by selecting the best of my past with the gospel message of the Bible as I now understood it in the hindsight of the 21st century's contemporary issues and praxis.

Of a Christian faith that could hold uncertainty and doubt, and yet a faith that could deeply interact with the social movements of our global societies.

To do this required a very personal effort of deconstructing those institutionalized "religious" voices ringing in my head from those "Spirit" voices I was hearing in my heart.

But it would not be an easy journey....

A New Day, a New Season, to All Things

In a sense, the bells were ringing and I needed to hear them toll afresh by reducing the noise surrounding my faith in order to redact the institutionalized Christianity I was bearing within me. One that had become full of religious opinions that were not Jesus-like, but become very man-like. Whose saving gospel message had become one of judgement and self-righteous indignation rather than a humbler version of its Lord and Savior.

Curiously, in the recent movie Noah (2014), this problem was poised quite succinctly which I wrote about in past articles earlier this year (see reviews here and here). Not only did I find my faith world colliding with my own dissettlement, disillusionment, and disaffections, with the Christian world I once new. I was also seeing it visualized on the silver screen by Russell Crowe's Noah who had to undergo a profound personal change himself to what he thought he knew and deeply believed about his God.

In essence, Noah required a deep change of mind-and-heart of the God he thought he knew in commandment and verse but really didn't know in the Divine's heart and cross of love.

And in a bit of surreal testimony, this Darren Aronofsky visualization of the Genesis Noah targeted the central nerve of what today's postmodern church is moving through in its own journey of spiritual identity and missional purpose.

Which reminded me once again that I was not alone in this journey of rejection and renewal. That there were other similarly minded souls walking Christianity's very tangled paths with me.

And yet, there were none who would personally walk with me during this time of self reflection and personal rewrite. None to share with. Or grieve with. Or be angry with. Or feel destroyed with. That my path was yet mine own solitary path marked only by words and thoughts as I forged through a wilderness of no faith, uncertainty, and doubt.

But in that journey came the deep joy of walking its solitary paths from a dark place to a place of crystallizing light that held a deep spiritual light that I had known all along, but now had better words and thoughts to express it against the growing institutionalization of my faith that had become all rhetoric and condemnation.

For the most part, the people I have meet in my life have helped give words to my journey. Some through their own lives of confusion and interpretation. While others through the sublimity of their grace and good will.

Each personage whom I had come to know held a unique piece of the Lord's puzzle to my own spiritual faith transition that was slowly fitting together into a redeeming picture quite unlike what I would have envisioned many long years ago when first starting out in my youth.

But ultimately, it was myself that had to change. A self that knew no time of rest or faith's certainty. That must travel life's byways from station to station like little Pilgrim of John Bunyan's fanciful story which he had written from prison to his congregants over many long years of religious confinement.

And with that change the Lord added a piece of His own puzzle bit-by-bit from any who unknowingly journeyed with me, sharing a glimmer here or an insight there of His will and heart, wisdom and grace.

Ultimately, the Christian faith is one of paradox. Like the proverbial enigma wrapped in a riddle played out in a mystery to our captive minds and hearts seeking the Lord's direction and grace against our stubborn wills and deafening words.

Or like an onion wherein the Christian faith has many, many layers that stumble on and on and on, not unlike our own journey along redemption's road as it intertwines and bisects with the highways and byways of our own mustering souls, the idols of this world, and even the church's conflicted messages held by pew and religious trowel.

But isn't this what one would expect of an infinite God's many layers of love and wisdom as He seeks out each traveller in accordance with their road of redemption? That we move from point to point, burdened by this or that, seeking enlightenment and encouragement along our long journey's trek?

To not expect that at salvation's first light all is made clear or understood by so simply memorizing select verses, or studying popular chapters and themes of the Bible. That this early effort would be enough to teach the greatness of God's many mysteries and divine will. Or that a church's patient creedal teachings - or a Bible college's ingraining doctrines - are sufficient descriptors of society... or even of man himself. Of humanity's sciences and technologies, history and literature, progress and failures. Or that a certain kind of theology can hold all of the Lord's wisdom and grace in any given time or space.

The World is No Longer Young in its Judgments

Even so, youth doesn't get the last word on one's maturing faith. Nor, do I expect, will death at life's end. But it is this grand journey of faith that we each travel that is our greatest teacher should we seek to stumble along guided by what we think we know while remaining open to modifying those old counselors of yore when confronted by greater sublime truths of the Bible than what we first knew or were taught.

That the Christian faith's greatest asset is its teachability. That a spiritual man or woman's greatest guide is to be willing to relearn what we once thought we knew all too well. To be willing to repent, and let go, and move on, even if it means going against the greater tide of popular religious opinion, itself its own deceiver in so many ways.

And when confused, to consider Jesus, the Author and Finisher of our faith, who brings the greatest definition to the God of the Old and New Testament claimed by prophet and apostle, temple and church, priest and king, slave and free, shackled and unshackled. Who taught of a God little recognized by the religious institutes of His day more willing to condemn disbelievers than to repent of its sins and errant renderings of the God they claimed they knew.

And so, what we might had once known in our youth - or had great feelings about later in life - can in themselves become errant counselors to the living, vibrant, faith of God Himself. Such that religious men and women (and even avowed atheists themselves) too-often confuse their Spirit-journey with its many way stations of refreshment and pleasure, darkness and pain, religious principle and dictum.

But the Lord's Spirit is our best, and steadiest, of guides. Albeit, a shifty one. Who, from time-to-time, when seeing our own spirits hold on too much to one facet of belief, or opinion, or willfulness, will re-direct us along tortuous paths to reawaken our souls to God's rights and claims in our lives. While at the same time leaving other more viable paths unseen or unvisited until at a later time when maturity and wisdom might be more present in our lives to measure the councils of God.

To this we each can attest that it was the Spirit of the Lord who led us on our many journey's meandering paths from early childhood to accruing adulthood. From a simple child with childlike faith-and-curiosity to a harden soul aching from the ills of this world whose pains have slashed deep and wide.

That this divine journey was never an easy trek. Nor would it ever be. That each day brings fresh pains and sorrows, new joys and blessings, in this thing we call life and must live discerningly every day.

While knowing that each pain or joy is yet another opportunity to go astray of the path of the Lord. Yea, the human heart is fickled. And its ears too eagerly attuned to listening to too many unhelpful voices with the truest of intents. Whether by pulpit or professor. Parent or friend. Life mate or idle wonder. That at times we must make our own judgments. And perhaps against all we believe knowing in our heart-of-hearts that it is the right thing to do.

But I can say, when reading these past several years of the testimonies of  similarly conflicted brothers and sisters in the Lord, that the blogging of my own journey was the right thing to do. If only to share my own sense of confrontation with the Christian message I grew up with which needed its own deep sense of reformation. A message I have struggled deeply with - even as many have themselves - when sensing its conflict with the broader gospel of our Savior.

That perhaps our limiting hermeneutic of the Bible needed expanding. Or the church creeds we knew so will might need a broader reflection in the pools of God's grace and mercy. Or that the world's scholarship might be allowed a bit more leeway in helping to guide us in the reading of the Bible's many stories; as set against the religious scholarship we had grown up with, knew, and were well versed in. Or that humanity itself, and nature itself, might further teach us of the wisdom of God's Word lying hidden in its pages without eyes to see or ears to hear or mind or tongue to grasp and tell. That in the end, we needed a larger perspective of God than from our own imaginations, religious tribe, and enculturated people.

The Demand to Write a Postmodern Theology

And even now, after so long a time of writing, I still feel the burden to write of my spiritual journey. To put fresh words and prayers to a Christian theology that needs a bit of coaxing from its overgrown garden of thistles and thorns, roses and cream.

To write of a new theology that is fresh, contemporary, and postmodern. If not post-evangelical with all the radical-ness that it implies away from its overly orthodox self. An orthodoxy in need of deep revival. If only to reclaim it back to the paths it once had walked in younger, gayer times, when life was so simply beheld and understood in its innocence.

And yet, if it does not, then I fear for others on this same journey towards God and redemption who might need a timely word of encouragement. Or a bit of coaxing along the path of Jesus to not give up.

To know that Christianity itself is no less in the throes of renewal than that of its present inheritors are who would follow the Christ of their faith against flames and arrow. That with each fundamentally new era (such as this postmodern era which itself is rapidly morphing into something else) the church has entered into a new world that cannot contain an old gospel message written for a classical, medieval, Renaissance'd, or even Enlightened faith many years earlier.

That the story of redemption held upon the pages of Scripture tell of an ancient story that is both old and new. A story which must morph and change to meet the needs of each new era of societal remake and redefinition. Whose very identity demands its readers to remit its truths by what they knew and understood in their timely ages.

A story that can as easily be lost should we try to contain it within the church's older wineskins of truth and knowledge having itself grown outdated and inflexibly bound by dogmatic hide and aging sinew, dithering hand and moiling understanding, societal caricatures and idolizing templates.

But to do this will require a proper critique of the past - both of our own histories as well as the church's in a postmodern deconstructive sense. But also a goodly measure of constructive rebuilding and re-envisioning of what the Christian faith can mean both now and at its best for the next generation of youth next to come.

To write of a postmodern Christian orthodoxy whose foundational elements adhere to an ancient past while avoiding its own minefields of enculturated untruths: heretical witch hunts, church-based inquisitions, disputed disallowance of slavery, denial of civil rights, nationalistic war drums, and etc and etc (sic, When Christian Beliefs Make for Unaffected Religious People).

Which discoveries may lead to fields of faith's opportunity while shedding the death mask of "religious man" himself in need of the "Spirit mask" of God met in human form..... Not only in Jesus, but in the global dress of the Jesus-church itself. In the I's and you's of the world who stumble along in the good and bad of us trying to find a God it seeks but doesn't understand nor perceive its own journey's end.

The Aftermath of a Postmodern Faith

At the last, I am unwilling to lay down mine own personal journey just yet. Whose pen must write until I can hear other voices of reason with mine own telling me I was not alone in my wilderness of distress and dismay with the institutionalized church and its insufferable doctrinal hegemonies. That there were others that travailed with me, though I knew it not. Who were seeing and feeling the same Spirit-led things I was seeing and feeling. And that, with one voice, we had together prophetically cried out, "Even so, Lord, come."

As such, in answer to this blog title's post, "Today's Postmodern Church... Is It Something Jesus Would Recognize?" Than yes, it is.... If measured in its emerging forms of dissettlement, disillusionment, and disaffection, with the larger Christian world become overly religious. Telling of a Christian faith that is quite unlike its Lord and Savior.

And yes, if it has become one that is measured in the spiritual doubt and uncertainty and restlessness that holds the human breast to a godly belief - and a life's testimony - against biblical untruth and egregious doctrinal presentation towards others dissimilar to ourselves in religious faith and practice.

A more gracious belief seeking to find a more sublime spiritual resonance with the Lord of the Cross who suffered, and died, and was resurrected, in the pains of His own godly faith conscripted for this lost world and condemned for it's courage and clear-sightedness.

Even so, does this same church of the Risen Lord follow in Jesus' testimony: to suffer, and die, and by resurrection find God in this life here-and-now as in the next to come (1 Peter 1.11b,c).

Who can embrace life's spiritual hardships with a testimony of enlightening spiritual light. Who might reject sin's prevailing darknesses with the clarity of divine grace and mercy, hope and forgiveness.

Who declare by present act, and renewing message, of a clearer gospel message become much abused or misunderstood by many... even the present church of its day through the councils of its scholastic bodies and pulpits.

To be postmodern day prophets in the face of postmodern day debates and attrition. To tell of God and His Word in the enlightening truths hard won by so many desperates, martyrs, and suffering journeys of God's attuned people, written in the blood, sweat, and tears of travail and goodwill.

Let us then enter into this grand fellowship of past divines to discover the unity of God's peace, and its meaning of life, as it was meant to be, and not as it was suppose to be by failing human mind and will. To the Lord's glory and praise. And in the truths of His Spirit and Word. Amen.

R.E. Slater

June 13, 2014 (yes, as in Friday the 13th!)

re-edited, June 16, 2014

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Index to past articles on "An Emerging Theology"





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Why Christianity Is Dying While Spirituality Is Thriving

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/cristinaodone/100078209/christianity-isn%E2%80%99t-dying-it%E2%80%99s-being-eradicated/

by Steve McSwain

Author, Speaker, Thought Leader, Spiritual Teacher

October 12, 2012

The title of this post alone will put some branches of the Christian church immediately on the defense. The fact is, however, I travel all over this country coaching religious leaders and consulting with congregations of every stripe imaginable. And there is one overarching conclusion to which I've come: Christianity is dying. Or, to put it more accurately, the Christian church is dying while the Christian faith, in too few places still, seems to be slowly, but gratefully, morphing into something new.

And better.

Admittedly, there are a few churches that are growing in the U.S. Some are evangelical; others are Catholic, although most of their growth is largely the consequence of the influx of Hispanics who are, almost universally, Roman Catholic. To those blinded by illusion, however, the few churches that are growing has made some feel driven to object, particularly if they happen to be part of such a church, by saying, "The church is doing quite well, thank you!"

The truth is, it is not. And when church leaders are honest, and many of them are not, they will acknowledge that they are drawing most of their growth from the disaffected, disavowed and disillusioned who have left or [are] leaving other churches. If you were to interview those who are leaving and going to these few growing churches, as I have, you would discover that for many of them, they feel spiritually disconnected and displaced, while still desiring to know and to feel a vital spiritual life. Unable to find it in much of the madness they've chosen to leave behind, they turn to these rapidly growing churches, many of which have become "mega" churches as a result of this phenomenon, in a kind of last ditch effort to find something that resembles spiritual sanity.

Regrettably, however, what many of them soon find even in many of these growing churches is just a polished-up and well-rehearsed, as well as well-performed, version of the same madness they left. Before long, scores of them wind up leaving even these [church experiences] and then join the ranks of those persons known today as the "Nones" -- who are, by the way, now one in every five Americans. These "Nones" have all but given up on organized religion and now simply regard themselves as spiritual but not religious. It is to these and for these I regularly write and blog.

So, what do I mean by the statement, "the Christian faith seems to be morphing into something new?"

I do not mean by this a new religion. To the contrary, what I'm seeing is a new and refreshing emergence within the Christian religion itself. Perhaps, as at no other time in Christian history, except perhaps the first few decades following the death of Jesus, the church today is slowly becoming, but in too few places as yet, something that I suspect Jesus himself might actually recognize. There is within this new emergence an affinity for those matters of social and personal justice, compassion, spiritual wholeness and unity within and among all people and faiths. These were the obsessions of Jesus while here on earth.

I regard these few churches as glimmers of hope scattered here and there.

What does this new emergence within the Christian religion look like?

1. This new, emerging church is made up of people who are desperately seeking ways of understanding, and in many cases, rewriting Christian theology. It needs to be rewritten. For decades now, the church has sought to survive on a doctrine of salvation that depended on the shedding of innocent blood to appease an obsessively angry God so as to rescue humanity from what would otherwise result in their conscious and eternal torment in hell. It's crazy theology. It is not what Jesus taught. And as a consequence, it ([evangelicalism])  is more pagan than it is Christian.

2. These new churches have a healthier view of their sacred text known as the Bible. They revere the Bible without making a god of it. Instead [of] worshipping the Bible as a kind of "Constitution," as Brian Mclaren dubs it in "A New Kind of Christianity," they interpret the Bible for what it is: an inspired book, capable of providing inspiration, wisdom and spiritual direction, not a textbook on science or morality or answer-book preachers might use for "Stump the Preacher" talk-shows.

3. These Christians no longer feel the enemy is liberalism, even "secular humanism," as it is commonly labeled in the declining and dying branches within Christianity. Admittedly, they see dangers in any extreme notions, whether in liberal theology or humanistic philosophy, but they have awakened to the realization that the church has met the "real" enemy -- and the real enemy is the church itself. Furthermore, these Christians no longer believe gays will destroy the institution of marriage when heterosexuals have successfully accomplished that all by themselves. Waging war against gays, lesbians and those within the transgender community is like trying to defend slavery. Furthermore, these have given up the church's war with science and psychology, choosing instead to embrace the truths science teaches us, not only about the origins of the universe, but about the complexities of the human mind, human development and sexuality.

4. Further, I see this new evolving Christianity being birthed in the hearts of sincere and devoted Christ-followers who are open to what other religions can teach us about spirituality, too. They would regard, for example, Desmond Tutu's statement "God is not a Christian," as the truth. While affirming that "God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself" (2 Corinthians 5:19), and cherishing that belief within their own faith confessions, these Christians would embrace and, in fact, do embrace the spiritual insights that may come from Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and scores of other spiritual traditions. They have exchanged the insanity of the dying church that insists "We're right! You're wrong," for the sane "We're in and you are, too" approach to human and religious solidarity. Together, these Christians seek spiritual awareness -- spiritual enlightenment -- and they seek the good of all people, too, even those who embrace no religion.

5. Finally, but I could go on and on in my observations, this emerging new Christianity no longer interprets Christian "hope" as some "pie-in-the-sky" future paradise that they alone will enjoy, along with those who agree with their theology, their eschatology and their exclusivist beliefs. No, these Christians would view "hope" the way Jesus their leader viewed it; the way the prophets of old viewed it; the way the entire biblical narrative views it: as a vision of the world wherein peace and justice and plenty for everyone exists in the here and now; a world that reflects "God's will on earth just as it is in heaven" (Matthew 6:10); a world where all people are treated equally, cared for, respected, fed and nurtured for the wonderful creations of God that they are; a world where all people regardless of color, sex, race, religion, political party, nationality or sexual orientation have a voice and a place; a world where people and nations, as the Prophet Isaiah put it, "beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; where nation no longer takes up sword against nation; where war is no longer learned" (Isaiah 2:1-5).

It is this kind of church that will emerge and thrive. The others will die a slow and agonizingly painful death.

For all the reasons above, and a host of others, spirituality is thriving both inside and outside these new and emerging expressions of the Christian faith. For me, and a growing number of other progressive-minded Christians, that is a cause for hope.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Why Nobody Wants to Go to Church Anymore

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-mcswain/why-nobody-wants-to-go-to_b_4086016.html?ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000051

by Steve McSwain

Author, Speaker, Thought Leader, Spiritual Teacher

October 14, 2013 

That's the title of a new book written by Joani Schultz and Thom Schultz. And it's a question those leaving are more than ready to answer. The problem is, few insiders are listening.

And, of course, that IS the problem.

In a recent issue of Christianity Today, for example, Ed Stetzer wrote an article entitled,"The State of the Church in America: Hint: It's Not Dying." He states: "The church is not dying... yes... in a transition... but transitioning is not the same as dying."

Really? What cartoons have you been watching?

Clearly, the Church is dying. Do your research, Mr. Stetzer. According to the Hartford Institute of Religion Research, more than 40 percent of Americans "say" they go to church weekly. As it turns out, however, less than 20 percent are actually in church. In other words, more than 80 percent of Americans are finding more fulfilling things to do on weekends.

Furthermore, somewhere between 4,000 and 7,000 churches close their doors every year. Southern Baptist researcher, Thom Rainer, in a recent article entitled "13 Issues for Churches in 2013" puts the estimate higher. He says between 8,000 and 10,000 churches will likely close this year.

Between the years 2010 and 2012, more than half of all churches in America added not one new member. Each year, nearly 3 million more previous churchgoers enter the ranks of the "religiously unaffiliated."

Churches aren't dying?

No, of course not. Churches will always be here. But you can be sure, churches are going through more than a mere "transition." I study these things carefully. I counsel church leaders within every denomination in America, having crisscrossed this country for nearly two decades counseling congregations as small as two hundred in attendance to churches averaging nearly 20,000 in weekly attendance. As I see it, there are "7" changing trends impacting church-going in America. In this first of two articles, I'll address the "7" trends impacting church-going. In the second part, I'll offer several best practices that, as I see it, might reverse the trends contributing to the decline.

Trends Impacting Church Decline:

1. The demographic remapping of America.

Whites are the majority today at 64 percent. In 30 to 40 years, they will be the minority. One in every three people you meet on the street in three to four decades will be of Hispanic origin. In other words, if you are not reaching Hispanics today, your church's shelf life is already in question.

Furthermore, America is aging. Go into almost any traditional, mainline church in America, observe the attendees and you'll quickly see a disproportionate number of gray-headed folks in comparison to all the others. According to Pew Research, every day for the next 16 years, 10,000 new baby boomers will enter retirement. If you cannot see where this is headed, my friend, there is not much you can see.

2. Technology.

Technology is changing everything we do, including how we "do" church. Yet, there are scores of churches that are still operating in the age of the Industrial Revolution. Instead of embracing the technology and adapting their worship experiences to include the technology, scores of traditional churches, mainline Protestant, and almost all Catholic churches do not utilize the very instruments that, without which, few Millennials would know how to communicate or interact.

However, when I suggest to pastors and priests, as I frequently do, that they should use social media and, even in worship, they should, for example, right smack in the middle of a sermon, ask the youth and young adults to text their questions about the sermon's topic... that you'll retrieve them on your smartphone... and, before dismissing, answer the three best questions about today's sermon, most of the ministers look at me as if I've lost my mind. What they should be more concerned about is why the Millennials have little or no interest in what they have to say.

3. Leadership Crisis

Enough has been written about this in the past. But you can be sure, clergy abuse, the cover-up by the Church, and fundamentalist preachers and congregations have been driving people away from the Church, and continue to drive people away, faster than any other causes combined.

4. Competition

People have more choices on weekends than simply going to church. Further, the feelings of shame and guilt many people used to feel and church leaders used to promote for not attending church every week is gone.

There are still those, however, who want to categorize Christians as an explanation for the church's decline in attendance in a futile effort to make things not look so bad. But this, too, is the illusion that many church leaders and denominational executives are perpetrating but nobody is paying attention. They are just too blind to see that.

For example, in the very same article I referenced above, Ed Stetzer has concocted three different categories of Christians he conveniently thinks explains the dire situation faced by the church.

He says there is a kind of "classification" system between those who "profess Christianity" as their faith choice.

• First, he says there are cultural Christians or those who "believe" themselves to be Christians simply because their culture says they are. But, clearly, he implies they are not.

• Second, he classifies a group of congregational Christians which he says are not much better off than the first misguided group, except that these are loosely connected to the church.

• Third, he notes the third group, which no doubt he ranks as "his" group, that he calls the convictional Christians. These are the true Christians who are actually living their faith, according to Ed Stetzer.

I've got news for you, Mr. Stetzer, there are scores of people who have left the church, not because they possess some phony or inferior faith, as you would like to believe, but precisely because they do not want to be around judgmental people like you. They have left, not to abandon their faith, but precisely because they wish to preserve it. You would be much better off to leave the judgment-making to Someone infinitely more qualified to do so (Matt. 7:1).

5. Religious Pluralism

Speaking of competition, there is a fifth trend impacting the decline of the church in America. People have more choices today. Credit this to the social changes in the '60s, to the Internet, to the influx of immigrants and minorities, to whatever you'd like, but the fact is, people today meet other people today of entirely different faith traditions and, if they are discovering anything at all, it is that there are scores of people who live as much, if not more, like Christ than many of the Christians they used to sit beside in church.

The diversity of this nation is only going to expand. Which is why, you might debate some of Diana Eck's conclusions, the Harvard scholar and researcher, but her basic premise in correctly stated in the title of her book, A New Religious America: How a 'Christian Country' Has Become the World's Most Religiously Diverse Nation.

6. The "Contemporary" Worship Experience

This, too, has contributed to the decline of the church. It's been the trend in the last couple of decades for traditional, mainline churches to pretend to be something they're not. Many of them have experimented with praise bands, the installation of screens, praise music, leisure dress on the platform, and... well... you know how well that's been received.

Frankly, it has largely proven to be a fatal mistake. Of course, there are exceptions to this everywhere and especially in those churches where there is an un-traditional look already, staging, an amphitheater-style seating, as well as the budget to hire the finest musicians to perform for worship. In traditional, mainline churches, however, trying to make a stained-glass atmosphere pass as the contemporary worship place has met with about as much success as a karaoke singer auditioning for The X Factor.

7. Phony Advertising

There's one more trend I'll mention I believe is having devastating impact on the Church and most certainly contributing to its decline. You cannot tell Millennials that your church welcomes everybody -- that all can come to Jesus -- and then, when they come, what they find are few mixed races or no mixed couples.

You cannot say, "Everybody is welcome here if, by that, you really mean, so long as you're like the rest of us, straight and in a traditional family."

In the words of Rachel Evans, a millennial herself and a blogger for CNN, "Having been advertised to our whole lives, we millennials have highly sensitive BS meters."

In other words, cut the bull. If everyone is not really equally welcomed to the table at your church, stop advertising that you are open to anyone. That is not only a lie, but Millennials can see through the phony façade as clearly as an astronomer, looking through the Hubble telescope, can see the infinity of space.

There are other trends. These are just a few of them. In Part Two, I'll offer some "best practices" I think the Church should seriously consider if it ever plans to get real and honest about its future and its influence on culture and society.

Engaging the World - What Is Your Discipleship Model?

A New Kind of Discipleship

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2012/12/05/a-new-kind-of-discipleship/

 

Scot McKnight

December 5, 2012

Comments

 

In his new book, A Thicker Jesus: Incarnational Discipleship in a Secular Age, Fuller seminary’s Christian ethicist, Glen Stassen, proposes a new kind of discipleship — a discipleship fit for a secular age and for a public faith. He calls this model “incarnational discipleship.” Framing an ethic, or discipleship, for the public sector will lead me to questions about the church as our politic, but we need to hear Glen out.

 

What model do you use when you think of how the Christian engages the State? In other words, what is your politic?

 

• The Constantinian takeover?
 
• Luther’s two-realms?
 
• The Reformed theory of influence through spheres of sovereignty?

• The Anabaptist ecclesial politic?
 
• Where does Stassen fit?

 

Stassen wants a “thicker” Jesus — not just a vague ideal or a principle, nor an ideal so high no one could achieve it, nor one restricted to “internal church relations” [OK, Glen, now we've made Jesus a public square Jesus] … the thicker Jesus is one that gives concrete and specific guidance and one that rejects a two-realms dualism and one that summons us from the ideologies of our day....

 

 

[A recent example of intergrating faith with society may be reviewed in my most recent

article here - Kurt Vonnegut and the Sacred Solidarity of God with Humanity. - R.E. Slater]

 

 

...So [Stassen] proposes [the idea of an] “incarnational discipleship,” and there are three dimensions defining it:

 

1. A holistic sovereignty of God and the Lordship of Christ through all of life.

 

2. A thicker Jesus who is God incarnate, historically embodied, and realistic.

 

3. A Holy Spirit who is independent from all powers and authorities, calling us to repent from ideological entanglements.

 

Stassen finds embodiments of this thicker Jesus incarnational discipleship in what can only be called the progressive Christian approach to the relationship of Christ and culture (or world). His major models are The Barmen Declaration, Bonhoeffer’s early resistance during his writing of the Sermon on the Mount, André Trocmé, the righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust, Martin Luther King Jr and Clarence Jordan, the Revolution of the Candles, and Dorothy Day and Muriel Lester.

 

He stews this new kind of discipleship in the work of Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, and applies this thicker Jesus/incarnational discipleship model to issues like democracy, science, individualism, sin, the cross, love and war.

 

 

* * * * * * * * * * * *

 

 

AMAZON REVIEW

 

 

Book Description

Release Date: October 25, 2012

 

Why have some Christians, such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King Jr., been able to speak truth to power at great personal cost, while others readily capitulate to injustice? In this magnum opus, Christian ethicist Glen Stassen argues that such robust Christianity stems from believing in a "thicker" Jesus, who is Lord over the whole of life and not just one compartment of it. Belief in this thicker Jesus results in "incarnational discipleship" and can help Christians deal with the challenges of what Charles Taylor has identified as a secular age. Stassen elegantly weaves the characteristics of incarnational discipleship as correctives to secularism.

 

About the Author

 

Glen H. Stassen is the Lewis B. Smedes Professor of Christian Ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. His book Kingdom Ethics: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context, with David Gushee, received Christianity Today's Award for Best Book of 2004 in Theology or Ethics. He is also the author of Living the Sermon on the Mount, Just Peacemaking, and other books.

 

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 out of 5 stars

An outstanding and innovative exposition of the ethics of Jesus

November 22, 2012

By John Mustol

 

Today American evangelical churches are in serious moral difficulty. We are in dire need of spiritual and ethical repentance and renewal. In this book, Dr. Glen Stassen, the Louis B. Smedes Professor of Christian Ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, CA, calls Christians to this needed repentance and renewal through his ethics of incarnational discipleship within the context of our modern secular age.

 

A "thick Jesus" means that Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior was a historically situated, flesh-and-blood person who walked the dusty roads of Palestine. A Jew thoroughly immersed in the Hebraic tradition, especially that of the prophet Isaiah. He lived, taught, and worked within the historical, physical, social, spiritual, and political, realities of his time and place. In this [way] Jesus revealed God's character and provided norms for guiding our lives today. Like Jesus, our ethics must be historical, social, spiritual, and political. They must be embedded in the "thick" realities, struggles, and particularities of earthly life, not in the "thin" conceptualities of platonic idealism or sectarian perfectionism. Stassen wants followers of Jesus to "enter into" the world and be deeply (thickly) engaged in all its flawed messiness in this "age of interaction."

 

Toward this end, Stassen offers his Trinitarian paradigm of incarnational discipleship:

 

(1) the holistic sovereignty of God and Lordship of Christ,

 

(2) God revealed thickly in [the] historical [personage of] Jesus Christ, and

 

(3) the Holy Spirit, independent of all powers and authorities, reminding us of Jesus and calling us to repentance from ideological entanglements (p. 17).

 

Grasping the narrative character of human cognition, Stassen emphasizes "historical drama" in Jesus and in our living out of the Christian life. He believes that the true test for the validity of an ethic is its historical fruit... how it performs in the "crucible" of history. In this regard, the great German theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer plays a prominent role. Stassen is a leading Bonhoeffer scholar.

 

Seeking an integrative and holistic approach to ethics and life, Stassen draws on diverse sources: Nancey Murphy's conception of scientific research programs (based on the philosophy of Imre Lakatos), Charles Taylor's analysis of modern individualism and secularism, his own background in scientific procedures and methods, the existentialist novels of Albert Camus, as well as careful analysis of biblical texts. Drawing on Bonhoeffer, Stassen offers an intriguing "incarnational" theory of the cross (atonement).

 

Finally, Stassen reiterates his interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount, giving it a central place in his ethics. For him, the Sermon is not idealistic perfectionism but concrete realism. He presents his "fourteen triads" for interpreting the Sermon and summarizes his ten "transforming initiatives" for just peacemaking, which is one of Stassen's central concerns as a Christian living in today's conflicted world. Stassen is on a mission to see Christians live out their faith in a morally credible way in the real world. He wants to see Christian churches pass the moral test of history. His passion for this is evident in the book.

 

Stassen is a man of remarkable character and vision, extremely knowledgeable, widely read, a brilliant and accomplished scholar and thinker. Yet he remains a profoundly personable and humble man. And he puts feet on his faith. He is not content to stay in his office writing books or hobnobbing with his fellow professors. At age 76, he is an activist involved in the rough and tumble problems of the world such as peacemaking in the Middle East. In the book he tells of his extensive work in the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

 

The book is dense in places, and Stassen's sense of urgency sometimes leads him to try to put too much meaning into too few words. Also, if you are not familiar with some concepts, such as Nancey Murphy's theory of scientific validation, you may find parts of the book a little hard to understand. It also would have been nice if Stassen had placed Jesus and ourselves more realistically in the ecological contexts in which all earthly life is located. But, overall it is an excellent and easy read. Stassen's message comes through loud and clear.

 

All Christians (and a lot of non-Christians) ought to read this book. And it is, or ought to be, required reading for all students and scholars in Christian ethics. When all is said and done, Stassen wants only one thing - that all of us who name Jesus as Lord follow him realistically, incarnationally and in so doing bring glory to God. As his final sentence asks: "Will you join me in the apostolic witness to a thicker Jesus-in the tradition of incarnational discipleship?" (p. 221).

 

 

 

Review - Peter Rollins "Insurrection"

Insurrection (pt. 1)

http://www.jrdkirk.com/2011/12/23/insurrection-pt-1/

by J.R.D. Kirk

December 23, 2011

We want to believe, says Peter Rollins. It’s natural. We want to know that someone is watching. We want to know that things beyond our control will get better. We need to hope for a brighter future.

And, he says, this is just the problem.

In his book, Insurrection, Rollins makes the case that our ideas of God are, pervasively, sub-Christian, precisely because they hope too much for a happy tomorrow rather than embracing the broken today.

Rollins warns the reader early on that the purpose of this book is, in essence, to slash and burn: this is a work of “pyro-theology," not constructive theology–an attempt to burn away the husk that has accrued to Christian faith and practice and return to the source.

In the end, this will be both the book’s strength and its failing. Its strength in that it holds up the mirror to the church and demands of us that we take a long hard look at what we say and do–and how these things fail to embody the gospel we confess to believe.

But it is also the book’s weakness as Rollins insists on a “not/but” where he should have constructively engaged in a “both/and.”

First, then, the strength of the book and what the church desperately needs to hear.

The book begins with reflecting on the significance of crucifixion. Christ was crucified. We are co-crucified with Christ.

And, on the cross, Christ was abandoned by God.

Thus, to live into our co-crucifixion is to live in a space where we experience and acknowledge that we are forsaken, that there has been no miraculous deliverance. The church has to create space for this embrace of darkness. Rollins speaks of our common mythology–the one that makes us all want to believe in God–that things will get better because God is present to deliver.

When we suffer, there will always be an army of Job’s comforters

who attempt to save our mythologies, and like Job, we must resist them.

What does this have to do with the church? The church, wittingly or not, creates structures that reassure people that the experience of crucifixion isn’t what is truly real. The church’s confident sermons, its songs of comfort, tell us that the co-crucifixion is not ultimately determinative.

“The structure acts as a security blanket that enables us to speak

of the Crucifixion without ever undergoing its true liberating horror” (48).

The problem as Rollins outlines it is that when we have people celebrating divine presence in dozens of ways, we are enabled “to admit that absence and forsakenness are part of our faith without experincing the transformative trauma of this admission” (70). And, of course, while being the agents of certainty, many pastors secretly harbor the very doubts that they are covering other for others.

Instead, the community should be helping us acknowledge and find life in the midst of suffering. The “new life” of resurrection that Rollins will turn to in part two of the book is lived now as life is found within the suffering and trauma of the world.

Although he uses language and takes it to a level that I am not always comfortable with, Rollins makes a strong and important case in the first part of his book that crucifixion is a crucial component of the Christian life experience–not something to be overcome in order for us to know and live what is true, but something that is to be lived in as where we discover the truth about ourselves in the Christian story.

Next time, we’ll turn to what he says about resurrection. And this is where I’m going to want to part ways with Rollins, in order to embrace a paradox of saying yes to what he advocates while simultaneously saying yes to the hopes of traditional Christian piety.

Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book from the Speakeasy on Tap book review folks. The Federal Government wanted to make sure you knew this, so that you could have all the information you needed to determine whether I was basically paid advertising rather than an objective reviewer. Of course, I never told the folks at Howard that I’d write a positive review, but they gave me a copy anyway. So, now that you know, you can decide for yourself: will I buy the book, or is this word of Kirk simply too tainted to be believed? I hereby fulfill my duties to the Federal Government.

Insurrection (pt. 2)

http://www.jrdkirk.com/2011/12/28/insurrection-pt-2/

by J.R.D. Kirk

December 23, 2011

The first part of Peter Rollins’ Insurrection was an exposition of the crucifixion as definitive of the Christian life (see part 1 of my review here).

Next, he turns to resurrection.

This is the part of the books that elicited the strongest reactions from me, both positive and negative. I knew I was going to have problems with the chapter when its epigram read:

“I am God,” says love. -Marguerite Porete

God is love. Love is not God. This is a fatal mistake that haunts the chapter. It begins well, however.

Rollins leads us through the realization that we tell stories about ourselves. We have ideas about ourselves. But these do not match the reality of what we do. The true us, Rollins argues, is found in what we do; the explanation of what explains our actual actions is a more realistic depiction of us that the ways we idealize or even demonize who we are and what matters to us and what motivates us.

We say that we know money and a larger house and a different neighborhood will not make us happy, and yet we devote all our time and energy to obtaining those things. Which is the real us? The one that says she does not believe it? Or the one who acts like she does?

This part of the book is pure gold. It helps put more meat on an assertion that I make regularly: the hardest part of preaching is convincing people that the message is calling them to repentance. We tell ourselves stories about who we are and what we believe, blind to the fact that our lives belie every bit of it. We need stories to unmask our self-deceit.

Rollins argues in compelling fashion that “our actions do not fall short of our beliefs–our actions are are beliefs.”

Ch. 7 is where things get more complex.

Rollins articulates here the best of what biblical scholarship will tell you as well: the kingdom of God, and even eternal life, are not categories simply about the future, but categories about a transformed here and now that we are called to participate in.

But Rollins mistakes the presence of the transcendent God within our world for the falsehood of the idea of a continued transcendence. And he mistakes the presence of the kingdom here and now for the falsehood of the idea of a future and perfect reign.

The biblical narrative maintains a tension between the already-and-the-not-yet, as well as between the immanent-and-the-transcendent. This dialectic is lost in Insurrection.

Thus, I find myself celebrating much of what Rollins affirms–because presence and realization are central to the gospel. And yet I find myself parting ways with Rollins in what he denies–because transcendence and futurity are core components to the gospel as well.

Here’s the problem, that manifests in the chapter, with confusing the statement “God is love” with its pagan counterpart, “Love is God.” This confuses God with the activity and attribute of God; it invites us, in fact, to worship and serve the creature–better, our own creation–rather than the creator.

In Rollins’s words, “God is the name we give to the way of living in which we experience the world as worthy of living for, fighting for, and dying for.”

God is a label of value we append to what we find beautiful in the world. God is an idol of our own making, rather than a being who is at work to make the world worthy of living for, fighting for, dying for. Far from a splitting of hairs, labeling God aright in relationship to the creation is the difference between Christianity being a projection of our imaginations, or a reality in which we are called by Another to participate, the difference between true (all of life-)worship, and idolatry.

Thus, while Rollins rightly challenges us with his claim that we cannot claim to love God while hating our neighbor, Christianity can never ground this on the claim that God is the love that exists between one person and another.

Heeding Rollins’ urgent pleas, we will find ourselves more invested in the world, never guilty of that classic failure of being so heavenly minded that we are of no earthly good. But we must so engage the world with the understanding that the kingdom is God’s and not ours, and that there is a future for this world because the resurrected Lord is at work in it here and now.

About J. R. Daniel Kirk: Professor at Fuller Seminary, resident of San Francisco, consumer of dark chocolate, brewer of dark beer, reader of Flannery O'Connor, watcher of the Coen Brothers, listener of The Mountain Goats.