A Gay Christian Responds to Christ and Culture

Ask a Gay Christian...(Response)

http://rachelheldevans.com/ask-a-gay-christian-response

by Rachel Held Evans

September 19, 2011

270 Comments

In our interview series so far, we’ve featured an atheist, a Catholic, an Orthodox Jew, a humanitarian, a Mormon, a Mennonite, an evolutionary creationist, and a Calvinist. When I asked who you wanted to hear from next, many of you requested an interview with a gay Christian.

I’m so glad you did!

Last week I introduced you to Justin Lee, the director of The Gay Christian Network (GCN), a nonprofit organization serving lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Christians and those who love them. Justin is also the director of "Through My Eyes," a documentary about young gay Christians, and the co-host of GCN Radio, a popular podcast on issues of faith and sexuality. He blogs at Crumbs from the Communion Table.

Hundreds of questions rolled in from a wide variety of perspectives, with the top three questions “liked” over 100 times. Justin certainly rose to the occasion, answering your questions thoughtfully and humbly. I hope you find his responses as helpful as I did.

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From Justin: Hello, everyone! I'm honored to have this opportunity, and I'm so grateful to Rachel for making it possible. Thanks, Rachel!

As soon as I read through the questions Rachel sent, two things were immediately obvious to me: First, you guys are passionate about this issue and have a ton of great questions! Second, some of the questions were really long. Yikes! I don't want to bore you all to tears, but I also know that short, bumper-sticker answers to deep questions aren't very helpful. So I've tried to be concise, I've edited a few of the questions for brevity, and I'm committing right now to stick around here for at least the next week to keep answering questions in the comments.

Anything I don't get to or that needs more space, I'll address on my own blog, Crumbs from the Communion Table.

Now, on to the questions!

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From (reader) Justin B.: Before you came to peace with your sexual orientation, did you ever try to "cure" your homosexuality, whether through prayer or some type of program? I'd also be interested in hearing more about your story, such as when you first discovered you were gay, how long you waited before you told people, that kind of thing.

This is the perfect question to ask, and it's a question I think we Christians should be more in the habit of asking the people we encounter in our lives: "Tell me your story."

Why was the woman at the well so impressed with Jesus? It was because he knew her story. That alone made her eager to listen to him and bring others to do the same.

Our God is a personal God, and as the Body of Christ, we have an obligation to represent God by taking an interest in people's lives and stories. Right now, the church's reputation (especially in the gay community) is that we're a bunch of holier-than-thou jerks who are quick to preach and dole out advice but slow to take an interest in people. That's a reputation we need to reverse. Yes, we are called to take moral stands on issues, but we ought to be known first and foremost for our love.

My story is long, but here's the short(ish) version.

I grew up in a loving Christian home, accepted Christ at a young age, attended a Southern Baptist church, and generally had a pretty awesome upbringing.

From the time I was young, Jesus Christ was—and continues to be—#1 in my life. My relationship with Him was life-giving in every sense of the word, and that's why I considered it so important to live out my faith. I got the nickname "God Boy" in high school because I was the Bible-toting goody two-shoes Christian who didn't smoke, drink, curse, have sex, or shut up about God!

My view of homosexuality was this: God created male and female for each other. Our bodies were designed to fit together in that way, and the Bible made it clear that while sexuality was a gift from God, using our sexuality in ways that were outside of God's design for it was a sin—whether that meant premarital sex, adultery, or homosexuality. My pro-gay friends called me a "homophobe" for this view, but I didn't hate or fear gay people; I simply believed that they were making a sinful choice with their lives, and that by speaking out in a loving way, I could call their attention to it and help bring them back to God. That's what we're supposed to do as Christians, right?

I, of course, wasn't gay. At least, that's what I thought.

But I did have a secret I was going to take to my grave.

Like other guys my age, when I'd hit puberty, I had begun to experience sexual attractions. No surprise there. But one thing was different: while all of my guy friends were starting to notice girls for the first time, I was starting to notice guys.

At first, I didn't worry about it. I figured this was just part of the process and that my attractions would eventually switch to girls. But they didn't. Instead, the feelings just kept getting stronger and stronger. Even if I could make it through the school day without thinking about guys, I'd go to bed at night and dream about guys. I'd wake up each morning feeling dirty and disgusted with myself.

Straight guys, do you remember what it was like to be 16 years old with raging hormones, completely unable to get your mind off of girls no matter what you did? Well, that was my life too, except it was my male classmates who made my hormones go wild, not my female classmates.

As you might expect, I was horrified by this. I couldn't tell anyone, and I didn't know what was wrong with me. It got to the point that I was crying myself to sleep, night after night, begging God to take away these feelings.

It wasn't until I was 18 (and dating a beautiful girl I had no attraction to whatsoever) that I finally realized there was a word for people like me: "gay."

Even then, though, I was convinced it was a phase. I was sure that God didn't design me to be gay, so I looked into every Christian ministry I could find that offered to help gay people become straight. I was completely convinced that an "ex-gay" ministry, combined with therapy and prayer, would help me become attracted to women and put these other feelings behind me. After all, God can do anything!

The hard truth was that it doesn't work that way. Yes, God can do anything, but that doesn't mean God does do what we expect. I met so many people who had faith to move mountains and who had prayed and struggled their whole lives to become straight, but their attractions had still never changed. Even the national leaders and "success stories" of these change ministries privately admitted to me that they hadn't become straight. Yes, some of them had married a member of the opposite sex, but the "happily heterosexual" face they showed to the world was not the reality. I heard more tragic stories behind closed doors than I can possibly convey.

As I turned to my church and the Christians I respected most to get their support, things only got worse. Christian groups kicked me out or turned their backs on me when they learned that I was gay, even though I told them that I didn't want to be and that I hadn't even acted on my feelings! I learned that that one magic word, "gay," had the power to make Christians turn unkind and uncompassionate without even realizing they were doing it. That was the realization that led me to create a safe space on the internet for people who want to live out their faith and explore these difficult questions, even if they come to conclusions that are different from my own. That's where The Gay Christian Network came from.

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From KMR: When you first realized you were gay, what verses in the Bible did you struggle with the most? And how did you reconcile them in order to find peace?

There are a handful of passages in the Bible that directly address homosexuality in some form, and all of them are pretty negative.

In Genesis 19, the residents of the wicked city of Sodom threaten to gang rape two foreigners (actually angels in disguise). They don't succeed, but that threat of male-male rape is why we have the term "sodomy" today.

In Judges 19, an almost identical story takes place in the town of Gibeah. Again, a (male) foreigner is threatened with gang rape, but in the end, the crowd rapes and murders his (female) concubine instead. The ending and other context suggests that Sodom and Gibeah probably weren't gay cities, but did use threats and violence to intimidate foreigners.

In Leviticus 18-20, the death penalty is prescribed for a man who "lies with a man as with a woman." This is part of a set of rules given by God to Moses to keep the Israelites set apart. Some of the rules we Christians still follow today; others we don't.

In Romans 1, Paul is making an argument that all of us are sinners in need of grace. As an example of the folly of turning from God, Paul references a group of people who turned from God to worship idols and engage in "shameful" and "unnatural" behavior including gay sex. Some scholars view this as an indictment on cultures that fail to condemn homosexuality in any form; others argue that Paul is making an obvious allusion to the orgy-like rites practiced by the fertility cults of his day.

Finally, in 1 Cor. 6:9 and 1 Tim. 1:10, Paul offhandedly uses an obscure Greek term when listing groups of sinners. Some scholars have translated it as "men who have sex with men," but others scholars dispute that translation. Adding to the confusion is a second term that appears in only one of those passages. The new NIV argues that these two terms should be taken together to refer to active and passive partners in male anal sex; the 1980s NIV translated the word as "male prostitutes"; and other Bibles and scholars have all sorts of different opinions.

All of these passages address sexual behavior, so when I first realized I was gay, none of them seemed relevant to me. I was attracted to the same sex, but I wasn't sexually active and I didn't have any plans to be. My plan was just to find a way to become straight so that I could be attracted to a woman and get married.

Once I discovered that it was unlikely I would ever become attracted to women, I realized with despair that this meant I would have to be celibate and alone for the rest of my life. I was willing to do it if that was God's call for me, but the idea of being alone my whole life was a scary, sobering thought. Some people deal well with that; I'm not one of those people.

It made me wonder: what was God actually condemning in these passages? Was it the relationship itself that aroused God's anger, or was it just the sex? Could God approve of a loving, non-sexual but committed relationship between two people? As I studied these passages, another question arose I was almost afraid to even ask: Was it even possible that these passages were condemning issues of the day like idolatrous orgies and temple prostitution, and not loving, Christ-centered relationships at all?

I wrestled with that question for a very long time. On one hand, it's easy to see how each of those passages actually addresses an issue other than committed relationships. On the other hand, I couldn't deny that all of the passages that explicitly mentioned homosexuality did so in a negative light. Then again, if we say that commandments for women to wear head coverings or be silent in church are culture-bound and don't apply anymore, isn't it possible the same could be true in this case? If so, how do we know? If not, how do we know? Are we all just reading the Bible to confirm what we already believe?

In the end, I decided that I needed to be consistent in my approach to the Bible: whatever standards I used for deciding this needed to be the same standards I would take to other issues. I spent years prayerfully studying how Jesus and the New Testament writers used Scripture, what the Bible has to say about the nature of sin in general, Jesus' teachings about the law and the Sabbath, Paul's teachings on sexual morality and marriage, and how the early church resolved controversial issues of their day. The more I studied, the more convinced I became that we Christians had applied a different standard to the homosexuality texts than we had to other Scriptural texts, and that condemning Christ-centered relationships solely based on gender was actually inconsistent with biblical teaching.

This conclusion shocked me, and I recognize I'm still in the minority, albeit a rapidly growing one. Some of my very close friends have prayerfully come to the opposite conclusion, so I don't pretend this debate is at all settled. I can honestly say, though, that after all this prayer and study, I am fully convinced of my position, and I believe that my approach to Scripture now is far more consistent than it was before.

I suspect that this will point spark hundreds more questions: What about Adam and Eve? What biblical passages support gay relationships? Couldn't this approach be used to justify any sexual sin? There's way more to talk about than I have space for! A few years ago, I wrote some initial thoughts on the subject, and I'll be writing more about this on my blog, so hang onto those questions!

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From Karl: Is it possible in your view for someone to disagree with you - to believe that the Bible consistently teaches sexual activity is intended for heterosexual marriage only - and for that person to not be a bigot, homophobe, motivated by ignorance or fear?

Absolutely! Some of my best friends disagree with me on this issue. I recognize that we are all fallible human beings, which means that either (or both) of us could be wrong, but that doesn't mean we aren't sincerely trying to seek the truth.

There are bigots who use religious language to justify their hatred, but that doesn't mean that anyone who has a view I disagree with is a bigot. There are also many compassionate, loving Christians who sincerely want to be able to give their blessing to their gay friends' relationships but are unable to because they believe the Bible forbids those relationships. I absolutely respect that.

The same is true on the other side. There are many people who claim they believe the Bible but haven't really made any attempt to see what it has to say on the subject; they're just content to have any excuse to do what they want. But I'd hope that anyone who knows me can see that I am not one of those people. I am sincerely seeking to do God's will with all my heart. If I am wrong, I am sincerely wrong. I'm not just looking for excuses.

All of us, on both sides, need to be willing to assume good motives for those we disagree with. We don't have to agree with each other to make a genuine attempt to understand each other.

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From Laura: As a theology student, I often have real problems with the theology I find in gay-affirming writing, teaching, and churches. Phrases like "I deserve to be happy" and "If God made me this way why should I be ashamed?" really don't jive with my theological convictions. Do you feel any major theological tensions between orthodox faith and the rhetoric of the community of gay Christians? And if so, how do you go about correcting theological error in a community that is already so wounded and vulnerable because they have grown up battered by "biblical" teaching?

This is a really great question.

I, too, get frustrated with a lot of gay-affirming theology. A lot of it is poorly thought-through and doesn't reflect a Christian outlook.

For example, I hate the argument that "God made me this way [attracted to the same sex] so it can't be a sin [to have a same-sex relationship]."

That's a terrible argument. As Christians, we believe that we have all kinds of inborn temptations and desires that are wrong for us to act on. Just because someone is born with a certain desire doesn't mean it's automatically okay for them to follow through on it.

I actually do believe that there are great Bible-based arguments for the church to support people in committed same-sex relationships. This, however, is not one of them.

(By the way, I should point out that there are many, many gay Christians out there with really strong Christian theology, so the theology you've read doesn't reflect us all.)

The reverse is also true, of course. I hear lots of people on the other side make equally poor arguments, such as, "People can't be born gay, because the Bible says homosexuality is a sin." That's just the same terrible argument in reverse, and it ends up with well-meaning Christians accusing gay people of being liars when we say we didn't choose to be gay. That only pushes people further away from the gospel and makes the church look like it's in denial.

Your second question is where it gets especially tricky. You're absolutely right that a lot of gay people are incredibly wounded, having been theologically "battered" over and over by misguided Christians. I cannot possibly convey how much damage Christians have done to our own cause by approaching the gay community in hurtful ways.

This damage, then, makes it very difficult for churches to offer even appropriate and loving correction—the kind we all need. Have you ever seen a dog that's been abused its whole life? They run and cower in the corner if you even try to approach them to pet them. A lot of us feel like that when dealing with conservative Christians, frankly.

At this point, the best solution is for Christians to err on the side of being loving when dealing with people who have been abused by the church. Often, you'll have to bite your tongue on the theological error and focus on building relationships. That correction may be necessary, but it will have to come from people who have built the necessary trust first.

As a gay Christian leader, I view it as part of my responsibility to talk about those hard things our community doesn't want to face. People can accept those challenges from me in a way that they might not from someone else. But we still have a long way to go, and the only long-term solution is for the church to get its act together and learn to approach this issue far more lovingly than we have.

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From Katy: My cousin, whom I love, is a gay Christian…He flaunts his sexuality. His Facebook profile oftentimes has pictures from parties or Halloween where he is in underwear or something else skimpy. If I posted pics of myself dressed that way, it would be considered raunchy and inappropriate, but it's accepted for him to present himself that way. When I have brought this distinction up with people, I have been told it's part of the "gay culture" but I don't buy that. So what’s your view, as a Christian gay, of sexuality? Is sex just for "marriage" because you are a Christian?

You didn't say how old your cousin is, but my guess is that this is something he'll grow out of.

I don't believe that the standards for sexual behavior should be any different for gay Christians than they are for straight Christians.

I grew up believing that sex is something you save for marriage, so even after I realized I was gay and came to a gay-affirming conclusion from the Bible, I still decided I would wait until I met the right person and got married before having sex. Not all Christians (gay or straight) believe in waiting until marriage, and studies show that even those who do believe in it, usually fail to live up to their own standards. But my point is that the standards ought to be the same.

(By "marriage," by the way, I'm referring to a commitment before God, whether or not the government recognizes it. C.S. Lewis said that there should be a distinction between civil marriage and church marriage, and I agree.)

Of course, I know a lot of gay and straight Christians who behave in ways I wouldn't approve of. I do think this is a bigger issue in the gay world, though, and I believe that just shows how important the church is in our lives.

Let me explain what I mean.

One of the church's functions in society is to offer boundaries. Why don't we just go around having sex with anyone we want to? Partly because of the influence of the church. When it functions as it should, the church offers us reasonable boundaries to help us live holy lives. We say to young men, for instance, "The sex drive you feel is normal, and I know at times it can feel overwhelming, but don't let it control you. It may be tempting to have sex with pretty girls now, but it's far more fulfilling to wait."

Do all the straight young men wait? No. But the church sets the expectation.

Sometimes, though, the church gets it really wrong. When a young man is gay, the message he gets isn't to wait until the right time; it's that there will never be a right time. Not only that; he's told that his sex drive itself—not even lust but just the temptation he feels—is a horrible sin, something that may condemn him to hell even if he never acts on it.

Kids who hear these messages feel trapped. They've been made to feel that they're condemned even if they follow all the rules, and many grow to hate themselves.

What often happens, then, is one of two things. Either they internalize the shame and become depressed and withdrawn, or they rebel against the shame, coming out and in many cases making their sexuality the core of their identity for a while.

You know those gay people who can't stop talking about being gay? The ones who always have to be front and center in the pride parade wearing a hyper-sexualized outfit and shouting loudly about how proud they are of their sexuality? Often, this is their way of rebelling against [their] many years shame. The good Christian boy who comes out and suddenly is on Facebook in his underwear may well be trying to escape from the years of shame you never even knew he felt. That's not always the case, but it often is. Once people have fully reconciled themselves and grown confident with who they are, they rarely post underwear pictures on Facebook.

There is, though, a very sex-obsessed gay culture out there, and it grew largely out of that kind of rebellion in the 60s and 70s. Just like straight Christians need the church to offer moral guidance about sex that is different from what the world offers, gay Christians need that too. If most churches won't welcome them, some gay Christians end up turning to a secular gay culture to see how they should live, and that really needs to be the church's responsibility.

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From Ellie: Do you know any homosexual Christians that have chosen to remain single and celibate? How well do they seem to cope with that? What would you advise a person who is gay but believes that homosexual relationships and activity would be wrong?

Yes! I know plenty of them!

The organization I run, The Gay Christian Network, has two theological "sides." We call them "Side A" and "Side B." One side supports gay Christian marriage, while the other side encourages gay Christians to remain celibate.

My friend Wesley Hill has written a wonderful book about being a celibate gay Christian called Washed and Waiting: Reflections on Christian Faithfulness and Homosexuality.

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[Amazon Editorial Review:]

'Gay,' 'Christian,' and 'celibate' don't often appear in the same sentence. Yet many who sit next to us in the pew at church fit that description, says author Wesley Hill. As a celibate gay Christian, Hill gives us a glimpse of what it looks like to wrestle firsthand with God's 'No' to same-sex relationships. What does it mean for gay Christians to live faithful to God while struggling with the challenge of their homosexuality? What is God's will for believers who experience same-sex desires? Those who choose celibacy are often left to deal with loneliness and the hunger for relationships. How can gay Christians experience God's favor and blessing in the midst of a struggle that for many brings a crippling sense of shame and guilt? Weaving together reflections from his own life and the lives of other Christians, such as Henri Nouwen and Gerard Manley Hopkins, Hill offers a fresh perspective on these questions. He advocates neither unqualified 'healing' for those who struggle, nor their accommodation to temptation, but rather faithfulness in the midst of brokenness. 'I hope this book may encourage other homosexual Christians to take the risky step of opening up their lives to others in the body of Christ,' Hill writes. 'In so doing, they may find, as I have, by grace, that being known is spiritually healthier than remaining behind closed doors, that the light is better than the darkness.'

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It's an incredibly challenging path. Incredibly, incredibly challenging. But it is, of course, the best option for a gay person who believes the Bible condemns gay relationships, and I know people who are committed to it and thriving.

We at GCN believe it's vital that we welcome those people and offer them support and fellowship so they don't have to endure the journey alone. The broader church, sadly, has all too often failed to offer any kind of support for them. I would like to see that change.

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From Dawn: Given all the nasty rhetoric that has been aimed at the LGBT community -- and in that sense, at you personally -- by Christian and Christian political leaders, what is it about Christianity itself that's so compelling that you haven't been turned off completely by so many of its messengers?

One word: Jesus.

The church is human, and we make mistakes. Sometimes we don't represent God very well at all. But Jesus represented God perfectly as the incarnation of God. He loved the people his culture didn't love, he interacted with people he wasn't supposed to interact with, and he refused to distance himself from the people others called "sinners." Jesus' harsh words were aimed at the religious leaders of his day who, in their zeal for correct doctrine, were pushing people away from God. He didn't run for office or yell at sinners through a bullhorn. He loved, healed, and fed people, and then he let them beat him and hang him on a cross.

That's my God.

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From Alise: Hi Justin! Been a fan for a while, since my best friend Tina turned me onto your site. Thank you for the safe place that you have for LGBTQ Christians. Your site was part of my journey toward gay affirming and I'm thankful to you for that as well. My question: Can a church that is not affirming still be welcoming to an LGBTQ Christian? What kinds of actions would make you feel more welcome, even if the church still believed/taught that gay relationships are sinful?

Thanks for the kind words, Alise!

I think whether a church feels "welcoming" depends a lot on the person being welcomed. I can say whether I feel welcome in a particular church, but that doesn't mean someone else will.

Personally, I would not feel welcome in a church that teaches that I chose to be gay (I didn't!) or that condemns me simply for admitting I'm attracted to guys. However, I have felt welcomed in so-called "Side B" churches that condemn gay relationships but still welcome gay people and encourage them to remain celibate. Many gay people would not feel welcome there.

I disagree with the "Side B" viewpoint, but I used to agree with it, so I totally understand where it's coming from. Since I'm single at the moment, it doesn't really affect me whether or not a church I'm attending condemns gay relationships. What I care about the most is whether I agree with the church's theology on major issues and whether the church understands that I didn't choose to be gay and is ready to fully welcome me as a gay Christian.

However, suppose I meet an amazing guy, fall in love, and want to commit my life to him? Then it would be a lot trickier. Would I continue attending a church that teaches that the most important relationship in my life is an abomination to God? Would they even want me there? I know many gay couples in that situation, and many others who wouldn't even consider a church like that out of respect for their own relationship.

Even the church I've described, though, is rarer than I'd like. Many, many churches still teach or imply that gay people choose to be gay or that we could become straight if we just prayed enough or had the right therapy. That's the quickest way to make me feel unwelcome.

The quickest way to make me feel welcome? Listen to my story and be my friend.

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Terry asks: As the parent of gay son who has left the church, what advice can you offer me as to how I can encourage him to relook at his beliefs in Jesus and the church?

Tami has a son in a similar situation, adding: At this point, he has returned to a faith of sorts, but has no use for "the church." We are at a loss for how to encourage him in this area because "the church" varies from un-accepting to just plain mean. Would you have advice for how we can better love and support our son in the area of growing in his faith?

This is a really tough one because of the battering problem I mentioned earlier. I find that most Christians are totally unaware of how mean the church can be to gay people, and so they don't know that they need to do anything to fix it. As long as it's not fixed, it's going to be hard to give gay people a reason to come back to the church.

(Incidentally, if you would like to know more about why I say the church is so mean to gay people, check out this documentary (below). I promise you won't look at the issue the same way again.)

Through My Eyes - Trailer

Dec 2011

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyIFcMHHTRg

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One possibility is to consider getting involved with a group of gay Christians. My organization has a conference each January that brings a number of gay Christians along with their parents and/or friends together in a nonthreatening atmosphere of worship and fellowship. People tell us every year that it helps re-energize their faith, and there are lots of 20- and 30-somethings, so Tami, your son should feel right at home. (You didn't say how old your son is, Terry, but I'm sure he'd feel right at home too!)

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There may also be groups of gay and affirming Christians in your area. GCN has local groups you can connect with through our message board, but there may be other groups and/or affirming churches in your area where he might feel welcome. Feel free to call our office and someone on our staff can help you find something in your area if you can't find it online. If your son is resistant to any kind of Christian fellowship right now, my advice is not to push it. Give him time, and keep him in prayer. He may need time to process his frustration with the church, and God doesn't stop pursuing us just because we're not in a church on Sunday morning.

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As a parent, you might even decide to get connected with an online or offline fellowship of gay Christians yourself, just to better understand the community; this would surely get your son's attention! In the end, of course, he'll have to make his own decisions, but we can do our best to make the church a more welcoming place for when he's ready......

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From Adam: Will you accept our sincere apology?.

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You mean for asking so many tough questions? Only if you'll accept mine for writing such long answers! Seriously, I appreciate the question, though I'd be hypocritical to say "yes" and not acknowledge that I, too, said the very same things in the past. I hurt people with my words when I thought I was being loving, so now that I have a new perspective on it all, I completely understand when others say the things to me that I used to say to the gay people I met. (I guess I deserved it!) I owe an apology to all the people I've hurt, and I of course offer my unconditional forgiveness to anyone who may have hurt me. We all make mistakes, and we're all trying to stand for what's right. It's just that sometimes we don't have all the facts even when we think we do.

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So let's stay in conversation even though we don't all agree. There are many more things I could say, and I know there are many more questions out there. I'll do my best to answer them here and on my blog over the coming days and weeks. Thanks, everyone, for your fantastic questions! And please, keep in touch! In addition to the blog, you can find me on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. I get to do this kind of stuff for a living, so I'm happy to help any way that I can.

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Renewing God's World: The Redemptive Renewal of Creation

Structure and Direction: A Better Paradigm for Cultural Engagement
http://vanguardchurch.blogspot.com/2011/09/structure-and-direction-better-paradigm.html

by Bob Robinson

September 16, 2011

There is a superior way to deal with culture rather than the pietistic path of arbitrarily deciding what in the culture is bad and then shunning those things.

Albert Wolters suggests that if we think in terms of the biblical storyline of “Creation, Fall, Redemption,” we will have a better paradigm by which to engage culture. “Creation” is the way things were originally created, “very good” in God’s eyes. It is the “structure” that God originally intended, not just for the primordial creation, but also the latent potential embedded in the creation from the beginning which enables humanity to create new technologies and art.

“Fall” and “Redemption” are then the two opposing “directions” that humanity is now engaged in exercising upon this God-ordained structure. Thus, if we think in the paradigm of “Structure and Direction” we will be called not just to shun the things of the Fall, but rather to actively engage in changing the trajectory of those things toward Redemption. In Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview, Albert Wolters writes,

“This twin emphasis makes a radical difference in the way Christian believers approach reality. Because they believe that creational structure underlies all of reality, they seek and find evidence of lawful constancy in the flux of experience, and of invariant principles amidst a variety of historical events and institutions. Because they confess that a spiritual direction underlies their experience, they see abnormality where others see normality, and possibilities of renewal where others see inevitable distortion. In every situation, they explicitly look for and recognize the presence of creational structure, distinguishing this sharply from the human abuse to which it is subject.” (pp. 88-89)

This paradigm then moves the Christian toward redemptive action. It is not enough to identify that which is good, true and beautiful as opposed to that which is evil, lies and distortion. It is the Christian vocation to intentionally turn that which is in the latter categories toward God’s good intentions.

In Matthew 13:33, Jesus says, “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into about sixty pounds of flour until it worked all through the dough.”

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Wolters writes,

“We learn for this that the gospel is a leavening influence in human life wherever it is lived, and influence that slowly but steadily brings change from within. The gospel affects government in a specifically political manner, art in a peculiarly aesthetic manner, scholarship in a uniquely theoretical manner, and churches in a distinctly ecclesiological manner. It makes possible renewal of each creational area from within, not without…

Everything in principle can be sanctified and internally renewed—our personal life, our societal relationships, our cultural activities…

What was formed in creation has been historically deformed by sin and must be reformed in Christ.” (p. 90. 91)

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A “Missional” attitude for artists and for those who patronize the arts, then, is to be actively reformational: Intentionally seeking to be change agents, changing the direction of God’s good creational structure away from the depravity of the Fall and toward the re-creation of all things in Christ.


 

Art in Action: Moving Towards Shalom

http://vanguardchurch.blogspot.com/2011/08/art-in-action-toward-shalom.html

by Bob Robinson
August 23, 2011

Wolterstorff’s book on Art is appropriately titled Art in Action. He states, “Works of art equip us for action. And the range of actions for which they equip us is very nearly as broad as the range of human action itself. The purposes of art are the purposes of life. To envisage human existence without art is not to envisage human existence. Art—so often thought of as a way of getting out of the world—is man’s way of acting within the world. Artistically man acts.” (p 4-5)

But to what end? What is the purpose of humanity’s action through art?

The answer is Shalom.

“Shalom—means man dwelling at peace in all his relationships: with God, with himself, with his fellows, with nature. Shalom is a peace which is not merely the absence of hostility, though certainly it is that, but a peace which at its highest is enjoyment. To dwell in shalom is to enjoy living before God, to enjoy living in nature, to enjoy living with one’s fellow, to enjoy life with oneself.” (Wolterstorff, p. 82)

The vocation of those who are made in God’s image is to bring about Shalom. This is the purpose of all callings, of all vocations.

It is the purpose of art as well, for art is one of the ways that God brings about a lushness of life that goes beyond vulgar utilitarianism, a sin of modern evangelical Christianity.

Wolterstorff observes,

“We have adopted a pietistic-materialistic understanding of man, viewing human needs as the need for a saved soul plus the need for food, clothes, and shelter. True shalom is vastly richer than that.” (Rainbows for the Fallen World, p. 63)

As Calvin Seerveld writes, “There is nothing worse than baptizing our technocratized hecticness and poverty of aesthetic life time into a  Christianized utilitarianism. It is no help to understand ‘redeeming the time’ to mean ‘Are you making money at it?’ or ‘Is it useful?’” (Rainbows for the Fallen World, p. 63)

- Bob Robinson

* * * * * * * * * *

Amazon Reader Book Review
by D. Clemens

This review is from: Art in Action: Toward a Christian Aesthetic (Paperback)

I am a graduate student in the fine arts at a major university in the United States. I ordered this book with an eye on enriching my own theological reflection on the arts, an area that presently suffers from near pervasive theological negligence and fundamentalist reductive tendencies.

Wolterstorff's "Art in Action" is commendable in so far as it offers careful analysis of and convincing argumentation against predominate contemporary Western views on the arts. This offering is additionally refreshing because Wolterstorff avoids the reactionary views of books with similar topics.

This book advances an argument rooted in Christian narrative but driven largely by a philosophical engine that privileges rigorous analytic logic and careful scientific scrutiny. I see this as both the book's great strength and weakness.

Wolterstorff spends an overwhelming majority of the book developing exacting analysis on what he rightly considers the narrowness of contemporary Western notions regarding the arts, with frequent discussions of analytic/scientific evidence regarding the arts and the nature of perception. Unfortunately, this privileging of analytic/scientific discourses significantly undermines the development of a prophetic, coherent narrative that distills a broader, more compelling Christian view of the arts in our lives.

I make this criticism partly because Wolterstorff himself claims that this volume is meant to be the more accessible work of a set of philosophical reflections he has written on the arts.

Those whose philosophical leanings run in the pragmatic/poststructuralist direction, or those whose theological narratives are indebted more to a Christ-story rather than a creation-story (Wolterstorff relies primarily on the latter), will find that the arguments of this book occasionally seem to miss the mark. Nevertheless, they will also find a cogent analysis and critique of contemporary Western notions of the arts as well as the messy birth of a Christian perspective for the arts.

Charity: Water: Get Involved!

 

 

http://www.charitywater.org/getinvolved/

Freedom Isn't Free: U2 Tribute to Aung San Suu Kyi "Walk On"

Aung San Suu Kyi: A triumph of the spirit

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/aung-san-suu-kyi-a-triumph-of-the-spirit-2299748.html

June 19, 2011

A film of Aung San Suu Kyi, commissioned by U2 and smuggled out of Burma, has gone with them on a world tour which reaches Glastonbury on Friday. Martin Wroe had a clandestine meeting with her in Rangoon.

GETTY IMAGES

'We don't think we will fail, and we are not afraid
of trying, the effort in itself is a triumph,'
says Aung San Suu Kyi

Behind the high fence on an anonymous Rangoon road, an old colonial house sits in slightly faded grandeur. Somewhere inside Aung San Suu Kyi is playing the piano. It is a daily ritual, developed while spending most of the past 21 years in detention as the leader of the movement to bring democracy to military-ruled Burma.

"During my years of house arrest I've often wished that I were a composer because then I could have spent my time composing," she says. "Music is much more universal than words."

It is also a way to assert her freedom in the face of her captors, who, despite making a great show of lifting her house arrest after widely discredited elections last November, continue to monitor her communications and travel, so that she rarely leaves the house except to visit the offices of her political party, the National League for Democracy (NLD).

"I don't feel any freer," she explains. "Because I never felt unfree. I never felt I was not free in all these years, so the fact that I am no longer under house arrest does not make me feel any freer." She adds, with a smile, "I am a lot busier."

Today she is busy because she has agreed to meet me and two colleagues commissioned by the rock band U2 to shoot a short film for their world tour. By the time U2, who headline the Glastonbury Festival this Friday, finish their 3600 Tour next month, seven million people will have seen them play in 30 countries. If any are unfamiliar with Burma or its Nobel laureate, by the time the band perform their hit song "Walk On", written for her, they will know who she is and what she stands for. Many will sign up to join Amnesty International or the Free Burma Campaign.

When Aung San Suu Kyi's house arrest was lifted, it was Bono's idea secretly to shoot a film to promote the cause of the thousands of prisoners of conscience who remain in Burmese jails. Like something from a spy novel, a covert line of communication was set up, and after several false starts we flew into Thailand to fill our cameras with holiday shots for our "cover story". Securing tourist visas in Bangkok, we took off for Rangoon, where our mobiles no longer work, where emails are monitored and caution is advised in case "someone is watching".

The NLD, led by Aung San Suu Kyi, won 82 per cent of the seats in the 1990 elections, but the military has always refused to transfer power. After decades of dictatorship, the country has become the poorest in south-east Asia and also the most paranoid – there are countless stories of people being arrested for saying the wrong thing in the wrong place.

As Aung San Suu Kyi's communications are censored and often fail to arrive, it wasn't entirely surprising that at the gate to her house the duty team was not expecting us ... and were unfamiliar with the U2 back catalogue. Fortunately, our credentials were rapidly established and a makeshift studio set up in the living room, including a green bedsheet taped to the wall to create a "green screen", for post-production graphics.

"After many years, I am finally able to speak to you." Fluent, articulate and graceful, Daw Suu, as everyone calls her, is a natural and charismatic presence in front of the camera, retaining her striking good looks in her 66th year.

"You who across such distances sent support to Burma, we thank you. Students, teachers, workers, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, music fans – U2 fans like me. When you raise your voices we hear them, they are louder than any rock band, than any army."

An hour later, filming done, she sits beneath a huge screen print of her father, General Aung San, the man who led Burma to independence before being assassinated in 1947, when she was just two years old. She is encouraged to hear news of the popular uprisings in North Africa. "When I see people in the Arab countries doing the same kind of things that our young people did in 1988, showing the same kind of needs and the same kind of courage and determination to change their lives, then I feel that we are all one, and this warms my heart."

It was in 1988 that she arrived back in Burma to visit her sick mother, leaving her British husband and two children in the UK. She never returned, realising she had to stand alongside the saffron-clad monks as they led thousands of ordinary people trying to overthrow the military. Three thousand protesters were killed and 10,000 imprisoned, and despite further popular uprisings, notably in 2007, the generals still retain their grip on power.

"We have to work for change all the time," she says. "There may be times when we feel that what we have done has not really achieved great results, sometimes there may be regressions, but that doesn't matter. The world is not a static place, it shouldn't be static.

"We should be moving all the time, moving to bring about better change, instead of just sitting there and letting things happen the way other people who are not so desirous of good change wish them to happen."

"Freedom Isn't Free"
9/11 Memorial, Naperville, Illinois

No one alive today is a more recognisable symbol of peaceful resistance in the face of obdurate tyranny, and her passion for non-violent revolution is the more remarkable given the suffering of the Burmese people and the imprisonment of so many pro-democracy leaders. But her luminous conviction that working for the common good is our best calling is undimmed by any passing doubts. She wishes younger people were more politically active, even if some consider it "rather boring".

"I don't think it's boring to work for other people. I don't think its boring to think about how you might improve the lives of other people. I don't think altruism is boring. I don't think faith in freedom is boring. I would like young people to understand that: that these things are not boring at all, that these are the things that make this world the kind of place where you can shape your own destiny.'

She shaped her own destiny most profoundly when she defiantly chose not to leave Burma, knowing she would not have been allowed to return if she did. It makes her uniquely qualified to talk about freedom, the subject of her two Reith Lectures, recorded by a BBC team on a subsequent clandestine mission. Broadcast later this month, they explore how freedom can be won in her own country and what it means for the Arab Spring. In conversation, it is evident that she chooses gracefully to evade the categories imposed upon her by her captors.

"I have tried to explain to people who ask about how very constrained we feel in Burma," she says. "I always say that we feel free, those of us who have followed our own conscience – that is the greatest freedom.

"We don't think we will fail and we are not afraid of trying. The effort in itself is a triumph, the fact that we've been going on for more than 20 years, that many of our people have gone through such terrible times and yet we are still doing it, we are continuing. That in itself is a triumph, a triumph of the spirit."

And freedom will not be long coming to Burma, she predicts, inviting U2 to visit and perform "a great big concert to celebrate democracy". Musicians and artists are powerful agents for social change, a point dramatically underlined when another NLD activist, Htin Kyaw, interrupts in halting English, to recall his own 14-year imprisonment. In 2004 his wife smuggled a copy of Time magazine to him, which featured a story about U2 and "Walk On". "I was so pleased and I shed my tears," he says, eyes welling up. "I asked my younger daughter to send the lyrics in writing, but I don't know the notes so I do not sing ... but still we are walking on!"

One of the sayings for which Aung San Suu Kyi is most famous is her exhortation to "use your freedom to promote ours". Struck by Htin Kyaw's story, her face lights up in explaining that those in the West who campaign for freedom rarely realise the power they wield.

"You don't know how much it means when [people] are cut off from the rest of the world, when they have this sense that really they are still remembered, that people know that they are there."

In her youth, she laughs, all celebrities had to do was "have themselves talked about in the gossip columns". Today, she senses they understand that they can harness their fame for good.

"Bono is one of the people who really started this movement of artists getting involved in human rights issues and political issues, which is very good. I really think that he is at the head of this movement, and that now more and more artists and singers are getting involved in humanitarian concerns. Music and art in general have the power to change people, and people have the power to change history. I think that's how it goes."

With multiple copies made of our recordings and various obscure hiding places identified to get them out of the house and then the country, we come to the end of our conversation. Our practical inconveniences are trivial next to the ongoing trials of the people of Burma, and she is keen to underline the solidarity she shares with all who work for freedom. She points to the other NLD members now returning her living room to its conventional use.

"Most of the people around here have spent time in prison," she says. "But, well, here they are. That in itself is a triumph."

Suffering Changes Everything

My Faith: Suffering my way to a new tomorrow
http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/02/13/my-faith-suffering-my-way-to-a-new-tomorrow/

By Rob Bell, Special to CNN

February 13, 2011

Editor's Note: Rob Bell is the Founding Pastor at Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His latest book and DVD are called Drops Like Stars.

One Friday evening in the fall of my senior year of college I got a headache.

I took some aspirin, laid on the couch, and waited for it to go away. But it didn't; it got worse. By midnight I was in agony, and by 3 a.m. I was wondering if I was going to die.

As the sun rose, my roommate drove me to the hospital where I learned that I had viral meningitis. A neurologist explained to me that the fluid around my brain had become infected and was essentially squeezing my brain against the walls of my skull.

So that's what that was.

The doctor informed me that it would take a number of weeks in bed to recover.

This didn't fit with my plan.

I was in a band at the time. We'd been playing shows in the Chicago area for a while and had just landed our biggest club dates yet in the city - all of them scheduled over the next several weeks.

We had to cancel all of them.

As this reality hit me, laying there in that hospital bed miles from home with a brain infection, I distinctly remember asking no one in particular "Now what?"

I was devastated. This was not how it was supposed to go. The band was my life, my future, my singular focus. We had just canceled our biggest gigs ever. Eventually I recovered enough to return to school but things weren't the same. Whatever had been driving us in the band wasn't there like it had been before and so we came to the mutual conclusion that it had been great while it lasted and now it was time for the band to come to an end.

I don't think I'd ever felt more lost. I had no idea what I was going to do with my life. I had all this energy and passion and I wanted desperately to give myself to something that mattered, but I had no plan.

I would walk around campus in a daze, muttering the same prayer over and over, which took the form of "Now what?"

Do you know that feeling when you're playing soccer and you lunge for the ball but you aren't fast enough and the player on the other team has already kicked it quite hard and the ball travels with ferocious velocity and force into your groin region and you keel over, gasping for breath, your voice several octaves higher?

It was like the existential version of that.

And then, things took a strange, beautiful turn.

In the days and weeks following the band's breakup, people I barely knew would stop me out of the blue and say things like, "Have you thought about being a pastor?" Friends I hadn't talked to in months would contact me and say, "For some reason I think you're going to be a pastor."

Me, a pastor? Seriously?

The idea began to get a hold of me and it wouldn't let go. A calling welled up within me, a direction, something I could give myself to.

I tell you this story about what happened to me 19 years ago because I assume you're like me - really good at making plans and plotting and scheming and devising just how to make your life go how it's "supposed" to go.

We are masters of this. We know exactly how things are supposed to turn out.

And then we suffer. There's a disruption - death, disease, job loss, heartbreak, betrayal or bankruptcy.

The tomorrow we were expecting disappears. And we have no other plan.

Suffering is traumatic and awful and we get angry and we shake our fists at the heavens and we vent and rage and weep. But in the process we discover a new tomorrow, one we never would have imagined otherwise.

I have interacted with countless people over the years who, when asked to identify key moments, turning points, and milestones in their lives, usually talk about terribly difficult, painful things. And they usually say something along the lines of "I never would have imagined that would happen to me."

Imagined is a significant word here. Suffering, it turns out, demands profound imagination. A new future has to be conjured up because the old future isn't there anymore.

Now I realize that what happened to me - the fluid around my brain swelling up and squeezing it against the walls of my skull – is nothing compared to the pain and tragedy many people live with every day.

But that experience irrevocably altered my life. Nothing was ever the same again. My plans fell apart, which opened me up to entirely new future.

This truth, about the latent seeds of creativity being planted in the midst of suffering, takes us deep into the heart of the Christian faith. We are invited to trust that in the moments when we are most inclined to despair, when all appears lost and we can't imagine any way forward - that it is precisely in those moments when something new may be about to be birthed.

Jesus hangs naked and bloody on a cross, alone and abandoned by his students, scorned by the crowd, and yet defiant, confident, insistent that God is present in his agony, bringing about a whole new world, right here in the midst of this one.

This is a mystery, and one we are wise to reflect on it, because of the countless disruptions we experience all the time.

God is in those moments, grieving with us, shedding tears with us, feeling that pain and turmoil with us, and then inviting to trust that something good can come from even this.

So keep your eyes and your heart open. Be quick to listen and slow to make rash judgments about how it's "all going to turn out," because you never know when you'll find yourself miles from home, laying in a hospital bed with a bad case of brain squeeze, all of your plans crashing down around you, wondering how it all went wrong, only to discover that a whole new life is just beginning.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Rob Bell

The Bible and Books About Dinosaurs

Guest Post: The Bible and Books About Dinosaurs

http://rachelheldevans.com/guest-post-mason-slater

by Rachel Held Evans

September 17, 2011

62 Comments

Today’s guest post comes to us from one of my favorite bloggers. Mason Slater is an MA student at Grand Rapids Theological Seminary, a freelance writer, and a publishing consultant. I had the pleasure of meeting Mason and his lovely wife Melinda when I was in Grand Rapids for the Festival of Faith and Writing. I love how this guy thinks! He’s smart, thoughtful, humble, and wise.

Mason blogs at MasonSlater.com, where he writes about the latest news in theology, Christian living, and publishing. I’ve been following for several years now, and am always interested in the conversation there. Mason recently moved his blog, so be sure to re-subscribe!

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The Bible and Books About Dinosaurs
by Mason Slater

After years of research, and quite a bit of agonizing, I’m finally able to offer this small pronouncement.

I no longer believe that there is any inherent conflict between the Scriptures and the scientific account of human origins, by which of course I mean evolution.

Admittedly, that someone you’ve probably never met is able to affirm a scientific theory which most of the Western world takes for granted may not seem like that big of a deal.

But it is for me, and I imagine my story is not all that unlike many of yours.

I grew up in a conservative evangelical home. As best I can remember my parents never made a point to bring up Creationism or Evolution, but they didn’t have to – the subculture did it for them.

Over time a young boy who loved dinosaurs and fossils began to sense those things were dirty, that the books he was reading were looked on with suspicion. At first I wasn’t sure why, but soon I learned that these books taught things about the world that disagreed with the Bible.

Because I loved the Bible more than my books about dinosaurs, it wasn’t long before those books found themselves gathering dust on my bookshelf.

That evolutionary science and Christian faith were incompatible seemed as apparent as that every autumn would lead to another cold Michigan winter. With that assumption firmly implanted, my young self was one day faced with a crisis. While talking with my mom she made some passing mention that my father believed in evolution.

I was shocked, terrified even.

Terrified because I thought this meant dad might not be saved. So, after arriving home from a long day at work, my father was confronted by his twelve-year-old son who proceeded to try and convince him how important it was that he believed what the Bible said about God making the world.

I’m sure I was not a terribly convincing young theologian at that point, but I’m also sure dad could see what it meant to me, so he agreed with me and the issue was never raised again.

Though it wasn’t long before I made my peace with Evolution not being an issue of salvation, these crisis moments ensured that I would wrestle for many years with the ways my faith seemed to clash with science.

By the time I graduated from high school I had read many Creationist books and had the debates time after time, and was no doubt obnoxiously sure of myself.

Then college hit, and the more widely I read the less sure I became of my easy answers.

A Biblical Studies major as an undergrad, I expected to find theologians offering a thorough repudiation of godless Darwinism, what I found was quite the opposite. There were of course theologians who were outspoken Creationists, but plenty of theologians who I had come to deeply respect saw absolutely no contradiction between biblical faithfulness and the science of evolution.

This was exciting, freeing even, but also deeply frustrating.

See, I still cared more for the Bible than my books about dinosaurs. And, try as I might, I just couldn’t see how to make the two compatible without doing violence to the Scriptures I valued so highly.

As I continued to research I could see more and more massive holes in the Young Earth Creationism I had grown up on, but with no better option I became essentially agnostic. I knew I was no long a traditional Creationist, but I couldn’t really bring myself to throw in with any other position either.

Enter John Walton.

Last winter I read Walton’s The Lost World of Genesis One and it changed everything. Or, rather, I knew that it could. I also knew I wanted to believe what he was saying, so I was a bit suspicious of my motives for embracing his argument. It made perfect sense, but did I just think that because of all sorts of subconscious motivations?

So I took some time to ponder it, and this summer I re-read The Lost World of Genesis One and had the chance to hear Walton speak about his argument in the book. This led to this post, and a follow up.

Walton’s suggestion? In the ancient world the idea of creation was not about material but function. So that, in all the ancient creation myths, the thing that is created is order, things are named and given roles and a place in the world. How the “stuff” that things are made of came into existence was simply not a concern to the ancients.

If that’s true, and Walton makes a very good case for it, here is the way it cashes out: Genesis 1 is about functional origins not material, the original audience would have understood it as being about how order was created out of chaos, not how matter came from non-matter.

So the Bible takes no particular side in the debates we have about Evolution or the age of the earth, that Story is about something else entirely.

And suddenly I don’t have to choose between the Bible and those books about dinosaurs.

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Love God with All Your...Entrails?

http://newwaystheology.blogspot.com/2011/08/love-god-with-all-yourentrails.html

by Mason Slater

August 18, 2011

In the ancient world the seat of thought and emotion was not the brain, it was the heart - or more specifically the entrails.

So when the Scripture tells us to love God with our mind, it’s actually telling us to love YHWH with our entrails.

Why would the Bible say such a thing if it's not scientifically correct? Because God was not interested in correcting their physiology. It didn’t matter if they believed that they thought with their entrails, so long as they thought in ways that were holy and righteous.

Similarly, the text is quite clear that ancient Israelites held a cosmology (understanding of how the world works) quite similar to their neighbors.

They saw the earth as a disk, with the stars and sun close at hand, Sheol was underfoot along with the oceans of the deep, and the dome of the sky held back the waters of the heavens.

Interestingly, YHWH never seems interested in correcting this idea either, even though as a scientific error it goes far beyond where we imagine thought takes place.

In fact, John Walton goes so far as to suggest in The Lost World of Genesis One “Throughout the entire Bible, there is not a single instance in which God revealed to Israel a science beyond their own culture. No passage offers a scientific perspective that was not common to the Old World science of antiquity.”

Having heard Walton speak last night I’m still wrestling with the implications of that claim, and I’m curious to hear your thoughts -

- Can you think of a passage where God did reveal new scientific data?

- If not, does that change the way we approach the text?

Grace and peace

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Are We Missing the Point of Genesis One?

http://masonslater.com/2011/08/19/are-we-missing-the-point-of-genesis-one/

by Mason Slater

August 19, 2011

Continuing yesterday’s conversation – if YHWH did not choose reveal scientific truths to the people of Israel that they would not have already known, and I’ve yet to come across a place where he does, why then do we assume Genesis 1 is a modern scientific account of creation?

Now, right away that question becomes problematic, or at least it seems to. It’s one thing for God to accommodate his speech to fit ancient ideas like thinking with your entrails, and quite another for him to fabricate an entire creation narrative that turns out to be misleading at best.

But what if it’s not a question of making Genesis 1 fit either Young Earth Creationism or Evolution?

What if the text is about something else altogether?

In The Lost World of Genesis One, John Walton makes what I find to be a quite convincing argument that we’ve imported an idea of creation into the text that was quite foreign to the ancient mind.

We, as good post-Platonic Westerners, are concerned with creation as material – the story of how there was no “stuff” and then God brought that stuff, that material, into existence.

In the Ancient Near East creation narratives were never about the creation of matter, but rather the creative act was a matter of bringing function and order to elements which were not serving their proper role. Case in point, the idea of “nonexistence” in Egyptian literature could be used to speak of the desert, which clearly exists in material terms but has not been given function or order in relation to the life of people or the gods.

{Similarly,] the story of Genesis 1 becomes the story of how the ancient world went from “formless and void” to properly ordered and given function by the God who, at the end of the story, sits down to rest and rule in his newly inaugurated temple – the cosmos.

Of course, the question behind the question for many of us will be this: if Walton’s understanding of Genesis 1 is correct, and it’s not about the creation of material, is there any biblical reason not to take up the scientific account of material origins?

New Students 2011 Convocation Message by Fuller President Richard Mouw

Rich Mouw gave a great welcome address to Fuller’s incoming students. It outlines well where Fuller came from, what “evangelical” might mean as a label for non-fundamentalist, even non-conservative Christians.

September 21, 2011

http://vimeo.com/29348644

New Students Convocation: President’s Message from Fuller Theological Seminary on Vimeo.

You Lost Me

http://www.patheos.com/community/jesuscreed/2011/09/21/you-lost-me/#more-20517

reviewed by Scot McKnight

September 21, 2011

David Kinnaman has written what I suspect will be a much-discussed, perhaps much-debated, book about why it is that young adults are walking out the doors of the church. His book is called You Lost Me: Why Young Christians Are Leaving Church…and Rethinking Faith. David’s previous book, called unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity… and Why It Matters, focused on outsiders. This one focuses on insiders — those reared in the church. It offers description of various types of young adults who are walking away from the church.

David discusses three kinds of “dropouts”:

Nomads: those who walk away but still consider themselves Christians.

Prodigals: those who no longer consider themselves Christians.

Exiles: those who are still invested in the Christian faith “but feel stuck (or lost) between culture and the church” (25).

One of his findings is that more are struggling with their experience of the church than their Christian faith. But about 40% of 20somethings are deeply concerned about friends who are abandoning the church.

Kinnaman finds three characteristics of this generation as it dwells in a new technological, social and spiritual reality and these are to be seen as pervasive realities and general realities:

What do you think of his three categories?

Do they describe “types” in your experience or church?

Access: facts and knowledge are a click away; authority gets diminished.

Alienation: family’s are less integrated; adulthood is postponed; they are skeptical of institutions.

Authority: there is a profound skepticism of authority. Christianity is not a default setting. The Scripture’s authority is not a default setting. Christianity’s influence on culture has diminished. Awareness of Christian influencers has diminished while other cultural icons has risen.

With this general picture, here are the characteristics of Nomads:

1. They describe themselves as Christians.
2. Involvement in a Christian community is optional.
3. Importance of faith has faded.
4. Most are angry or hostile toward Christianity.
5. Many are spiritual experimentalists.

Prodigals:

1. They feel varying levels of resentment toward Christians and Christianity.
2. They have disavowed returning to the church.
3. They have moved on from Christianity.
4. Their regrets, if they have them, usually center on their parents.
5. They feel as if they have broken out of constraints.

Exiles:

1. Exiles are not inclined toward being separate from “the world.”
2. Skeptical of institutions but are not wholly disengaged from them.
3. Sense God moving “outside the walls of the church.”
4. Not disillusioned with tradition; frustrated with slick or shallow expressions of religion.
5. A mix of concern and optimism for their peers.
6. They have not found faith to be instructive to their calling or gifts.
7. Struggle when Christians question their motives.

 

The Search for the Historical Adam 9

The Search for the Historical Adam 9

http://musingsonscience.wordpress.com/2011/09/13/the-search-for-the-historical-adam-9/#more-869

by rjs5

posted September 13, 2011

I have been posting over the last several weeks on the recent book by C. John Collins entitled Did Adam and Eve Really Exist?: Who They Were and Why You Should Care. Dr. Collins’s book looks at the question of Adam and Eve from a relatively conservative perspective but with some good nuance and analysis. The questions he poses and the answers he gives provide a good touchstone for interacting with the key issues.

Chapter 5 of Dr. Collins’s book asks the question Can science help us pinpoint “Adam and Eve”? He answers the question in the positive – but in a limited sense. In his view we must take into account science, with what he considers appropriate skepticism of scientific claims, as well as the biblical narrative and Christian world view. Section 5.a deals with the topic of scientific concordism, section 5.b discusses the need to read the bible well, sections 5.c and 5.d consider the criteria for acceptable scenarios involving Adam and Eve and then critiques a few of the scenarios that have been proposed, considering both strengths and weaknesses.

I dealt with Dr. Collins’s discussion of acceptable scenarios last November in a post How Much History in Gen 1-3? focusing on his article “Adam and Eve as Historical People, and Why It Matters” in the theme issue of the ASA Journal Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith (v. 62 no. 3 2010) – this book is an expansion of the material in that article. The post generated much discussion – 102 comments. Another post on this topic will not add anything new to the discussion.

In reading this chapter, however, I was struck by another point Dr. Collins makes in his section on reading the bible well. Today I want to pose some questions based on this section of Dr. Collins book, and then wrap of the discussion of the book with a few summary statements – both Dr. Collins’s summation and my response.

Reading the bible well requires having respect for the authority of scripture which reflects the authority of God, and having respect for the form and genre of scripture. This means that we need to pay attention to the text on many levels and read it intelligently. Scot’s post yesterday Seven Days That Divide the World 2 raised the issue of concordism. For many the truthfulness and authority of scripture rests on its accuracy in detail, and this includes scientific concordance. Dr. Lennox expects to find scientific concordance in the text of Genesis. Neither John Walton nor C. John Collins think that we should expect to find scientific concordance in the biblical description of origins. Our reading of Genesis should take into account the viewpoint of the original audience, their picture of the world. They were not asking scientific questions, and we should not expect to find scientific answers in the text.

There is another aspect of the text of Genesis 1-11, one we have not discussed before, that should also help to shape the way we read and understand Genesis. This is anachronism. An anachronism is present when a writer (or artist) describes or portrays an earlier time using forms and images familiar to his or her contemporary audience. These elements, of necessity, introduce an inaccuracy into the telling of the story.

Is anachronism consistent with inspiration? Is it consistent with inerrancy?

How should we view passages of scripture with apparent anachronisms?

One clear illustration of anachronism in the text of Genesis 1-11 is seen in the story of Noah in Genesis 6-8. In Genesis 6:19-20 (NIV) we read:

You are to bring into the ark two of all living creatures, male and female, to keep them alive with you. Two of every kind of bird, of every kind of animal and of every kind of creature that moves along the ground will come to you to be kept alive.

In Genesis 7:2-3 we read:

Take with you seven pairs of every kind of clean animal, a male and its mate, and one pair of every kind of unclean animal, a male and its mate, and also seven pairs of every kind of bird, male and female, to keep their various kinds alive throughout the earth.

The distinction between Genesis 6 and 7 provides evidence for the idea that the text of Genesis is an edited work incorporating information from a number of sources. Like the creation narratives in Genesis 1-5 we can discern the editor/author’s use of material from different sources. More than this though, the reference to clean and unclean animals in Genesis 7 is anachronistic. The text describes events, perhaps events with an element of history, perhaps cultural myths, in terms familiar to an audience from a later time and context. Dr. Collins comments on this passage:

In Genesis 1-11, we have Noah taking aboard the ark extra specimens of the “clean animals,” presumably because these were fit for sacrifice (Gen. 7:2, 8; 8:20). Now there is no hint in the creation account that the clean-unclean distinction is inherent in the nature of the animals, and in the Bible this distinction served to set Israel apart from the Gentiles (see Lev. 20:24-26); this is why the early Christians did away with these laws (see Acts 10:9-29; Mark 7:19). The very first mention of a “clean” animal occurs right here; we do not even know what they are unless we turn to Leviticus 11. Perhaps we are to think that Noah had some idea of what kinds of animals are right for sacrifice, but we need not suppose that it was identical to the system found in the books of Moses. How could it be when Noah was not an Israelite? Perhaps the specific “burnt offering” is also anachronistic – that is, Noah made a sacrifice, but the term “burnt offering” had a very precise term in Israel that may go beyond what Noah thought. Genesis interprets Noah’s behavior in line with Israelite practice. Nothing makes this literary practice unhistorical since we are recognizing a literary device. (p. 114)

The elements of anachronism and literary form extend beyond the story of Noah. They are present in the setting of Cain and Abel as farmer and keeper of sheep, the fear that Cain has for blood revenge, the records of the various crafts in Gen 4:20-22, although not as easy to pinpoint and illustrate in these examples as in the story of Noah.

Do you think that anachronisms, like the reference to clean and unclean animals in Genesis 7, cause a problem for the reliability of scripture? Why or why not?

How do you deal with this in your view of scripture as the Word of God?

And this is a wrap – the last post on Dr. Collins’s book. Dr. Collins sums up his book with an intriguing mix of ideas. He has very good discussions of aspects of scripture and the nuance and importance of literary form in our understanding of scripture. He takes a conservative view of the authorship and date of Genesis (substantially from Moses with small tweaks and updates p. 170), but this still leaves Genesis 1-11 in the genre of primeval history pulling together the story of Israel from the mists of antiquity. An appreciation of this should impact the way we read the text – including the anachronism mentioned above.

He doesn’t think that animal death is part of the death described in Genesis 2-3 or in Romans.

To answer that question, we first recognize that, whatever the verse talks about, it is referring to humans. Therefore Genesis is not at all suggesting that no other animals had ever died before this point: the teeth and claws of a lion are not a decoration, nor have they been perverted from their “pre-fall” use. (p. 116)

Dr. Collins does believe that Genesis 1-4 contains a description – with many literary elements – of a historical fall. We need not look to Genesis 1-4 as a historical account of the fall, but he has tried to show that there must be a historical element to the story of Adam and Eve. In summary he gives four reasons for this conclusion.

(1) The conventional telling of the story as creation, fall, redemption, restoration is the Christian story, this is what makes sense of the world.

(2) Sin is an alien invader that affects all people. Our story and world view must account for this invasion.

(3) The Christian view of humanity must include a common origin for all mankind. Paul uses Genesis to demonstrate this – and this element of historicity is not incidental to the message, it is essential.

(4) Jesus appears to have affirmed an element of historicity, and Moses, Paul, John, and other people entrusted as God’s messengers writing what we know know as the bible, have viewed and used Genesis with a historical understanding. To eliminate this will undermine our view of biblical authority. It is not incidental. “But it seems to me that Adam and Eve at the headwaters of the human family, and their fall, are not only what Jesus believed but also an irremovable part of the story.” (p. 135)

My take. I’ve enjoyed reading Dr. Collins’s book – it has provided a good interaction, and a nice forum for wrestling with some of these ideas. I agree with many of his points, but not all, and perhaps not with some of the points he considers particularly important.

(1) I don’t think we should cast the Christian story as creation, fall, redemption, and restoration. Rather I think the story is cast as creation, fall, redemption, and consummation and this is the way we should read scripture and approach the Christian life. We are not returning to an original condition but moving on to the final state God always intended.

(2) Sin is rebellion from God – but I am not comfortable with some of the ways the view of sin as “alien invader” play out. This needs a good deal more thought and conversation.

(3) I am in total agreement with Dr. Collins on the importance of the unity of all mankind.

(4) I don’t think that scripture as the authoritative word of God requires the kind of acceptance of the view of Paul or the other writers of scripture that Dr. Collins maintains. I think there may be an element of historicity to the fall, but I also think that there are ways to read scripture without this element of historicity and without undermining the authority of scripture. Dr. Collins’s emphasis on the belief and understanding of Paul regarding Adam as an important data point in determining the historicity of Adam has been my primary objection to his argument.

What do you think?

If you wish to contact me directly you may do so at rjs4mail[at]att.net.

If you have comments please visit The Search for the Historical Adam 9 at Jesus Creed.