2020 TheoCon - The Contours of An Anti-Authoritarian Theology, by Brian McLaren

Why TheoCon?

https://theologycon.com/

Our moment is one of crisis upon crisis. We are at a turning point historically and while we cannot simply return to ‘normal’, a growing number of people do not want to. For too long, some of the best resources and voices for wrestling with our biggest questions have remained distant from too many. TheoCon intends to address that through an exploratory project in public theology, connecting leading figures within academia with the public. Our goal is not to think for you, but with you, providing intellectual resources from multiple disciplines and then inviting you to engage, contribute, question, and help lead us out of this time.

Think of this as a hybrid style conference. Each of our keynote speakers will be sharing their talk in video and audio for you to engage. Then we will be scheduling live panel discussions in which the speakers and panelists will not only talk to each other, but will respond to your questions and to the responses to their talks. All of the talks and invitations to live sessions will be delivered via email. All you need to do is sign up here, and we will take care of the rest.

Speakers

We are bringing together a host of leading scholars across different disciplines. Here are some of the confirmed speakers, with more on the way.

All the keynote lectures will be sent as video and audio via email. As the live webinars are scheduled they will be added here.

https://theologycon.com/latest-episodes/

* * * * * * * * * *

Theologian Brian McLaren

2020 TheoCon

The Contours of An Anti-Authoritarian Theology

by Brian McLaren

https://youtu.be/gU65wdS8zu8

POWERPOINT SLIDES

What is Anti-Authoritarian Christianity?

Postmodern

Postcolonial

Post-Partriarchal

Post-dualist

Post-supremacist

Emerging

Anti-Racist

      Ecological

(-)  Right-wing Authoritarianism - Mobilizes around imagined or feared common threats

(+)  Left-wing Anti-Authoritarianism - Mobilizes around achieving common benefits

Genesis Story speaks to the goodness of Creation and Reconciliation between all things

The Exodus narrative speaks to the resisting of tyrants and to anti-authoritarianism

Isaiah speaks to a promised land and time of a peaceable kingdom

where justice and mercy inhabits all

Evil is defined as anti-creation, anti-liberation, anti-reconciliation

Our theology needs to move from a two dimensional authoritarian model

to a three dimensional capacious model with Jesus in the center.

The authoritarian model at its most benign speaks to a controlling, highly masculine Dictator who grants heaven or hell; who tortures for eternity those condemned; whose old church hymns were written during this era of viewing divine sovereignty as rightful authoritarianism using the Calvinistic model; whose eucharist patterns this model; whose ideas of human society parallels this model; even how it interprets the biblical text throughout its OT reach.

The next two decades will see increased societal instability, ecological instability, mass migrations, political and religious instability. These will be times to choose between authoritarianism and anti-authoritarianism. To choose dictatorship or to choose human solidarity with one another. To live in a world of haves and have nots or to live in a world which is all in with one another.

To overcome future worlds of political, economic, societal, and religious oppression we must choose to become activists for a new world of peace, justice, and equality. If we do not, the kingdom of Jesus will not become part of this old world system we allow to perpetuate itself unfairly upon others. We must resist. We must protest. We must offer new and different ways of reconciliation between one another. If we do not, Jesus cannot become into humanity. He will be left outside of all our human structures as they strive towards evil and not towards goodness and peace. It is imperative we speak out and act upon what this new ecological civilization might be like; might become; might attain when speaking peace, love and respect to our sisters and brothers. It begins now. Not later. Now.

Theological Fronts of Activism

planet - ecology

poverty - inequality

peace - hostility

politics - religion

We face a future of suffering, war, terrorism, proliferation of oppression, and so on. Through these times of panic and crisis let them motivate us towards a positive and not a negative reconstruction of society where we emphasize our solidarity with humanity, with the earth, with one another. Let it be the motivation to build a new society, an ecological society focused on creation, liberation, justice, and peace. This is the Jesus kingdom to come. Not a kingdom of submittance, suppression, injustice, and inequality. - Brian McLaren

* * * * * * * * * *

Brian McLaren

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to navigationJump to search

Brian McLaren (foreground) and Tony Jones, Yale Theological Conversation, Yale Divinity School, February 2006; Photograph: Virgil Vaduva

Brian D. McLaren (born 1956) is an American pastor, author, speaker, and leading figure in the emerging church movement. McLaren is also associated with postmodern Christianity.^[1]

McLaren founded Cedar Ridge Community Church in Spencerville, Maryland in 1982 while he was teaching English on the college level. In 1986, he became a full-time pastor. The church eventually grew to include 500 members.^[2] In 2015, McLaren was recognized by Time Magazine as one of the 25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America.^[3] McLaren left his position at Cedar Ridge in 2006 to pursue writing and speaking full-time.^[2]

In 2011, McLaren defended Rob Bell's controversial book Love Wins against critiques from figures such as Albert Mohler, who argued that Bell advocated universalism.^[4]

In 2013, McLaren stated that he did not believe homosexual conduct to be sinful.^[5]

McLaren is married and has four children. He has traveled extensively in Europe, Latin America, and Africa, and his personal interests include ecology, fishing, hiking, kayaking, camping, songwriting, music, art, and literature.^[6] In September 2012, McLaren led a commitment ceremony for his son Trevor and partner Owen Ryan at the Audubon Naturalist Society in Chevy Chase, Maryland.^[7]

Contents

• 1Bibliography
• 2See also
• 3References
• 4Critical references
• 5External links
  • 5.1Interviews

Bibliography

• The Church on the Other Side (Zondervan, 1998)
• Finding Faith (Zondervan, 1999)
• A New Kind of Christian (Jossey-Bass, 2001)
• More Ready Than You Realize: Evangelism as Dance in the Postmodern Matrix (Zondervan, 2002)
• A Is for Abductive (Zondervan, 2002)
• Adventures in Missing the Point (Emergent/YS, 2003, co-written with Tony Campolo)
• Church in Emerging Culture: Five Perspectives (Zondervan Emergent/YS, 2003) Leonard Sweet (General Editor), with contributors Andy Crouch, Brian D. McLaren, Erwin McManus, Michael Horton, Frederica Mathewes-Green
• The Story We Find Ourselves In (Jossey-Bass, 2003)
• A Generous Orthodoxy: Why I Am a Missional, Evangelical, Post/Protestant, Liberal/Conservative, Mystical/Poetic, Biblical, Charismatic/Contemplative, Fundamentalist/Calvinist, Anabaptist/Anglican, Methodist, Catholic, Green, Incarnational, Depressed-yet-Hopeful, Emergent, Unfinished CHRISTIAN (Zondervan, 2004)
• The Last Word and the Word After That (Jossey-Bass, 2005)
• The New Kind of Christian Trilogy - Limited Edition Boxed Set (A New Kind of Christian; The Story We Find Ourselves In; The Last Word and the Word After That) (Jossey-Bass, 2005)
• The Secret Message of Jesus : Uncovering the Truth that Could Change Everything (W Publishing Group, April 2006)
• The Voice of Luke: Not Even Sandals (The Voice) (Thomas Nelson, July 2007) ISBN 0-529-12351-7
• Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope (Thomas Nelson, October 2007) ISBN 0-8499-0183-9
• Finding Our Way Again: The Return of the Ancient Practices (Thomas Nelson, May 2008) ISBN 0-8499-0114-6
• The Justice Project (Baker, September 2009), edited with Elisa Padilla, and Ashley Bunting Seeber ISBN 0-8010-1328-3
• A New Kind of Christianity (HarperOne, February 2010) ISBN 0-06-185398-4
• Naked Spirituality: A Life With God in 12 Simple Words (HarperOne, March 2011) ISBN 0-06-185401-8
• Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road? Christian Identity in a Multi-Faith World (Jericho Books, September 2012) ISBN 978-1-4555-1396-3
• We Make the Road by Walking: A Year-Long Quest for Spiritual Formation, Reorientation, and Activation (Jericho Books, June 2014) ISBN 9781455514007
• The Great Spiritual Migration: How the World's Largest Religion Is Seeking a Better Way to Be Christian (Convergent Books, September 2017)

See also

Progressive Christianity Emerging church Postmodern Christianity Frederick Buechner

Kwok Pui Lan - Chinese PostColonolism and the Need for Theological Innovation

Kwok Pui Lan with Professor John Cobb

On postcolonialism, theology, and everything she cares about

http://kwokpuilan.blogspot.com/2017/03/a-rich-past-for-positive-future-for.html

by Kwok Pui Lan

March 5, 2017

*Presented at the “New Frontiers in Theology” Conference

at Claremont School of Theology on February 17, 2017

A Rich Past for a Positive Future for Theology

As an Asian postcolonial feminist theologian, my relationship to the Christian past is multifaceted and ambivalent. My reading of the Bible and the long theological tradition is never a “natural” reading, arising out of a living tradition that shaped my culture. For example, I wondered how the termsousia and hypostases in the debates on Trinity could be translated into Chinese and whether there would be equivalent concepts in Chinese philosophy.

So why do we have to study the Christian past? Sometimes my students put this even more bluntly, “Why do we have to study the dead white guys?”

We study the past because we want to learn different models of how theologians addressed social, political, and ecclesiastical issues of their time. Take for instance, this year we are commemorating the 500th anniversary of Luther’s posting of the 95 theses. The questions that Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and Münster raised for the church and wider public remain with us to this day, such as, the source of authority, the shape of liturgy and the meaning of sacraments, the visible and invisible church, the relation between the two kingdoms, and the relation between the established church and radical reform impulses.

Kwok Pui Lan teaches theology and spirituality
at the Episcopal Divinity School and is the author
of Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology

A highly relevant question for today might be “How can the Church be reformed so that it might respond to the challenges of the Trump era?” Although the Chinese may not have an event equivalent to the Reformation, the Reformation provided a mirror through which to look at the relation between religion, politics, and power at a watershed moment of the early development of capitalism and modernity.

Without learning from the past, we impoverish ourselves because we are left with the tyranny of the present. We can easily lose hope and fall prey to cynicism and despair. This is especially important in the United States because historical literacy is low and people seek immediate relevance. Facebook and social media outlets can make us obsessed with the immediate present. Learning from history allows us to maintain a certain distance and to have a broader perspective when examining our present time.

Given that we have such a long and rich theological tradition and so many theological giants before us, there is also the danger of the tyranny of the past. We might become so immersed and inculturated into certain modes of theological thinking, patterns of argument, and the common vocabularies of a certain theological tradition and our minds be so colonized that we are unable to see the horizon beyond or dare to take the road less traveled.

Theological innovations often begin by posting radical questions to the past. The feminist theological movement wrestled with the validity of past tradition. Mary Daly argued that the Christian tradition is so sexist that it is irredeemable, while Letty Russell spoke of a usable past. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza offered a revisionist history of Christian origin, and Rosemary Radford Ruether recovered the lost voices of Christian women in history.

Many theologians who have found their cultures and traditions left out from the dominant theological tradition have recovered their histories through the use of slave narratives, alternative archives, oral history, literature, and myths and stories to create a colorful tapestry of theologies. Today, theology is a global enterprise and we must pay attention to the global contexts shaping human lives and our theological imagination. Theology is contextual, but our contexts are deeply intertwined today. We need to find ways to educate ourselves about how others are developing theologies to respond to common concerns of our time. This must be a sustained and deliberate effort and not something to do only when we have time.

I wish I knew when I began to study theology that this would be a life-long vocation with many twists and no easy answers. Our work is harder because, unlike Luther and the reformers who stood in the vanguard of the intellectuals of their time, we as contemporary theologians have to defend our existence in the academy and larger society. When Christian theology is in a defensive posture, the marginal voices within it could be even more marginalized or suppressed. A danger for theological movements is that they become reactionary or ossified over time and fail to respond to new challenges. There is often much excitement when a theological movement begins, but as it becomes institutionalized or domesticated, it needs new reformers and discussants to keep it alive and on the cutting-edge.

Facing the future, theologians have important roles to play in the Trump era. Latin American theologians reminded us that we must distinguish between the worship of God and the worship of idols. When people are mesmerized by populist claims such as “Make America Great Again” and the representation of the President as pseudo-Messiah, theologians must challenge idolatry and alternative facts. In the battle for truth, we stand on the shoulders of giants such as Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Y. T. Wu, Oscar Romero, Mercy Oduyoye, Tissa Balasuriya, Desmond Tutu, Gustavo Gutiérrez, Ivone Gebara, and others. When the country begins to look inward, we need theologians and leaders of faith communities who are cosmopolitan in theological outlook, astute about world politics, and have a deep sense of American multiracial and multicultural history.

We must develop a culture of resistance in the churches and rid ourselves of Constantinian Christianity in order to see clearly the life and ministry of a postcolonial Jesus. Americans have not been comfortable seeing the connections between empire and Christianity. Middle-class American Christianity has so successfully adapted to the individualistic culture that religion has often become a private affair.

The Christian message of sin, atonement, justification, and salvation has been thoroughly individualized, if not psychologized, such that they have relatively little social import. We look at Jesus as primarily a religious figure, separated from the highly politicized and volatile situation of his time, an era filled with periodic popular revolts and protests against Roman colonial rule. We must recover that the Jesus movement was a resistance movement against Pax Romana. Jesus was not a passive religious leader, but took an uncompromising stance against the Roman Empire and its client Judean and Galilean rulers. Jesus’ revolutionary message is relevant to our time more than ever as we struggle against pax Americana.

Do I think theology will have a positive future? My answer is yes. When I began to study theology in the early 1970s, Gustavo Gutierrez had published A Theology for Liberation Theology for a few years. [But] Mary Daly had not published Beyond God the Father. As a doctoral student, I witnessed the development of Womanist theology, Mujerista and Latina theology, Asian American feminist theology, and gay and lesbian theology. Today we have [a great] such a plurality of voices arising from racial and ethnic communities in the U.S. and from faith communities around the world.

In the 1960s, some of the avant garde theologians launched a series of books with the title “New Frontiers in Theology” and their aim was to facilitate “discussions among Continental and American theologians” and the discussants were all male. Here at this conference, we have such diversity of theological voices, and this should give us hope for a positive and more inclusive future.

- KPL