The Future of Evangelicalism

The Great Emergence (of) Christianity: Changing the World
http://www.patheos.com/Resources/Additional-Resources/The-Great-Emergence-of-Christianity-Changing-the-World.html

By Phyllis Tickle
posted on August 09, 2010

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Phyllis Tickle is a renowned author, editor, and lecturer. Once the academic dean for the Memphis College of Art, she became a trailblazer in the fields of Christian publishing and ministry, as a founding member of the Canterbury Roundtable and the founder of the Religion Department for Publishers Weekly. Winner of several of the most prestigious awards in the publishing world, and holder of two honorary doctorates, she has authored over two dozen books in American religion and spirituality, including a series on fixed-hour prayer and her recent book, The Great Emergence, documents the appearance and development of emerging forms of Christianity in the postmodern context.

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“Emergence Christianity” is changing the way we see politics, obedience, the kingdom of God, and even the Trinity. The Age of the Spirit has dawned.

No short piece of commentary can hope to speak with either credibility or utility about the future of Christianity globally. Even to speak of the future of Western Christianity in so attenuated a fashion as this is suspect; but at least one has a somewhat increased hope, if not of hitting the mark, then of coming a bit nearer to it.

Whether one chooses to speak of Western culture or first-world culture or, more accurately, of those parts of the world that practice Latin or Latinized Christianity, the truth is that the cultures and societies that are so denoted pass, about every half a millennium, through times of major upheaval. Every aspect of their common life, be it economic, political, intellectual, or sociological, undergoes massive re-structuring; and that storm of pervasive change always involves, as well, a re-structuring of the forms of religion(s) that hold hegemony at the time of shift. We are in such a time now.

Is There One Evangelicalism? (C. S. Lewis on Mere Liberty and the Evils of Statism, Part 3 On the Dire Need for the Imitation of Christ)

The upheaval or tsunami we are passing through in the 21st century is the Great Emergence; and just as the Great Reformation of 500 years ago gave us the rise of the nation-state, the birth of capitalism, the growth of the middle-class and, oh! by the way, Protestant Christianity, so the Great Emergence is giving us Thomas Friedman's flat world and the globalization of its cultures, the ‘mergonomics' of the world's economies, the non-nuclear and/or extended family as a norm, the ascendancy of information and technology as the basis of barter, and, oh! by the way, Emergence Christianity (not to mention emergence Judaism as well).

Like its most immediate sibling of Protestantism, Emergence Christianity is composed of many member parts. If Protestantism presents in real life as Baptists and Presbyterians and Lutherans and Methodists and Evangelicals, etc., so Emergence presents in real life as Emergings, Emergents, Missionals, Neo-monastics, Hyphenateds, Fresh Expressions, etc. And as was the case with Protestantism, so it is with Emergence. All the member-parts may be distinguishable one from another, but they all are held together and seen as belonging together, because they all share with one another a basic set of sensibilities, a similar world view or context, and a common mode or timbre of conversation. They all are (and know themselves to be) kindred member-parts of a new form of Christianity that is birthing now and here in the same way that Protestantism birthed from within Roman Catholicism 500 years ago.

Institutional Skepticism – Political, Social, Religious

When we set out, then, to discuss so opaque and laden an issue as the future of even just Western Christianity, we first must take care to engage without prejudice all the member-parts of the ecclesial and doctrinal mix. Given that, and because the Western Christianity of the right-here and the right-now is in the midst of so major a re-configuration, perhaps all we can responsibly do is name as predictive some two or three of the more deeply embedded characteristics of Emergence Christianity as it assumes its place beside Orthodoxy, Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Protestant Christianity and begins to react to, and interact with, them. [I think of emergent Christianity as a flavor or a character of these mainline denominations and not as its own denomination or sect – skinhead].

1. Whether one speaks of Emergence Christianity or of one of its member-parts, one is still referring to an entity that has been born out of the pervasive and abiding fear in our times of any institution, regardless of whether that institution is social or political or religious.

1a. When Dietrich Bonheoffer spoke, decades ago, about religion-less Christianity, he may have intended, as can be argued, something other than what is forming among us now, but that does not make him any the less prescient or his term any less applicable. Emergence Christianity, like every other part of Great Emergence society, is deeply persuaded that the institution -- any institution -- by its very nature must strive to preserve and further itself. It therefore follows that the institution -- any institution -- will always argue passionately and often monomaniacally that the greater good is best served by its own continuation at all costs.

1b. Emergence Christians, because they are dwellers in Emergence times, will argue, on the other hand, that it is the community that takes precedence, the gathered community out of which direction and order must come, the community in concert as the source of authority, except . . .

2.  . . . except that, even while sharing that general fear of institutions, some Emergence Christians fear as well (and will continue to fear) the tyranny of the group, the risk of error inherent in unfettered immediacy, the lack of economy patent in having constantly to re-invent all the courses of life.

3. Those who share these reservations and who wish to find some common ground between the suspect, self-perpetuating emphases of institutions and the vitality of the autonomous community will, by definition, be hybrids. As such, they can reasonably be expected to exert a considerable and perhaps aggressive influence on the question of just where authority does lie and/or is going to lie in the church of the next half-millennium. In scripture?

4. Then what is the nature of that authority? What are its exercises and what is the existential nature of its being? With the passing of Christendom, how far into political and civil affairs does that authority verge? And how far, even, into ecclesial ones? These are the questions that will occupy the next half-to-whole century of Latinized Christianity and that will, by the way, bring it into direct conflict with its non-Latin siblings.

Strong Focus on the Trinity, Especially the Holy Spirit

If one of the principal hallmarks of Emergence in general is a chariness about institutions, then just as surely an increasingly more Orthodox or eastern understanding of the Trinity is likewise a principal hallmark of Emergence Christianity in particular. That is to say that Emergence Christianity is far nearer to the position of a co-eternal, co-equal triune, indivisible Godhead than, in all probability, has been any other form of Western Christianity in a thousand or more years; and that shift will have enormous repercussions for the Church, including its validation of an increasing Pentecostal and charismatic form of praxis and belief. The Age of the Spirit has come, just as many of the mystics had promised it would. Authority will rest not only in scripture, as Luther and Protestantism had argued, but also in the intentions of the Spirit as they are revealed to, and discerned by, the devout in prayer and in congress with one another. It is a shift of historic proportions.

Living in the Tension of the Kingdom of Christ (the Church) As Here, But Not Fully

Perhaps the most dramatic change, however, is in the conceptualizations of "kingdom" that have entered the conversation with the coming of Emergence, changes in how "kingdom" itself is to be understood or envisioned. If God is a perichoresis that dances in us human beings and through us and with us, then the dance is not about us. It is about the Whole, about some mystery that is palpable but not subject to dissection or even to naming. It is not about any particular one of us as separate from, or independent of, any of the rest of us. It is all of us in aggregate, for none of us is in any other way than in aggregate. It is the dance, and we are both the dancers and the music.

Within this understanding, then, only radical obedience, like radical Trinitarianism, makes sense. To not lose all for the sake of this perichoresis is to be unworthy of it, just as we were told by Him 2,000 years ago. Nor is the kingdom some kind of top-down, political structure. Such, Emergence Christianity says, is indeed the false imaging that has strangled the faith and the faithful for long enough. No, the kingdom is a lacework of inter-connected and equi-connected nodes or pods, like a spider's web that vibrates when any one of its strands is touched . . . like the internet when any one of its sites makes contact with millions of other nodes, and reality is changed thereby. The kingdom is horizontal, not hierarchal. It is here, and it is now. Most certainly, it is not over there and later.

The Arising Formation of a New Christian Anthropology

Such a re-definition of the kingdom is a direct challenge to the established definitions of many Western Christians and communions. Moreover, because it is a self-aware and well-argued challenge, it will also be a provoking one that demands engagement from older communions within the larger body. Inevitably, of course, each one of those older communions will be changed to some greater or lesser extent by the very engagement itself. More to the point, however, at least in terms of the Latinized Church's near future, is the fact that shifts in understanding or belief about the Trinity and about the Kingdom both rest upon, and demand, a new anthropology. One of the ironies of Emergence, both civil and sacred, is that we have come into a time when we no longer know what a human being is. We can neither describe consciousness or its etiology nor even justify its ancient claim to being imago dei.

Descartes' famous Cogito ergo sum may have consoled 400 years of our recent cultural and religious history, but it is now jestingly referred to as "René's Folly" or the "Cartesian Error" for good reason. And knowing not who we are or how constructed, nor by what means organized, makes us more like unto Adam in the Garden wearing a fig leaf out of new-found modesty than Christians have been for many a century. It ultimately may be, then, this questing for a new anthropology that history will later say of us was our greatest burden and our greatest gift as the Church marches into yet another new millennium.

From Modernism to Post-Modernism

From modernism to postmodernism: evolution vs. accommodation

http://rachelheldevans.com/article-1209840010

Rachel Held Evans
posted on May 2008

A reader recently contacted me with a good question about a topic I address on this blog and in my book:

“While reading, I noticed you made the correlation that Christianity has evolved from modernity and now must evolve again into post-modernity. I suppose I would question, ‘Why are we evolving from one cesspool to the other?; I think understanding our philosophical presuppositions is important when addressing Christian Theology, but at the same time I think it's time Christian's stopped playing by culture's philosophical rules. We have to realize we can't rewrite the scriptures (or even grossly re-interpret them in error) just to follow another culture's philosophical trend.”

This is a good question, which I attempt to address in the introduction of my book.

Whether we like to admit it or not, whenever the world changes, Christians instinctively change with it, and my “theory of evolution” is that God actually created us that way. It seems that whenever followers of Christ begin to inadvertently fundamentalize things that are not, in fact, fundamental to the faith (like geocentricism, the church’s authority to sell indulgences, the separation of the races, etc.), God allows our environment to challenge us and force us to evolve. He might use a telescope, 95-theses nailed to a door, or a March on Washington, but the result is always a re-thinking and reassessing of what it really means to know and follow God.

Evolution is just the painful process of distinguishing the true fundamentals of the faith from those we have invented along the way and adapting our beliefs and actions accordingly in order to survive in a changing environment. Sometimes we evolve because our environment disgusts us, sometimes because it challenges us, but always because the legitimacy of our faith depends on it. The same adaptability that allowed Paul to become all things to all people applies to the Church collectively. The ability of the Body of Christ to change-to grow fins when it needs to swim and wings when it needs to fly-is what keeps it alive and vibrant and relevant in this ever-changing world.

Now when I talk about the influence of culture on the Church, my metaphor of evolution should not be mistaken with accommodation. Accommodation is the opposite of evolution. Accommodation happens when the Church simply gives up and gets eaten up by the culture, when it fails to evolve as a unique creature and becomes indistinguishable from the rest of the world.

In the Middle Ages, when the papacy abused its power by waging the Crusades, selling indulgences, and issuing simony, church leaders had accommodated to a culture of greed and violence. Likewise, when Christians in America succumb to our environment of materialism, we risk losing the humble, Christ-like attributes that are supposed to set ups apart from the rest of the world.

In times like these, true disciples may become endangered species, but by the grace of God, they have never become extinct. The Church is forever indebted to those prophets and prophetesses who have, at critical times in history, spoken out against popular accommodation, often sacrificing their reputations or lives in an effort to preserve the integrity of the Church. (I think of John Wycliffe, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sojourner Truth, and Martin Luther King Jr., ) In fact, some of the greatest accomplishments in history, such as the abolition of slavery, resulted from counter-cultural action from the Church. Evolution can only occur when there is a distinction between allowing the culture to inform and influence us (as it inevitably will), and allowing it to control us. The trick is knowing the difference, and therein lies the struggle.

When it comes to modernism and postmodernism, I don’t really think one is worse than the other or that they are inherently good or bad. They just are.

Modernism brought with it great advances in science and technology. It helped Christians more reasonably articulate their faith, and provided a framework that supported their efforts to abolish slavery and make progress on major human rights issues. At the same time, the Enlightenment’s emphasis on intellectual autonomy and rationalism has led to the assumption that in order for Christianity to be intellectually viable, God’s existence must be proven empirically. I think the evangelical community has gotten to a point where it is so steeped in modernism’s emphasis on rationalism that it is obsessed with apologetics, emphasizing orthodoxy (right belief) over orthopraxy (right action).

The advantage of postmodernism is that it draws attention to the fact that all knowledge must be taken on faith. However, postmodernism, (though less defined), has its problems too, particularly as it is (mis)interpreted by popular culture. For example, when people say all religions are “more or less the same,” I worry that we’re moving to a point where we fail to recognize the unique differences between world religions and the things that distinguish the gospel of Jesus from other belief systems.

The thing is, it’s pretty much impossible not to be influenced by one’s culture. To assume that, as Christians, we can stand outside of our own interpretive communities and interpret the Bible and our culture objectively is actually a very modern way of thinking. It’s just not that easy to “rise above” one’s place in time and history in order to render a judgment about it.

I don’t think we are moving from one cesspool to another, just one age to another. There are things we can learn from the culture. There are things we should challenge about our culture. But I think it is inevitable that we will be changed by our culture.

Jesus, God in Sandals

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0310293995/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=racheleva-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399349&creativeASIN=0310293995

Evolving in Monkey Town: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask the Questions

by Rachel Held Evans
pub. June 15, 2010

Excerpts from Chapter 8

The most startling thing I noticed as I grew more acquainted with the Gospels was that Jesus had a very different view of faith than the one to which I was accustomed. I’m not sure when it happened, but sometime in my late teens or early twenties, it was as if Jesus packed his bags and moved from my heart into my head. He became an idea, a sort of theological mechanism by which salvation was attained. I described him in terms of atonement, logos, the object of my faith, and absolute truth. He was something I agreed to, not someone I followed…

But Jesus rarely framed discipleship in terms of intellectual assent to a set of propositional statements. He didn’t walk new converts down the Romans Road or ask Peter to draft a doctrinal statement before giving him the keys to the kingdom. His method of evangelism varied from person to person and generally involved a dramatic change of lifestyle rather than a simple change of mind. To Jesus, “by faith alone” did not mean “by belief alone.” To Jesus, faith was invariably linked to obedience…

...Needless to say, that was a strange summer. It wasn’t the summer that brought an end to my doubt, but it was the summer I encountered a different Jesus, a Jesus who requires more from me than intellectual assent and emotional allegiance; a Jesus who associated with sinners and infuriated the religious; a Jesus who broke the rules and refused to cast the first stone; a Jesus who gravitated toward sick people and crazy people, homeless people and hopeless people; a Jesus who preferred story to exposition and metaphor to syllogism; a Jesus who answered questions with more questions, and demands for proof with demands for faith…a Jesus who healed each person differently and saved each person differently; a Jesus who had no list of beliefs to check off, no doctrinal statements to sign, no surefire way to tell who was “in” and who was “out”; a Jesus who loved after being betrayed, healed after being hurt, and forgave while being nailed to a tree; a Jesus who asked his disciples to do the same…

It occurred to me that if my faith managed to survive all of these doubts then this radical rabbi, this God in sandals, would require more from me than ever before. This radical Jesus wanted to live not only in my heart and in my head but also in my hands, as I fed the hungry, reached out to my enemies, healed the sick, and comforted the lonely. Being a Christian, it seemed, isn’t about agreeing to a certain way; it is about embodying a certain way. It is about living as an incarnation of Jesus, as Jesus lived as an incarnation of God. It is about being Jesus…in tennis shoes.

Is Emergent Another Name for Evangelical?

If this guy’s an evangelical, then maybe I am too
http://rachelheldevans.com/roger-olson-evangelical

Rachel Held Evans
April 14, 2011

Roger Olson calls himself a post-conservative evangelical, and in this podcast interview with Homebrewed Christianity, he explains why he hasn’t given up on evangelicalism.

Considering our recent conversation about the future of evangelicalism and my generations’ discomfort with that label, I thought you’d be interested in his remarks. What’s more, Olson touches on just about every topic that’s been keeping me up at night over the past ten years, and does so in a way that makes me think “If this guy’s an evangelical , then maybe I am too.”

Within about an hour, Olson talks about:

• What Calvinists misunderstand about Arminianism
• What many Arminians misunderstand about Arminianism
• The future of evangelicalism
• The advantages and disadvantages of labels
• The missional church
• Neo-fundamentalism
• Open Theism
• Homosexuality
• Atonement (I loved what he said about the meaning of the cross)
• The Gospel
• NT Wright
• Rob Bell
• The unfinished work of theology

Books by Olson include:

• Arminian Theology: Myths and Realities
• How To Be Evangelical Without Being Conservative
• The Story of Christian Theology
• Questions To All Your Answers

Kudos to my friends Tripp Fuller and Bo Sanders for scoring the interview and asking some great questions.

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Want to be an Evangelical Arminian?

Roger Olson will Help

http://homebrewedchristianity.com/2011/04/07/want-to-be-an-evangelical-armiian-roger-olson-will-help-homebrewed-christianity-96/

By Tripp Fuller • Apr 7th, 2011 • Roger Olson Podcast

I am pumped to share my conversation with Roger Olson. This card carrying ‘evangelical Arminian’ joins the podcast to explain common misunderstandings around Arminian theology, the ethical problems of being a Calvinist, the nature and future of evangelicalism, Open theism, the Rob Bell controversy, and the impact of the homosexuality debate in American evangelicalism. It was really a blast to get to talk with Roger and will be looking forward to next time (because I am sure the Deacons will want more!).

  

Olson is a professor of theology at Truett Theological Seminary of Baylor University, he blogs, and publishes a bunch of books….including ones for a general audience.

continue to -

 

Index to past articles on "Calvinism v. Arminianism"

 

 

 

12 Ways to Make Arminianism Cool Again

Love requires risk and risk requires freedom,

love risks to love -

w/o conditions, expectations, qualifiers or obligations.

it is freely given, freely risked, freely offered.

it's response is in the form of a "relationship"

of an "I" and a "you"  -

previously non-existent

be/come alive with a "you" and an "I".

 

 

 

Today I felt like laughing and thought you may too. Rachel had a great blog on Arminianism and so I thought it should be passed along in the fun and the banter that it creates. On a side note, my personal preference leans towards Arminianism and the DAISY metaphor was great; so I think I'll keep it and kiss the TULIP goodbye. Too, Emergent Christianity necessarily favors Arminianism which is another reason that the idea of "God's love" gets so bantered about, misused, misunderstood, and held hostage by Calvinistic dogma. A little Arminianism will help open God and his love up to the mystery of life and meaning in much more encouraging ways than the dry desert lands we too often find ourselves lost within by our fellowships or our own hearts. Peace my brothers and sisters, and enjoy the laughter - we mustn't always take ourselves too seriously!

skinhead

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12 Ways to Make Arminianism Cool Again

http://rachelheldevans.com/12-ways-make-arminianism-cool

by Rachel Held Evans

April 18, 2011

Roger Olson’s interview (http://rachelheldevans.com/roger-olson-evangelical) with Homebrewed Christianity got me thinking about how, with all the talk about the Neo-Reformed movement, Arminianism has been underrated. Maybe we just need some better PR. Here are some ideas:

1. Petition Microsoft to make Arminian an actual word so that bloggers ranting about the pros and cons of Armenians don’t sound like complete racists.

2. Create a Stuff Arminians Like blog. Entries could include: love, freedom, and “secretly wondering if we’re not elect.”

3. Three words: Driscoll. Boyd. Cagefight.

4. Instead of the “Gospel Coalition,” we’ll form the “Gospel Welcoming Committee.”

5. Get Roger Olson some thick-rimmed glasses and a pipe and send him to Catalyst.

6. The Calvinists have their own flower, so why shouldn’t Arminians? But instead of TULIP (“total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and perseverance of the saints”) we’ll adopt the DAISY (depravity of all, atonement for all, inclusion of all, salvation is a gift, you can accept or reject).

7. Start referring to Donald Miller as “Arminian Donald Miller.” (I don’t know if he’s actually an Arminian, but it’s worth a try.)

8. To counter the “young, restless, and Reformed” movement we’ll create the “middle-aged, Arminian, and not-in-the-mood-to-argue ” movement.

9. Start a “I bet we can find 1 million people who don’t want to be predestined to hell” Facebook group.

10. Launch an Arminianism Awareness Day to address some of the common misconceptions about Arminians—that we think grace is earned, that we have a “man-centered” theology, that we’re all dispensationalists, that just because we lost that one argument with our Calvinist roommate back in 2003 we’re always wrong.

11. Calvinists make T-shirts that say “Jonathan Edwards is my homeboy.” Arminians can make T-shirts that say “Arminius is my homeboy…but not in such a way that I uncritically accept everything he teaches” (because we’re nuanced like that).

12. Keep talking about how real love requires freedom while extending kindness and grace to those with whom we disagree…because living your theology is more important than arguing it.

Can you think of a #13?

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Humorous Commentary (Just for the fun of it)

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Audie - (Spoken in deep confident voice) Look at me..Look at your Calvinist, now back to me...back to your Calvinist...I'm on a horse but I'm letting him choose where we go, now look at your Calvinist....don't you wish you were on the horse with me??...Arminian's we may not know exactly where were going but we will have more fun getting there!!

Tim - T-shirt: Calvinism: 500 Year of Reasoning Logically to the Wrong Conclusions

Dave - Arminimergent!

Rachel - Lol! What a mouthful!

Dave - Guess maybe I'm complegalitarimolimergent. Suddenly it all becomes clear...

Alan - Please, you Arminians most certainly don't want to become the annoyance that the neo-reformed crowd is, do you? On a more serious note, one of the most critically undefined terms in Roger's interview was the word "freedom" and you have used it in a serious way in #12. Theologically speaking, what is "freedom"? My sense is that most people who reject Arminianism do so over how this word is understood. Can we understand our freedom apart from God's freedom?

Cherie - #13. Another 2 ideas for T-shirt and/or bumper sticker:

JOHN WESLEY WAS NOT A CALVINIST (although he may have embraced some Reformed notions).

or,

ARMINIANS RULE!!! (well, metaphorically, because the idea of ruling kind of goes against our nature...)

chad - My wife already made a shirt for Roger Olson that says "Arminius is my homeboy" as a gift from his TNT 2 class last summer. You should ask him about it.

Cherie - Love this list. Re: #11, you should totally include the "(because we're nuanced like that)" on the T-shirt.

Nick - Perhaps you could call the distinction "John Calvin, Origen and the Stoics vs. Everyone Else."

Melinda - I like DAISY ... it was the first flower I heard associated with Arminianism, though it was as "daisy"-- re, "He loves me, He loves me not." I think we can TOTALLY rock that.

Cherie - I also like the daisy metaphor, because it's an open-faced flower. Tulips, once they open up, fall apart...

Chad - I think the problem is, Arminianism

Niki - The only reason Calvinism sounds cool, let's face it, is thanks to Calvin and Hobbes. Without C&H, Calvin would just be another theologian's name (well, and a movement, but I digress).

Ed - I think it's all about the name. I agree with Chad and Niki, though Calvin has two syllables and Arminius has 4. That's a huge number of syllables. Also, Calvinists can also say they're "Reformed," but Arminians don't have a word of their own even though they came from the same reformation. I think we need to keep things simple.

Ed - Here is the new Arminian acronym I propose - N.I.C.E. - Not . Interested in . Calvinist . Exclusivity. Then we can just say we're "NICE" Christians, and we're good... ;)

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Index to past articles on "Calvinism v. Arminianism"

 

 




 

 

McKnight - A Critique of Love Wins 8

http://www.patheos.com/community/jesuscreed/2011/04/18/exploring-love-wins-8/

by Scot McKnight
April 18, 2011
Filed under: Universalism

Share“There Are Rocks Everywhere” is the most controversial and important chapter in Rob Bell’s new book, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. This chp is going to take some special grace if we want a good conversation. I am asking that you pause quietly and slow down enough to pray this prayer as the way to approach this entire series:

O Lord, you have taught us that without love whatever we do is worth nothing:

Send your Holy Spirit and pour into my heart your greatest gift,

which is love, the true bond of peace and of all virtue,

without which whoever lives is accounted dead before you.

Grant this for the sake of your only Son Jesus Christ,

who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God,

now and for ever. Amen.†

I want to sketch the substance of this chapter because it provides a sketch of how it is that God’s saving presence is made known to all people who have ever lived. Some people have profound religious experiences, seemingly out of nowhere, and some of them come to Christ as a result of those experiences. [Again, if you like this post or conversation, please Tweet this or FB share it. Thanks.]

This chapter is about the omnipresence of Christ, and by presence he means really present in an engaging and “God wants to save you” way.

What is your take on this chp? What are the implications of Christ’s omnipresence for world religions? For God’s mission to all people? Or backing up a paragraph: How does this kind of experience happen when it is not part of a church, or the gospel, or a preacher, or anything?

Bell finds a similar idea in the Rock that Moses rapped in Exodus 17 — and Paul tells us that the Rock was Christ. This is typology, not ontology. From this Bell asks how else Christ is present, and observes that early Christians believed Christ was present everywhere. Within proper limits, I agree: Christ is present everywhere. Christ is creator, Christ is life, where there is life Christ — the Life and Life giver — is present. This should not be denied by Christians with a robust view of Christ. John 1, Colossians 1, Hebrews 1 — Christ is Creator. All life is from God.

This fundamental conviction leads Rob to ask where Christ is also present. If Jesus is the Life and Life giver, Jesus is also “the ultimate exposing of what God has been up to all along” (148). A robust view of God’s mission in Christ will agree with this statement but it will want to ask, too, how distinctive the work in Christ is. What God did, is doing and will do is all summed up in Christ.

What Christ is doing, Rob says, is bringing unity to all things. Here he draws again on his universal reconciliation themes in the Bible — Colossians 1. Christ is the Life of all things and of everyone. John 12 where Jesus says he will draw “all people to myself.” And the “other sheep” of John 10.

Then Rob makes two major logical inferences: “As obvious as it is, then, Jesus is bigger than any one religion.” [He takes a cheap shot at our faith when he says "especially the one called 'Christianity'" (150). Especially? How about "including"? Why take a dig at the Christian faith and not others?] Next move: “Jesus is supra-cultural. He is present within all cultures, and yet outside all cultures” (151). So, “we cannot claim him to be ours any more than anyone else’s” (152).

There is so much possibly being said in this, and so little that is explicit, that I’m not sure what to say. But it sure sounds like a de-privileging of Israelite and Christian culture to me. It sounds like minimizing of the truth of Christian orthodoxy. When he says “we” who is that? If that is the Christian cultures of this world, then I disagree with him significantly. We don’t own Christ and he speaks against our culture, but to say that our culture has no more claim than an explicitly anti- or non-Christian culture makes no sense to me.

He’s too harsh on the Christian claims (or Jewish claims in Romans 2) but he’s seeking to expand our sense of the omnipresence of Christ. Anyone who believes in omnipresence has got to admit an important point here. The issue is whether or not that presence is a loving presence, and more particulare, an “I’m here to save you” presence. The issue is whether this Rock is present in a saving way — revealing salvation in an exclusive sense.

Sometimes people who have never heard about Christ and then who hear about Christ say “That’s who we’ve been looking for. Or that’s who we’ve been worshiping. You gave us his name.” Missionaries know about these stories. I believe the missionaries are right and I believe those people were and are experiencing the true Christ. How common is this? It’s rare.

Next logical move: He is the Way, Truth and Life. “What [Jesus] doesn’t say is how, or when, or in what manner the mechanism functions that gets people to God through him. He doesn’t even state that those coming to the Father through him will even know that they are coming exclusively through him. He simply claims that whatever God is doing in the world to know and redeem and love and and restore the world is happening through him” (154).

He clarifies now in ordinary, if very simplistic, academic terms: Bell says he’s not a traditional exlcusivist, he’s not an inclusivist (here he’s talking more about pluralism), but an exclusivist on the other side of inclusivism. God saves only through Jesus, and God is saving all through Jesus … but this means who is “Jesus”? And he pushes against the narrow views to this expansive, omnipresent Jesus, and in this expansion one has to wonder if the content of the gospel is falling out. He’s got an expansive Christ, an omnipresent Christ, an anonymous Christ, and he’s got that Christ saving in all of history and across the whole world.

He brings up three (pastoral) points:

1. We are not to be surprised when people stumble on this mystery. [This omnipresent Rock.] “Sometimes they use his name; other times they don’t” (159). OK, but… I’ve got questions I’d like to raise, a lot of them in fact.

2. None of us have cornered the market on Jesus. Of course, we haven’t. But, I ask, do some have the truth of Christ more than others? Did Jesus? Did the apostles? Do the NT writings? Does the Church? More than Islam? Buddhism? Atheism?

3. It is our responsibility to be careful about making negative lasting judgments. “We can name Jesus, orient our lives around him… and at the same time respect the vast, expansive, generous mystery that he is” (160). What’s he affirming and what’s he really denying?

I question whether he has (speaking in terms of missiology) sufficiently affirmed the distinctiveness of Jesus in the apostolic gospel, or a little more broadly, in the Bible. I question whether he has affirmed the privilege of the biblical and Christian tradition. I question whether, pastorally, he has so maximized the presence of Christ that gospel preaching, evangelism and missionary work are no longer necessary. This is getting too close to some kind of religious pluralism or religious instrumentalism, or perhaps better, less than a robust affirmation of the necessity of faith in Christ. In the Rock chapter not only the atonement metaphors no longer are in play but neither is his dying-to-live idea.

I do think Bell has discovered some of the theological categories at work in what to think of the salvation of those who have not heard: once you admit the deity of Christ, once you admit that Jesus is the Creator and the life that sustains all of life, once you admit the omnipresence of Christ, and once you tie to these the universal dimensions of God’s mission and reconciling work and once you believe that God loves all and wants all to be saved … you’ve got the possibility that Christ really is at work everywhere and to everyone. There might be some that believe this omnipresent life/Christ is general revelation and not the saving manifestation of Christ, and that general revelation does not save. This deserves more attention in Bell’s discussion. But I have major questions about whether or not Bell is dispensing with the cross in favor of a gentle omnipresent Christ. The content of the Rock simply isn’t clear to me.

And the universal scope of God’s mission in Christ, when tied into the omnipresence of Christ, does not mean all are saved. What it means is that everyone hears or knows or somehow encounters the one true God who saves in Christ.

What seems possible in an omnipresent Christ is some kind of “accessibilism” and a clear affirmation of everyone’s ultimate, final accountability before God.

Or what is at work perhaps is some kind of “a wideness in God’s mercy” or “God holds people accountable for the light they have received,” with the belief that the “light” is Christ at work.

But anything that minimizes the content and cross of the apostolic gospel of Christ is not sufficient.

This chp is inadequate for me to deal with the questions its raises.

We Believe in the Holy Spirit... Right?

By Kyle Roberts

April 11, 2011

The Holy Spirit is not an amorphous abstraction. He is active and embodied

in our efforts to transform ourselves and transform the world.

This was a long Minnesota winter. My snow-bound friends and I bemoaned the stubborn cold and the elusive thaw. We collectively longed for spring and for the warmth, the growth, and the new life it brings.

The renewal of life associated with spring reminds me of the activity of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is known in scripture and theological tradition as the life-giver, healer, and Perfector of creation. One of the "two hands of God" (Irenaeus), the Spirit draws, awakens, and breathes new life into creation and humanity.

In its original form, the Nicene Creed (325 A.D.) simply asserted, "we believe in the Holy Spirit." In 381 A.D., more was added: the Spirit is "the Lord, the giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father; who with the Father and Son together is worshipped and glorified." The Holy Spirit was understood to be fully divine, an equal "hypostasis" (person) with the Father and to the Son. Why did it take so long for the Church to articulate clearly and emphatically that the Spirit is fully divine and equally worthy of worship, prayer, and praise as the Father and the Son?

The reasons are several. The Father and the Son had "faces" (the Father figuratively, the Son literally in his incarnation), while the Spirit seemed faceless. Amorphous. It blows where it pleases. It refers and defers. It is effective but elusive. Its particularity as a person seemed difficult to grasp. And the biblical witness for the full divinity of the Spirit seemed less clear or emphatic than for the Father and Son. An influential Christian sect, known as the "Pneumatomachoi," or "spirit-fighters," argued just this point in their assertion that the Spirit is not fully God. This position did not carry the day; the prevailing, orthodox position was that the Bible manifests a progression of revelation, and that the Spirit's full divinity and personhood is a burgeoning idea—even in the New Testament. So on what basis were early Christians justified in articulating the Spirit as the third person of the Trinity?

Together with the biblical witness, it was partly the collective experience of the early Christians that fortified the belief in the divinity of the Spirit. The Spirit was experienced as Savior, healer, guide to truth, bringer of new life, restorer of harmony, and facilitator of unity. Wherever Christ and the Father were known in the Church, the Holy Spirit too was there, bringing the love and grace of God to bear on communal, liturgical, and individual life. Converts were consistently baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. Conviction about the Spirit arose from a palpable sense that the Spirit, while instrumental in the creation of the universe and in the original animation of human life, continues to be active in its preservation and redemption. The Spirit brings life and salvation as human beings encounter and participate in the energeia, the divine energies of God.

Eventually, and with consensus, the Church determined that the Spirit, too, is a divine person (hypostasis). The Spirit brings new birth (Jn. 3:3-8); the Spirit empowers us to witness (Acts 1:8); the Spirit intercedes for us in prayer (Rom. 8:26); the Spirit can be grieved (Eph. 4:30); the Spirit guides us into truth (Jn. 16:13); and the Spirit will bring righteousness and justice to the "needy" and "poor of the earth" (Is. 11:4). Gregory of Nazianzus asserts, "it is the Spirit in whom we worship and in whom we pray." Our experience of the Spirit is our experience of God: Father, Son, and Spirit in economic union.

Although interest in the Holy Spirit has revived recently in churches and in academic theology, it may still be true that the Holy Spirit is the most neglected of the three persons of Trinity. This has been my experience in the evangelical Baptist tradition. Just as it took the early generations of the church some time to acknowledge the full divinity of the Spirit, so today there is a gap in our appreciation for and acknowledgement of the Spirit and its significance for Christian communities and individuals. This is not because we are not experiencing the Spirit. It's because, when it comes to the working of the Spirit, we may not know what to look for or how to recognize it. When we assume a dichotomy between the workings of the Spirit and the embodiment of concrete practices, we end up looking for the Spirit in all the wrong places.

For the most part, the early Christians' experience of the Spirit was a concrete, embodied experience that coincided with practices of the church and discipleship. Experience of the Spirit was eminently bodily, practical, and not only life-transforming but world-transforming as well. As David H. Jenson writes, the Spirit "claims our bodies and our prayers and makes them participants in the life given for the world" (The Lord and Giver of Life, pg 11). The Spirit grounds and renews concrete visions of hope in and among embodied life and in broken communities. The Spirit proclaimed by the prophets and encountered at Pentecost calls forth justice for the oppressed, salvation for the hopeless, and unity in the Church.

If the activity of the Spirit is not "spiritual" (in the Gnostic sense of invisible, immaterial, and disembodied), then we are experiencing the Spirit whenever we are working along with God and seeking his Kingdom and righteousness. The work of the Spirit is everywhere present: in soup kitchens, hospitals, schools, community centers, mission and social work and, of course, in the Church itself.

The Spirit creates a unity in diversity, a presence of the new and different, a transformation of our selves in community, a re-direction of mission and conviction. The fruits of the Spirit include love, joy, peace, and faithfulness, but they also result in communities of people and coalitions of churches who are satisfied with nothing less than righteousness and justice and who prophetically advocate for the oppressed and for the "least of these." In short, the work of the Spirit leads to God-intoxicated, kingdom-inspired people.

Trinitarian theology tells us that where any one of the three persons is working, they all are. So where the Spirit is, there is Jesus, and where Jesus is, there is the Father. There are good reasons to enrich our God-language and to long for, in a focused way, the purifying, healing, and reconciling power of the Holy Spirit in our lives, our churches, and our work on behalf of the world. If we are not experiencing the Spirit in manifest and transformational ways, neither are we are experiencing the transforming presence of Jesus, the Father, or of that which Jesus called the Kingdom of God.

Winter is over. Spring has come. May we also, and with far greater significance, witness a fresh work of the Holy Spirit in our midst.

We proclaim in our creed, "We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of life . . ." And we should ask ourselves: Do we really?

Kyle Roberts is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology and Lead Faculty of Christian Thought, Bethel Seminary (St. Paul, MN). He researches and writes on issues related to the intersection of theology, philosophy, and culture.

The New Apologetics

By Kyle Roberts
February 08, 2011

A "new apologetics" for a post-modern, post-Christian society will focus less on

winning arguments than witnessing to the redemptive power of Christ.

Is the place of apologetics in contemporary Christian theology and ministry changing?

Apologetics, within the modern evangelical framework, is understood as a reasoned defense of the coherence and intellectual validity of Christian faith and belief. It tends to draw upon "worldview" language and usually involves an active comparison of religious, philosophical, and ethical frameworks. Apologetics is usually considered an evangelistic enterprise, though one characterized by cerebral discussions. The "target" of apologetic practice is normally an intellectually sophisticated non-Christian, agnostic or atheist.

When talking about apologetics, the question usually arises regarding how many non-Christians are "converted" to Christianity through an apologetic dialogue. A common concession one hears is that apologetics often ends up being more about strengthening and encouraging the faith of Christian believers than winning and converting new ones. In either case, whether it is for the evangelism of unbelievers or for the discipleship of the converted, apologetics—even as traditionally practiced—can be fruitful and positive.

However, it is worth considering, in our evolving cultural context, whether a fresh paradigm for apologetics might render new energy and vitality to a time-tested practice. Theologians over the centuries have always reexamined the right way to engage with unbelief. For followers of Aquinas, for instance, apologetics includes "natural theology" (reflecting on the qualities of God made manifest in nature) and takes an optimistic outlook on the place of general human knowledge in articulating Christian belief. For followers of Karl Barth, on the other hand, apologetics, when it bases its argument on propositions independent of Christian revelation and practice, is regarded with deep skepticism. Both perspectives are still found in the dialogue today. Yet the Thomistic and Barthian concerns might find some common ground in a "new apologetic" for the 21st century that would be 1) evangelistic, 2) integrative, 3) holistic, 4) communal, and 5) contextual.

Evangelistic: We still need to practice apologetics today, because evangelism is no less important today than it was in the first century. Christ is still Lord and redeemer, but many still have not personally experienced his Lordship and redemption. Apologetics, as I see it, is simply what happens when theology (and philosophy, science, history, and sociology—but more about that later) is utilized in an evangelistic dialogue.

When a Christian is engaged in conversation with non-believers or skeptics, questions invariably arise: Why do you trust the Bible as your primary source of divine revelation? Why is there so much evil and suffering in the world? Why should I accept the uniqueness of Christ in an age of many putative gods or potential saviors? Apologetics simply is the attempt to address these questions with pastoral sensitivity, communal embodiment, and intellectual viability.

A caveat: While Christians ought to continue to practice evangelism, we need to maintain a poignant—though painful—recognition of our past and present failures to respect the other and to distinguish between Jesus-styled evangelism and triumphalism. We need to be aware that colonialism and imperialism have often masked themselves as evangelism and mission. But this awareness should not keep Christians from sharing the Lordship of Jesus and from answering probing questions about their faith and theological convictions. With that caveat in mind, the "new apologetics" should be:

Integrative: "All truth is God's truth." If something is true, it counts—no matter whether it comes from scripture or from science, from "the book of God" or the "book of nature." Apologetics should take an explicitly and intentionally integrative stance and methodology. Science can show us how nature works, introduce us to the outer reaches of the cosmos and explore the inner workings of the quantum world, and detail the origins of the universe and the remarkable development of biological life. Apologetics ought to embrace the discoveries of science, while recognizing that contemporary scientific consensus does not have the final word (as any responsible scientist would acknowledge). Prevailing scientific explanations will eventually be outstripped and outdated by new discoveries. This does not give us continual license, however, to pit interpretations of the Bible against science while closing our eyes to evidence. Models of integration between science and theology can be found in the work of people like Alister McGrath, John Polkinghorne, Nancey Murphy, and Francis Collins. While these figures are not often labeled as apologists, they offer resources for communicating the reasonableness of the Christian faith in positive, integrative ways. If apologetics is intentionally integrative, then it need not worry so much about "defending the corners" (per Daniel Harrell's phrase) as about exploring the intersections.

Holistic: Apologetics has often been characterized and practiced as a "lone ranger" discipline. The "brave Christian apologist" (usually a white male) takes his stand against the secularist, atheist, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, etc., attempts to poke holes in the armor of his opponent, and to persuasively defend his faith against all comers. While we could locate, perhaps, examples of early Christians in the New Testament articulating their faith and defending their convictions in the public marketplace (Paul and Peter come to mind), it seems that early Christian witness, on the whole, was a communal and holistic enterprise. Christians cared for the sick, fed the hungry, and clothed the naked—just like their master taught them—and in so doing they proclaimed the Lordship and salvation of Christ. Perhaps apologetics ought to work at integrating not just other disciplines, but also the practices of Christian life and discipleship into and along with intellectual discourse.

Communal: The most influential book I have read on the topic of the "new apologetics" (and the book isn't all that new!) is Brad Kallenberg's Live to Tell: Evangelism in a Postmodern Age. Kallenberg points out that people learn a new language best by immersion in a culture and community. In the 1950s, Christians could pretty well assume an in-depth familiarity with the Christian language. Americans in general knew what sin, grace, and forgiveness meant. They had at least a rudimentary familiarity with the doctrine of the Trinity and the two natures of Christ. They had heard the "old, old story" many times. But in our post-modern, post-Christian, increasingly secular age, these words and concepts can be as foreign as German or Spanish words to an English-only speaker. In order to learn a new language well, one must observe the meanings of words in a lived context. Those words need to be embodied and enacted in a community of people committed to living them out with authenticity. Apologetics, then, is not merely a defense of certain truths; it is an invitation into a community that seeks to live out those truths deeply and daily.

Contextual: The narrative of the history of the modern Western Christian missions movement contains much that is positive and good. However, as renowned missiologist Paul Hiebert pointed out masterfully in his formative essay, "Critical Contextualization," it also contains a good bit that is deserving of critique, repentance and sadness. Too often Western missions became about transmitting American culture rather than biblical truth. The exporting of "Christianity" wasn't always about the Lordship and Redemption of Christ. Too often, perhaps, the discipline of apologetics has fallen into the same trap. Winning intellectual arguments may come not only at the expense of relationships, but also at the expense of authentic contextualization. When non-Christians engage the message of Christ and the hope of the Gospel, there needs to be a range of freedom to appropriate that message in ways that are authentic to that person's (or that community's) context. The earnestness of the apologist (and his or her conviction about "the truth") may at times preclude a genuine contextualization of truth.

For some, the term "apologetics" has taken on too many negative connotations to continue to be useful. They believe it is time to dispense with the term altogether. I am not convinced. Saving the term, however, is less important than revitalizing and re-contextualizing the concept. Christians need to continue to talk about the best way to communicate the heart of the gospel and the saving message of Christ in compelling and coherent ways. To that end, apologetics (or whatever one may call it) should be evangelistic, integrative, holistic, communal, and contextual.

Kyle Roberts is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology and Lead Faculty of Christian Thought, Bethel Seminary (St. Paul, MN). He researches and writes on issues related to the intersection of theology, philosophy, and culture.

Roberts' column, "Theological Provocations," is published every second Tuesday on the Evangelical portal. Subscribe via email or RSS. http://kylearoberts.com/wordpress/

Blessed are the homeless

http://faith-theology.blogspot.com/2011/03/blessed-are-homeless.html

A sermon by Kim Fabricius
Sunday, 6 March 2011

Have you ever been homeless, spent time without a roof over your head? I have. In the autumn of 1971, in Amsterdam, no money, my best mate and I slept in a derelict building for a couple of weeks. Not a pleasant experience. Fear of intruders, fear of the police, but, above all, it’s the cold I remember most – we had only our Moroccan burnooses for cover – the interminable sleepless wait for sunrise and warmth. That was for only a fortnight. But for some people it’s a way of life – and death.

That’s one kind of homelessness – the “homeless and broke” kind. Here is another kind. Remember ET, Steven Spielberg’s 1982 sci-fi film? ET is an extra-terrestrial who, stranded on earth, befriends a lonely little boy who lives in a fatherless household, whose name is Elliott (observe that Elliott’s name begins with “e” and ends with “t”). ET begins to learn the local language – English – by listening to words that Elliott’s little sister repeats as she watches Sesame Street. And the first word he picks up – home; and with Elliott’s help he builds a device to “phone home” (a phrase BT was quick to deploy in a famous advertising campaign). The rest of the film is all about how ET finally heads for home – and also about how Elliott himself gets home, in the sense that he ceases to feel “alien-ated”. Why was ET at the time the most financially successful film ever? Because, I think, it tapped into deep feelings of rootlessness (the Emmy Award-winning TV mini-series Roots ran five years before ET) and a longing for home – wherever that is.

Here is a third, historical take on homelessness: the refugees of the world. Let us look at the Palestinian people. In 1915, during the First World War, Britain made a deal with the Sharif of Mecca: in exchange for an Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire, Germany’s ally, the promise of British support for an independent Arab kingdom when the war was over. But then, in 1917, Britain reneged on the deal and issued the Balfour Declaration, promising to support the establishment of a Jewish state – in Palestine. Here, as Arthur Koestler put it, was one nation promising another nation the land of a third nation. It was a formula for a catastrophe. Fast-forward to 1947-48, the UN partition plan, and the blessing of the establishment of the state of Israel for the Jewish people becomes a curse for the Palestinian people – 700,000 uprooted, evicted. Palestinians themselves call this massive dislocation the Nakba, which is Arabic for – “Catastrophe”. Over sixty years later and one generation of homeless, refugee people has become three. There is no reason to be optimistic that it will not become four.

Do these varied experiences of homelessness have anything in common? I think they do. A sense of isolation and vulnerability for one thing, and, conversely, a yearning for safety and peace: a roof over your head and an electric fire, the return to a world from which you’ve been separated, or a land from which you’ve been forcibly expelled. The Welsh understand this concept by their word, hiraeth – which conveys a connection with the land, the valleys and the hills, a sense of “belonging” (the title of a rather good Welsh soap), and if you have the misfortune to live beyond Offa’s Dyke, chronic homesickness.

And yet, without belittling in the least all these feelings, or the terrible life of the homeless or the landless, indeed praying for their rectification, I wonder: for Christians, is not homelessness a metaphor for the way of life that we sign up to at baptism? How interesting, and noteworthy, that Peter addresses his first letter to “God’s chosen peoples who live as refugees [NRSV: exiles]” (1:1). And later on in the letter (2:11), he appeals to his readers as “strangers and refugees” (NRSV: exiles). And in the Epistle of Diognetus, a second century Christian writing, the author says that while “Christians are indistinguishable from other people by nationality, language, or customs,” nevertheless “there is something extraordinary about their lives. They live in their own countries as though they were only passing through… Any country,” the author declares, “can be their homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country.” On this reading of discipleship, the church is an outpost for pioneers colonising an alien territory in which we can never be at home, because, as Paul writes in his letter to the Philippians (3:20), “we are citizens of heaven.”

There has been a lot of talk over the past decade or so about the church at the end of Christendom being a church in exile, often rather glib talk, in my view, because it has neglected to acknowledge the Old Testament significance of exile, and the traumatic experience of exile, namely, God’s judgement on Israel, God’s punishment of Israel by their dispersal to Babylon. Without this recognition, it is easy for Christians to slip into a victim mentality, in which we blame church decline on secularism or atheism. Without this recognition, we rather too quickly start “re-imagining the future” (as the process of renewal was called in the URC in Wales) without confessing and repenting the sins of our past – sins mainly of taking too much for granted, sins of apathy and lethargy, the sins of civic religion.

And then there are the three dangers of living in exile. The first is nostalgia, pining for the good old days and trying to re-inscribe them in the reality of today. But – remember King Canute – you can’t command the tides of time to withdraw. The second danger is withdrawal, disengaging from the big bad world of today altogether and circling the wagons. This is the sectarian option and it is not only cowardly and faithless, it is also a recipe for further decline and ultimate disappearance. And then there is the third danger, assimilation, whereby we think we can save the church by aping the ways of the world, as if all we’ve got to do is to market and manage the church more strategically and effectively to be “successful”. But then the customer, not the gospel, becomes sovereign, and though the church gain the whole world, it loses its soul.

What then do I suggest? I suggest what Jesus himself and the New Testament suggest: that it is by living in exile that Christians find their true home, that living in exile, which begins as a judgement, actually turns out to be a blessing,turns out to be our vocation. Remember Jesus himself was homeless, permanently homeless, itinerant, from his time as a child with his refugee family in Egypt, to his vagabond ministry when he says: “Foxes have holes, and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lie down and rest” (Luke 9:58).

And what do we do as a church in exile, a church of permanent dispersion, diaspora? Exactly what the exilic prophet Jeremiah, in a letter, told the Israelites to do in Babylon. While false prophets were engaged in a cover-up and calling for a return to the land (preaching old-time religious revival, if you like), Jeremiah modestly, but radically and bravely, advised: “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare” (Jeremiah 29:7 NRSV). Which is not to romanticise exile – far from it: Jeremiah recognised that a deracinated, decentred life is lonely and hard; that swimming against the stream takes determination and energy; that being mocked and mistreated erodes your self-esteem and confidence. Nevertheless, exile is just the right place to prune and refine, to explore and experiment, to make tactical critiques of prevailing cultural norms, and to practice that peculiar counter-cultural way of being human called “discipleship” which is embodied in the Sermon on the Mount. Freed from the compulsion to be in charge, and from the delusion that we control our own destiny, we can get on with being faithful, being Christian, being church, being mission.

Many in the church are still in denial about exile, or we grieve our losses, yes, but don’t repent our failures. I think it’s about time we lose the self-pity and move on – and out: to embrace our homelessness, and travel on with the fearless conviction and hope of a people called and sent to do just one thing: to bear witness to the new humanity, the new creation, disclosed in the eruption of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. “Blessed are the homeless” is a beatitude truly in keeping with the teaching of our Lord.

Theology of Suffering and Evil

Course Outline
http://kylearoberts.com/wordpress/?p=401

by Kyle Roberts
Posted on March 4, 2011 by admin

Course outline for my 2011 summer doctor of ministry seminar on “theology of evil and suffering”:

Topical Course Outline and Schedule

Introducing the Challenge of Evil and Suffering (Monday AM)•

Major Theological Perspectives on Evil and Suffering (Monday AM and PM)

1.Calvinism
2.Arminianism
3.Open Theism
4.Eschatological Theism
5.Liberation and Contextual TheologiesBiblical Interpretation and Evil and Suffering (Tuesday)

Old Testament Issues (Tuesday AM)

1.Is God a “Moral Monster”? and “Disturbing Divine Behavior”
2.War and Violence in the OT
3.The “Untamed Creation”: Earthquakes and Tsunamis

New Testament Issues (Tuesday PM)

1.Suffering and Christian Discipleship
2.Jesus and the Cross
3.Did/does God Suffer? Is God impassible?

Assessing Prominent Theodicies (Wednesday)

1.Free Will / Free Process Defense
2.Best of All Possible Worlds/Greater Good
3.Soul-Making
4.Eschatological Theodicy
5.Issues in Theodicy and Science

Toward a Theology of the Cross and a Vision of Hope (Thursday AM)

Forms of Suffering and Pastoral Reponses (Thursday AM and PM)
1.Depression and Suicide
2.“Senseless” Tragedy and Trauma
3.Physical and Mental Disability 4.Personal and Local Poverty

The Dark Night of the Soul and Pastoral Care (Friday AM)

1.Creating Alternative “Future Stories”
2.Facilitating Communities of Empathy, Care and Justice

Texts
Boyd, Gregory. Is God to Blame? Moving Beyond Pat Answers to the Problem of Suffering. InterVarsity Press, 2003. ISBN 0830823948 (211 pages)

Fretheim, Terrance. Creation Untamed: The Bible, God and Natural Disasters. Baker Academic. ISBN 0801038936 (160 pages)

Greene-McCreight, Kathryn. Darkness is My Only Companion: A Christian Response to Mental Illness. Brazos Press, 2006. (176 pages)

Hall, Douglas J. God and Human Suffering. 03, Augsburg. ISBN 0806623144 (224)
 Hasker, William Triumph of God over Evil: Theodicy for a World of Suffering. 08, InterVarsity. ISBN 0830828044 (228)

Kelleman, Robert W. and Karole A. Edwards. Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African-American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction. Baker Books, 2007. ISBN: 0801068061. (250 pages)

Lewis, C. S. (2001). The Problem of Pain. HarperOne, 2001. ISBN 0060652969 (176 pages)

Sobrino, Jon. Where is God? Earthquake, Terrorism, Barbarism and Hope. 04, Orbis. ISBN 1570755663 (156 pages)

Other Required Readings (Instructor will make these available)
Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion (excerpt: Book 1, chapter 17, pp. 210-237).

Copeland, Shawn. “Wading Through Many Sorrows,” in A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Suffering, pp. 109-129 (20 pages)

Piper, John. “Suffering and the Sovereignty of God: Ten Aspects of God’s Sovereignty Over Suffering and Satan’s Hand in it,” in Suffering and the Sovereignty of God, eds. John Piper and Justin Taylor Crossway Books, 2006. (15 pages).

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2011/april/5bookspoverty.html
My Top 5 Books On Poverty

Picks from Brian Fikkert, co-author of 'When Helping Hurts.'
http://www.christianbook.com/Christian/Books/product?item_no=WW457051&p=1006327
posted 4/12/2011 12:00AM

Let Justice Roll Down

John Perkins (Regal)

http://www.christianbook.com/Christian/Books/product?item_no=WW743073&p=1006327

This classic documents the riveting story and enduring principles of one of the greatest heroes of the civil rights era. Despite little formal education, Perkins combines practical theology, a deep understanding of grace, and keen insights on the essential elements of community development.

Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger: Moving from Affluence to Generosity

Ronald J. Sider (Thomas Nelson)
http://www.christianbook.com/Christian/Books/product?item_no=WW945305&p=1006327

Sider's 1977 book was a prophetic call for evangelical Christians to make a radical commitment to end global poverty. His appeal to Scripture moved a generation of Christians to believe loving poor people is inherent to following Jesus Christ.

 

 

The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good

William Easterly (Penguin)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0143038826/christianitytoda

Easterly, a secular economist, demonstrates that good intentions are not enough. Improper incentives and inadequate information plague most attempts at poverty alleviation, with profound implications for Christian efforts.

To Live in Peace: Biblical Faith and the Changing Inner City

Mark R. Gornik (Eerdmans)
http://www.christianbook.com/Christian/Books/product?item_no=WW46850&p=1006327

Combining theology, social science research, and grassroots experience, Gornik narrates how the New Song Church in Baltimore created one of the premier examples of Christian community development in the U.S.

Walking with the Poor: Principles and Practices of Transformational Development

Bryant L. Myers (Orbis Books)
http://www.christianbook.com/Christian/Books/product?item_no=WW752753&p=1006327

Arguing that poverty is fundamentally relational rather than material, Myers critiques the standard Western approaches and provides an essential handbook for pursuing transformational development for both the rich and the poor.

Previous Christianity Today articles on poverty include:

An Obligation to Remember Eternally?

Resentment, even in the name of justice, is not for those who expect God's final reconciliation. (May 18, 2007) - http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2007/mayweb-only/120-52.0.html

Centering on Poverty

A coalition of the Right and Left launches a new project to reduce poverty. (February 17, 2009) - http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2009/februaryweb-only/107-21.0.html

How We Fight Poverty

U.N. Millennium Development Goals are good—as far as they go. (December 5, 2007) - http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2007/december/17.20.html

Can We Defeat Poverty?

Unless Africa tames corruption, new aid efforts will fail. (September 26, 2005) - http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2001/septemberweb-only/9-17-53.0.html

Which is Stronger: Grace or Law?
http://peterrollins.net/?p=2664

by Peter Rollins
posted 2/4/11

Aesop was such a powerful and insightful storteller. I was recently reminded of this fable he wrote that beautifully sums up the nature of grace and its transformative effect.

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A dispute once arose between the Wind and the Sun, which was the stronger of the two, and they agreed to settle the point upon the issue – that whichever of the two soonest made a traveler take off his cloak, should be accounted the more powerful.

The Wind began, and blew with all his might and main a blast, cold and fierce as a Thracian storm; but the stronger he blew, the closer the traveler wrapped his cloak around him, and the tighter he grasped it with his hands.

Then broke out the Sun. With his welcome beams he dispersed the vapor and the cold; the traveler felt the genial warmth, and as the Sun shone brighter and brighter, he sat down, quite overcome with the heat, and taking off his cloak, cast it on the ground.

Thus the Sun was declared the conqueror; and it has ever been deemed the persuasion is better than force; and that the sunshine of a kind and gentle manner will sooner lay open a poor man’s heart than all the threatenings and force of blustering authority.

What is Love

Love does not exist – A valentines post
http://peterrollins.net/?p=2127

by Peter Rollins

posted 2/14/11

"Love does not belong to the beholder of love, but to the subject to which it loves. True love cannot help but overflow, to give, to reveal itself to the object of its desire." - Soren Kierkegaard

Love is so humble that it seems impossible to ever really catch anything but the briefest glimpse of her. She is like a tiny field mouse dwelling in the dark. Should we hear her scratching in the corner and shine a light she will, quick as a flash, scurry away so that we catch sight of only the tip of her tail. Indeed love is so bashful that we often forget about her entirely. For love, to change analogies, is like light. When we are sitting with friends we do not think about the light that surrounds us but only of the friends that the light enables us to see. Likewise love illuminates others and so our attention is focused on what she illuminates rather than with the illumination itself.

Love, in a very precise way, enables us to see. For in daily life we perceive others in much the same way as a cow gazes at cars. We walk past thousands of people without really seeing anyone. I was reminded of this recently when a friend of mine told me of something that happened when she took a train from Connecticut to New York. As the conductor, a large and imposing man, approached she realised that she had left her purse at the house. When he got to her seat and asked for her ticket she, with much embarrassment, explained the situation and braced herself for the worst. But the conductor just sat down in the seat opposite and said, “Don’t worry about it”. Then, for the remainder of the journey they talked. They shared photos of their family, they exchanged jokes and they spoke of the ones who meant most to them. When the conductor finally got up to continue his rounds my friend began to apologise again, but the conductor stopped her mid sentence and smiled, “please don’t pay it any thought, you know its just really nice to be seen by someone.”

This might initially seem like a strange thing to say as the conductor was being seen by thousands of people every day. But only in instrumental terms, only as the extension of a function he performed. In this brief conversation with my friend he felt that he had actually been seen as a unique individual and that was a gift to him.

This is what love does. It does not make itself visible but rather makes others visible to us. In a very precise sense then love does not exist but calls others into existence: for to exist means to stand forth from the background, to be brought into the foreground. Love does not stand forth but brings others forth. When we love our beloved is brought out of the vast, undulating sea of others. Just as the Torah speaks of God calling forth beings from the formless ferment of being so love calls our beloved from the endless ocean of undifferentiated objects.

In this way love is not proud and arrogant. It does not say, “I am sublime, I am beautiful, I am glorious”. Love humbly points to another and whispers, “they are sublime, they are beautiful, they are glorious.” It does not tell us that they are perfect despite their weakness and frailty, but that they are perfect in the very midst of their weakness and frailty.

Love does not want our hymns of praise or prayers of adoration. She does not want our sacrifices or seek our time. One cannot and should not even try to love love. For love always points away from herself. To honour love is to be in love, to swim in the world illuminated by her.

That which love illuminates means everything to us: a reality that can be exquisitely pleasurable or devastatingly painful. As such we will always experience the one we love as the most sublime existence in the universe. This experience however hides within itself a deep truth, a truth that we would do well to forget as soon as we learn of it (for it works best in darkness). Namely, that the most sublime presence in the universe is not our beloved but the love that exposes them as our beloved. The love that does not itself exist, but which raises our beloved to the level of existence.

Feeling Mostly Like Winnie-the-Pooh

Great Theologians: Winnie-the-Pooh
http://peterrollins.net/?p=2600

by Peter Rollins
posted 24/3/11

“Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it”

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We all experience life like Winnie-the-Pooh at times. We all have been touched by the feeling that we are upside down and traveling this path of ours all wrong. When this feeling creeps up on us it is deeply disconcerting. And so we try to avoid it. We fill our lives with distractions… we gather people around us who tell us everything is fine… we affirm our view of the world all the more vigorously (reading books, watching programs, reading papers etc. that solidify our view of the world and thus help to inoculate us from the experience of Winnie-the-Pooh).

Most of us flee from the idea that perhaps it is not the rest of the world who are wrong… but us.

However there are a few who allow this feeling to speak to them, a few who are brave enough to let this experience interrogate them, to break them, rather than attempting to domesticate it, tame it or repress it. These few open themselves up to a deeply disconcerting experience of feeling forsaken by all that has grounded them, all that has sustained them, all that has nurtured them.

This crucifixion experience is deeply painful, but just perhaps it can help to humanize us and open us up a whole new type of community. A community where we acknowledge our weakness, brokenness and frailty, a community in which we gather, not around the idea that we are right, strong, pure and good. But rather around our wounded flesh. Finding purity, beauty and truth, not in the renunciation of our weakness, but in the very midst of it.