Foundations for a Radical Christianity, Part 3 - Jesus

What is Radical Christianity?

So what is Radical Christianity? At its core, in its simplest and most sublime form, it is Jesus. One's entire theology, dogma, religion, beliefs, ethics, and morality is centered upon Jesus who becomes both the foundation stone and builder upon whom we build out God's kingdom in as many ways as there are people and talents, dreams and hopes.

It is to Jesus whom we bow and must submit the philosophy's of our day to His holy person. Whether it be our personal philosophies held in religious folklores. Our enculturated philosophies of existential dialectic (how we would interpret the world around us). Our societal philosophies of global communication, trade, and common effort. Even our ideas of our self and our identity of who we are before God. Everything, and in every way, must be submitted to Jesus as the Master Builder of our lives, our families, our businesses, our communities, our nations, and our world.

What Do You Want?

Jesus Calls the First Disciples (ESV)

35 The next day again John [the Baptizer] was standing with two of his disciples, 36 and he ([John]) looked at Jesus as he walked by and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God!” 37 The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus. 38 Jesus turned and saw them following and said to them, “What are you seeking?” And they said to him, “Rabbi” (which means Teacher), “where are you staying?” 39 He said to them, “Come and you will see.” So they came and saw where he was staying, and they stayed with him that day, for it was about the tenth hour.[h] 40 One of the two who heard John speak and followed Jesus[i] was Andrew, Simon Peter's brother. 41 He first found his own brother Simon and said to him, “We have found the Messiah” (which means Christ). 42 He brought him to Jesus. Jesus looked at him and said, “You are Simon the son of John. You shall be called Cephas” (which means Peter[j]).

In John chapter 1 Jesus asks John the Baptizer's disciples a question, "What are you seeking"? Or, asked another way, "What do you want?" This is the sublime question of any man or woman. "What do we want?" At once Jesus shows a rude insightfulness into the lives of His new adopted followers that borders on a personal invasiveness to all that they believe they are in their identity and commitments of themselves to the gospel of God. And rightly so. Especially for the servant of the Lord. And so Jesus asks, "What do you want!?"

So too with us when we come to Jesus in God's Word: "What do I want!? What do I wish to get out of this Jesus-thing?" Or, thought of in another way, we might diagram Jesus' statement in three different ways:

1. You are what you love.
2. You might not love what you think you love.
3. You make what you think you love into what you think you want.

Each of these statements are a truth to themselves. The first asks us "What is our core identity?" Not what do you know, nor what do you believe, but what do you most want our of life.

Statement 1 - "You are what you love."

God has made us as lovers and so it is natural to ask "What do you love?" as Jesus does here in John 1. What is your deepest longings? Your greatest desires? What drives you when you get up in the morning?

We're not talking about agape love (selfless love) but eros love (fleshly, guttural love). This is how God made us. Desire is not a bad thing though it can become a bad thing when used in a wrong way. Hence the question, "What do you most desire, crave, yearn for? What makes you get up in the morning?"

Statement 2 - "You are what you love but you might not love what you think."

What if there is a gap between the answers to the questions we have versus the deepest part of our being which unconsciously hungers for the things we don't know or don't realize we carry within us?

For example, imagine if there was a magical room that you could enter that could  give you not what you thought you wanted but what you really wanted. Would you enter it? Would you take the risk to enter this magical, all-knowing room?

Or, like many, would you hesitate? Would you reconsider your first impulsive to go into this room for fear of discovering something you really hadn't thought about before. Because, quite naturally, what we thought we wanted is not actually what we really wanted all along. Just some facsimile of what we thought we wanted all along. And if what we really wanted turns out quite differently from what we thought we wanted we could be in for quite a little disappointment, or shock, or even dismay!

So what does this mean? Simply, Jesus is "the room." Jesus is the one who will transfer your desires from what you think you want to what you truly want in a process known as "conformity." A process that teaches us to unlearn our first desires of ourselves so that we might discover our heart's greatest desires. It's deepest cravings. It's most powerful longings.

It is the process of discerning who we are and not what we think we are.

Statement 3 - "You make what you think you love into what you think you want."

This latter idea is known as our "rival story of ourselves." That is, it is the lies and delusions we tell ourselves all the time - and then re-inforce them in some narcisstic or harmful way. And let us not count out all the legalisms and self-righteous works we use to tell God just how good-and-valuable we are to Him! Sure, we can blame our actions on the devil or on others or evil but in truth, it is us. It is us telling ourselves a rival story to the real story that lingers in our heart but cannot get out.

What is the solution? To discover ourselves and our rival stories so that they might be re-framed into a truer story of ourselves within the story of Jesus. The better, more conflicted story in which He asks us the dreaded question, "What do you really want from Me?"

It is here where the work of the Holy Spirit comes to us through the story of Jesus and into the stories of ourselves to help us begin to chisel away all the false images of our delusions down into the bedrock of our deepest desires we keep hidden far, far away from ourselves.

Neither the "Christian faith" per se, nor "a belief in God," is the answer here. In point of fact there are many Christian men and women who have hidden from themselves - and Jesus' studied question - by taking on the false imagery of conformity which is more me-lead than Spirit-lead. A false image where we hide ourselves even deeper from the God by telling ourselves we are closer to God because we are doing all the right things, thinking all the right thoughts, believing all the right messages. To this Jesus asks, "What do you want!?" 

This is the Jesus who loves us through our "good" works, penance, and absolutions. Who sees us beyond the fig leaves we have stitched for ourselves. Who walks with us in patience and faithfulness as we wander and bobble about in our lives like toy boats on the waves of life as we try to figure out who we are and what we really want.

The Truer Story of Us

Nay, our story isn't so much about what we are doing but what God is doing in our lives. He, who is the shaper and molder of our lives-and-dreams-and hopes into the identity of ourselves freed from the former self to the transformed self. What Paul calls the "new man" that casts away the "old man."

Yes, even in this new spiritual version of ourselves we can "make what we think we want" from it. But the real trick is to learn to listen to the Spirit and to be willing to move through the process of self-discovery at His pace and not our own. To relax in the providence of God and let life happen as we steer our course through its turbulences.

The image of God within our breast is a deep thing. Far deeper than we know. Not only has God made us to be lovers but He has made us to be makers. We are natural born creators as God's image bearers. Ultimately we are in the process of being re-created by the Holy Spirit as God's image bearers. To be involved in this task and confident that with humility and grace we might survive its chaffings and tortured route.

Our Commission and Mission

And what is this image-bearing-thing that we possess? To re-create God's world in all the vocational, recreational, and personal things that we do in this life now by His love. Whether we can ever discover our deeper selves truly, or not, the simplest thing we can do is to bear God's image of love to the loveless, the forlorn, the unempowered, the overlooked, the condemned, and despised.

By this activity we discover ourselves by discovering the image of Jesus indwelling our hearts. We come to the identity of ourselves by unlocking all the potentiality of God's creation to become what it can become by God's Spirit. To translate the story of us into the story of the world. And by that translation release the rival story of ourselves from our hearts into the truer story of ourselves in Jesus.

This is our narrative ultimately. Not of us - but of losing ourselves into God's greater story which frees us from ourselves to release the burden of our creative, loving being upon a world locked in sin and woe.

Ultimately the Christian story is the Jesus story of unleashing God's image through us as His image bearers. And to not worry about all the psychological mumble-jumble of "desires, and cravings, and guilts, and penances." But to love as Jesus loved. This is our commission and mission.

Go Unpack All that I have Made for you

We are the recipients then of a Jesus message that is both a blessing and a necessity. Jesus' story doesn't end in His resurrection but begins with His ascension to become what He truly was on earth. To unpack all that He had created in His lifetime even as we are to enact it by unpacking His truths of love and witness, fellowship and forgiveness.

Like the centripetal force of the centrifuge which gathers in the liquid solvents of the science lab Jesus becomes the gathering force which spins us into Himself as the real center of the world against all the lies and delusions it tells us. So that in the process we might be separated from our former selves into the purer form of our new selves in Christ by His Spirit.

This is the process of transformation by conformity and when done spins us outwards into the world when released from the grip of the devices holding us from breaking out. It is through the process of worshipping together each week that the church is called out to break out during its weekday lives as a commissioned body propelled to missionize our communities by the simple acts of repentance, conformity, and transformation.

There is no real mystery to Jesus. There is no deeper philosophy than God's Spirit. It is the language of love that is the greatest reformer to the world's deepest needs and darkest delusions. And it is the language of conformity to Jesus who spoke in the simplest, but most sublime terms, when saying, "Learn to love. And when loving then do what you will." 

If you love rightly you will do precisely what God's will is by being in His will. This is the radicalness of a Radical Christianity. It begins with Jesus and is sewn through-and-through by Jesus even unto its ends. A Radical Christianity takes its postmodern faith and hermeneutic and re-captivates its message with the person and work and love of Jesus.

Whether we understand ourselves or not. Or this world or not, in all its "velocities of self-implosion" and "accelerations away from itself," to the lies and delusions it holds in front of us as the truer false-paths of self-discovery. No, the power, the source, the engine to all of this is Jesus. Without Jesus there can be no discovery. No release. No truth or fulfillment. Just endless, empty strivings after the winds of our own demise and misplaced stories that we tell ourselves.

The Little Prince

There is a story out there that says "If you want to build a ship than teach people to long for the sea." Not how to build a ship, or to go through the mechanics of building a ship, or even attend apprenticeship classes around the marine industry. No, the truer story is to long for the immensity of the sea. To long for its endless bounty recreated upon every new sunrise as it embeds itself into all that it is from day after day after day until the last dawn of all new mornings.

It is in the story of longing that we may act out the story of us that we don't even realize we are acting out. For it is not a story that we may simply read of - we must become active participants in it. Mark Twain, the great American literarist once said, "He who carries a cat by the tail learns something that can in no other way be taught." So too with Christianity.

It is not enough to read of it, to study and dissect it theologically. It must be lived. Experienced. Used and witnessed to by our very selves as the actors upon God's lively stage.

We attend the communal practice of Christian worship with the mindset that we are to burst from this Sunday assemblies into the worlds we live to really want what God wanted us to want and not the unleafed pages of unlived lives unsullied from trying, failing, or attempting to live life by God's grace and Spirit.

This is the truer story of us. It is the story of Jesus within the greater story of God. It is the truer narrative of who we are in Jesus. We have become the "little prince of our story' who sails around the world dauntless of its fears, ceaselessly yearning for adventure and discovery. To become one with the horizons of our lives lived too meanly upon the leaden pages of our rival stories of ourselves. Lost on the wings of the wind until Jesus came into our lives to become the captain of our ships and the Lover of our souls. He, who is the Lord of creation and the God of our imaginations. Praise ye the Lord.

Peace,

R.E. Slater

May 13, 2015

Foundations for a Radical Christianity, Part 1 - Change

Foundations for a Radical Christianity, Part 2 - Thriving

Foundations for a Radical Christianity, Part 3 - Jesus





Index to past articles on "Phase III"

Remembering a Motherless Day

Reading through Facebook yesterday I came across distressing comments by dear friends who were remembering their loss from many years ago. It is a pain which is shared by many on this special day where we honor our mothers who have worked so hard for us to become the people we are today.

But let us not forget that there are other women out there too who dwell in that special category of "motherless moms" for whom we must remember in our prayers and fellowship,

"Mother's Day is fast approaching...again! Why do I need to be reminded.

Isn't it enough that I continue to feel that same dreadful loneliness that

once consumed me. Our little miracle would have been close to  16 by

now. A singer? Most definately! Oh, how I had dreams." ~ MRD

As I read this script I felt a deep empathy for our friend who loves to sing and perform professionally on the concert stage as she mused over the dreams she held for herself and her daughter. Nor did the passing years quiet her pain in the deep parts of her soul. It remained sharp every time she remembered what could have been and never was.

Then, as I read on, came this very kind and loving reply from her husband,

"It saddens me to think that we could not share our lives with a little one. You

would have made a wonderful mom. Happy Mother's day my love." ~ PCD

Here was a thoughtful man who understood his wife's pain and wished to be present with her in the deep thoughts of her brokenness which filled both heart and soul. No other response could be as good as that of a friend and a spouse who would love his special wife through this time of deep absence.

Which reminds us today of all the "motherless mothers" who have been bereft of children through circumstance and event. Let us therefore be in prayer for the women we know today - not only for the mothers who work so hard to be the best mothers they can be.... But for the broken moms and motherless moms who are burdened with the lost of light they once had borne in the depths of their thirsty souls hungering to give love which could never been given to a lost daughter or son.

R.E. Slater

May 10, 2015

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An open letter to pastors [an except]

(A non-mom speaks about Mother’s Day)

http://timewarpwife.com/open-letter-pastors-non-mom-speaks-mothers-day/

by Amy Young

May 9, 2014

To those who gave birth this year to their first child - we celebrate with you.

To those who lost a child this year - we mourn with you.

To those who are in the trenches with little ones every day and wear the badge of food stains - we appreciate you.

To those who experienced loss through miscarriage, failed adoptions, or running away - we mourn with you.

To those who walk the hard path of infertility, fraught with pokes, prods, tears, and disappointment - we walk with you. Forgive us when we say foolish things. We don’t mean to make this harder than it is.

To those who are foster moms, mentor moms, and spiritual moms - we need you.

To those who have warm and close relationships with your children - we celebrate with you.

To those who have disappointment, heart ache, and distance with your children - we sit with you.

To those who lost their mothers this year - we grieve with you.

To those who experienced abuse at the hands of your own mother - we acknowledge your experience.

To those who lived through driving tests, medical tests, and the overall testing of motherhood - we are better for having you in our midst.

To those who are single and long to be married and mothering your own children - we mourn that life has not turned out the way you longed for it to be.

To those who step-parent - we walk with you on these complex paths.

To those who envisioned lavishing love on grandchildren - yet that dream is not to be, we grieve with you.

To those who will have emptier nests in the upcoming year - we grieve and rejoice with you.

To those who placed children up for adoption - we commend you for your selflessness and remember how you hold that child in your heart.

And to those who are pregnant with new life, both expected and surprising - we anticipate with you.

This Mother’s Day, we walk with you.

Mothering is not for the faint of heart and we have real warriors in our midst. We remember you.

* * * * * * * * * *

Mother's Day Poems

Foundations for a Radical Christianity, Part 2 - Thriving

Everything Must Change

Not many years ago I began my movement away from what I call a "closed bible" and a "closed faith" towards a spiritual hinterland promising a more open bible and open faith. One that might allow the God I knew "to breathe" again away from the specific theological containers and measured borderlands I had come to place Him in through affiliations to the institutions of my youth. What I strongly felt I needed was a faith that might be "less sure of itself" than what it had now become in its verities and condemnations.

What I didn't see was this same aspect carried through in the corporate religious identities I was associating myself with. In essence, my personal faith identity was not matching up to my corporate faith identity and I sadly knew one or the other must change. By-and-by this discernment became a personal crisis of identity where the God I knew was not the God I was hearing spoken through the voices of a religious America become darkened in its speech and knowledge. One, or both, had to change, and I knew it must first begin with me.

Yes. Personal Change. This was the easier route. But it was also the harder route because it required letting go of my former identity in finding a new identity that bore very little similarity to the older religious groups I saw fomenting around me. Faith groups that I was familiar with and had grown old with. Very old. I was in the early stages of my sixth decade of life by now at 53. I was identified with faith groups that were adopting a new form of Christian identity than I felt comfortable with. In many ways we both were changing. Curiously, I had become less certain while the other corporate form had become more certain in ways that changed their view of God and the Bible in more agitated tones than I first remembered of them.

Even still, I was not alone. Though at the time I felt very much alone. Had I considered it, I did have a fellowship of equals measured in the lives of those men and women of the Bible who likewise faced deeply personal crisis of faith interpretation with the religious institutions of their day that they had grown up and identified with. Who were forcibly flung into the unknown away from friends and family, away from the religious dogmas they had grown up with, and away from their homelands and occupations they once had known. As example of this latter, some bible pastors and professors were being removed from their churches or colleges because their positions on human equality and justice were changing.

Essentially my fellowship was becoming affiliated with a broader Christian fellowship than I had first considered. It was not simply mine own woeful burden of a new Christian awareness as I struggled to be released from "the miry pit of clay" which had formed tightly around me that was presently keeping me from divine breath and light. Nay, others had also trod this unceremonious road of sacrilege to feel despised and alone. Like myself, other destitute men and women of God had wandered foreign lands of idols-and-fear searching for a land not of their own making through the dark days that seemed to stretch endlessly onwards without end.

For myself, my developing new faith was as much an attitude shift as it was an epistemological crisis. I felt strongly moved towards a faith that might be more doubtful, less certain of itself, and less strict in its personal dogmas of confidence. A faith which had lately become quixotically more religious than when I first remembered it as a youth. A faith which once had carried a certain kind of Jesus figure, or Jesus cross, or missional message, but had strangely morphed away from what those things once meant to me and the church to become something completely alien to itself in these, my later years.

Largely, the Christian affiliations I had once identified with seemed to have changed. And as they changed so did my identity as it became something more foreign to myself than when I had first subscribed to it so many long years ago. It required of me to re-think my identity, the message of my Christian heritage, and even the kind of faith I was holding. To find a continuity with my faith heritage that was less dogmatically orthodox and more spiritually orthodox in an updated sense to the contemporary times of my postmodern society.

A Crisis of Faith

I hadn't planned on doing this as I explained in Part 1. But it was a journey requiring me to move forward in quite an unexpected fashion to my earlier faith identity. An identity that had been formed in my youth and then, as I grew older, had become caught up with the responsibilities of family and job as it trusted to those in religious authority to keep the Christian faith from an apostasy to dogma and dictum.

But these Christian leaders had failed in their congregational duties becoming harsher in their attitudes of Christ and God's sanctifying love. More uncharitable and unforgiving. Belatedly, I now discovered that my faith required a deep updating to the contemporary institutions I had grown up in having trusted them to adopt and accommodate the Christian faith in positive ways to societal trends and academic findings. But apparently senility is as much a problem for long-lived institutions as it can be for older living adults. Even at the age of 53. For myself, I didn't wish to fall into the category of black cynicism and fear which typically marks older age against a more youthful, hopeful faith I was observing in the younger generations of my son and daughter's twenty-something worlds. And yet, a more fearful faith can-and-will fall into this "pit of despair" (as John Bunyan would call it) if it doesn't learn to grow and acclimate itself to its times and seasons of missional opportunity as time will challenge the church to do.

And thus began a very difficult personal journey as I wrote and wrote here at Relevancy22 of my despair and testimony to a more hopeful Christian faith. But never a task which I wished to back away from when facing the deep complexity it would require in deconstructing Christianity's present foundations and structures towards a newer promise filled with God-filled grace and presence. Nor was this task one that I could back away from even if I might hesitate because with age had come a sense of settledness to who I was, and a belief in what I must accomplish, in order to get past the "me of yesterday" to the "me of tomorrow." The faith groups I identified with required as much breakage and re-constructing even as mine own head and heart would require. Each pretending their own fantasies in a world they were lumping along with in a way that they really weren't understanding or able to testify to. My more dogmatic faith only made sense to me in the way that I pretended it to be within its delineated confines. But when doing this I had to shut my eyes and close my heart to what I read in the Bible or saw of God in His secular presence to the world I lived in.

Moving Forward

Overall, I don't really have any magic formulas to describe how God moved me through this formative time of searching, burden, betrayal, abandonment, and resurrection. All I knew was that my theology had to change if I were to come into a Christian faith more flexible with the times and more intolerant to the folklore theologies that abounded everywhere around me.

More curiously, the presence of God was exceedingly strong in my life during this time and there was never a silence of His Spirit that I could attest to by God's absence or lack of guidance. No, I felt very burden by the Holy Spirit to climb out of the hole my faith had lately fallen into while re-envisioning what it might become for the generations ahead of me. To reconstruct, or re-envision, its theological and religious orthodoxies where the God of the Bible is more present in this life than far away. Who might breathe into us a more open Bible to people everywhere burdened with the quest for spirituality than an arcane faith of nonsense and disbelief.

"Yes," I thought, "Everything must change" and nothing can be left unturned that wasn't dissettled before. In many ways it was my third experience of breaking from my hallowed past. The first was when I left my country family, the gentrified farm I grew up on, and the little one-room country school house I had attended, to join a public school system less glamorous than my past. I wasn't concerned about the new subjects I would learn because without attending the public school I wouldn't have been able to learn those newer subjects. But what I actually was experiencing in my transition was a new kind of Christian agnosticism and disbelief that I hadn't experienced in my boyhood years. One that began to drive me to ask the question of why and how and what.

Of course these questions could not be settled right away. It took me some dozen years to re-calculate a more contemporary faith than I had held from the good earth days of my boyhood. My simple, sheltered, almost mystical faith, had become filled with an admixture of Christian and non-Christian thought asking more questions than I could answer. Nor did this go away after high school graduation as I studied the sciences, math, and engineering, having gained a full-ride academic scholarship at a major national university. At the last, the profundity to which I was becoming disturbed caused me to leave university in my junior year to complete my senior year at a bible school over a two year time frame. Afterwards I needed a little time off and found myself teaching out-of-state at a Christian high school for one year before choosing to return to complete a 4-year Master's program in Divinity without ordination. All along I was active in my local churches (GARB Baptist and IFCA Bible), singing, evangelizing, visiting homes, teaching youth, while asking the Lord what next.

Eventually, I settled down, married, took 3 more years of night school towards a partial MBA degree and called it quits on the schooling front. I was laid-off from my financial analyst job at a major Christian publisher and decided to form my own IT consulting firm for the next 27 years where I could explore IT trends and processes, several business entrepreneurships, and generally help small businesses with the then curious world of technology.

During this time I stayed active in my church but stopped reading theology and trying to figure things out because I no longer knew which way to press forward. The best I could do was use what I knew while trusting the Lord to bless the college/career and single adult ministries I was then leading and pastoring at the time. It really wasn't until long years later, once I had left those ministries, that my boyhood years of curiosity and passion began to stir again asking the age-old questions I once was asking.

Mostly, I think I had delayed this more fundamental period of investigation because I knew the hard work it would require of me if I should stop and ask disturbing questions of my Christian faith. And, more specifically, how disruptive it might become if a father and a husband started to ask questions which were very-unlike what my wife and children had come to expect of me as a Christian lay minister, "Pauline tent-builder," and family figure. And so, I plodded along until discovering one day I could no longer be content with where I was personally. I began asking questions and then started trying to answer those questions back in the days when I was a promising young student theologian. To then discover that my non-Calvinistic or non-Reformed orthodoxy answers may be disruptive to the my faith tradition I grew up in. My faith dilemma suddenly became a deeply orthodox dilemma so that what I feared would happen, did. Over past several years it would require the wisdom of God to put all back together quite like the Humpty-Dumpty which had fallen off the theological wall. There the pieces lie everywhere about the ground and I, not wanting to reassemble it, into the fashion it once was. No, this assembling would take a deep, more complex rethink of the Christian faith.

Hallowed Ground Fell Away to Discovery

It seemed the epistemological grounds which the Lord had been sowing in my life had lain fallow inside of me until the seeds of my discontent must burst forth lest they became more rigid and inflexible with the passing years of old age as I was now witnessing in my older friends. A new kind of faith now echoed within my once youthful vigor. But one that could finally seek more meaningful direction. I think my work in sales, product marketing, adaptive entrepreneurship, and the rapidly changing industry of technology had taught me how to handle the upheaval of a postmodern society throwing out the past while dealing with the ills of a post-postmodernism full of anarchy, chaos, hate, and division.

A new philosophical direction inhabited me. One I couldn't ask my questions of before but had, with the passage of time, learned to become more able to discern and read among the newer, more promising, trends and directions I was sensing within Christianity. It dawned upon me that the times of silence in my life might not only have been the best answer to epistemic or theologic unknowing, but perhaps the best ontic solution during those times of metaphysical unknowing.

Surely, the process of epistemological tension requires the patience of decades as much as movement, shout, and roar of the society we dwell within as it writhes, twists, and turns. Significantly, I now had the advantage of old age and a contemporary postmodern history of event showing to me the way forward... and the way out! The way forward into a postmodern Christianity more developed than it once had been years earlier. And the way out of a secular Christianity more at odds with itself than it ever was in the past having adopted neo-Calvinistic and non-scared conventions and sanctums into its lapsing evangelicalism.

And so, being part innovator, part creator, part artist, I knew I had to set aside time to think, research, pray, and write of these new developments in my own spiritual world as well as that of the church I hoped to see again. I began with writing unpublished poetry for two-three years from dawn to dusk and eventually this task slowly gave way to a conscious need to write of a more open faith which might rest upon a more open theology. A theology both of my past (the good parts) as well as a theology of the future. In essence, my poetry came to an abrupt stoppage because it wanted a better theological foundation to write upon.

One that might move away from its more linear edges I was now observing within American Christianity. An open faith and theology that might re-embrace God's grace with the good spiritual sense He has given His followers to be gracious in witness and humble in prayer. Less agitated with sin and judgment and more agitated for mercy and forgiveness.

For me, it was the development of a new spiritual constitution that I could no longer be patient waiting for against what I was seeing from the lips and actions of a harsher brand of Christian faith than once remembered. My faith of yesteryear had grown up from the whips and chains of fear-mongering to seek a more open Christianity at peace with itself and with the world it lived within. What I had learned from my fundamental, conservative church experiences was the love of God for all men and women everywhere, as curious as that now sounds to me when looking back on those impressionable years of youthful faith development within the heart of darker church constitutions. Surely that must be a work of the Spirit to see straight-and-true the gospel Christ had lived, preached, and died for!

And so, today, I wish to present a new kind of faith. One more rounded to its future faith possibilities and more jagged to its present-tense assembly of itself beheld in fiery Christian pulpits and incharitable (stereotypical) Christian media. One that embraces people with God's love and forgiveness as much as against the calling down of God's holy judgment by self-proclaimed false prophets of our day and age.

I have felt then, as I do now, a holy prophetic calling of God to preach salvation to both the unbeliever as much as to the believer. That the roots and foundations of our dogmatic chains must fall off if we are to behold the light and beauty of the gospel of Jesus as it reclaims this wicked world from the bondages of its miseries and woes. That evil comes in all forms - even that of well-intentioned Christian religion. And that like all sin, must be burned up and thrown on the trash heap of bad theology as readily as any farmer would to save the soils of his land from biological rape and destitution.

My pro-bono calling now is to discover this new homeland where the Christian faith might breathe again in the postmodern airs of disruption and upheaval. And if it can, than I have met my calling and answered my burden long enough to allow others the opportunity to carry forward what I and others had sensed among us was corrupting the great halls of past hallowed orthodoxies. Spiritual reformations which were once bourne by dissembling faith-bearers against their own times and cultures who were agitating for God's calls for truth, love and worship.

Faith-bearers we now know as the great saints of the Christian past though greatly differing in spiritual judgment to the dying churches and dead cults of their day. Who strove for both precept and principle, by letter and by deed, for the grace and mercy of Christ their Lord. Even so do we postmodern reformers by picking up the broken glass shards of theology lying shattered everywhere on the churchy floors around us by reframing new theological windows looking out upon the Creator Redeemer of the universe streaming into our souls the purer airs of blue skies and brighter hues of sun and moon.

Peace be with you, my brothers and sisters, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,

R.E. Slater

April 30, 2015
revised May 13, 2015;
September 3, 2020

Foundations for a Radical Christianity, Part 1 - Change

Foundations for a Radical Christianity, Part 2 - Thriving

Foundations for a Radical Christianity, Part 3 - Jesus





Index to past articles on "Phase III"

Bradley Jersak - "A More Christlike God"

The Need for a More Christlike God: An Interview with Brad Jersak

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/peterenns/2015/04/the-need-for-a-more-christlike-god-an-interview-with-brad-jersak/

by Peter Enns

April 29, 2015

Comments

Today’s post is an interview with Brad Jersak, author of A More Christlike God, which came out last week.

The book, with a foreword by Brian Zahnd, is about how replacing whatever image of God we have with a more Christlike image of God is central to the Gospel being truly good news. ​Brad Jersak (PhD) serves on faculty at Westminster Theological Centre (UK), where he teaches New Testament and Patristics. He is also senior editor of CWR Magazine. 

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your spiritual journey

I grew up in the Canadian Evangelical scene and sensed a lifelong call to ministry from a very early age. In the course of pursuing theological training, I met and married Eden. After seminary, I eventually pastored in two congregations (one Mennonite, one Renewal focused) for twenty years (1988-2008).

In 2003, I began writing books (10 now) and doing seminars, especially on the topic of ‘listening prayer.’ In 2008, I left pastoring and completed a PhD in theology (Bangor, Wales). I am now on faculty at Westminster Theological Centre (UK) teaching New Testament and Patristics and am senior editor of CWR Magazine (Pasadena). Over the last 12 years, my journey progressively led me toward and finally into the Eastern Orthodox Church, where I was ordained ‘Reader’ in 2013.

So, in a sentence or two, can you tell us what your book is about?

In the church and the world, toxic images of God abound—retributive notions of God that look nothing like what Jesus revealed in his life or teachings. A More Christlike God portrays God as exactly like Christ crucified: self-giving, radically forgiving, compassionate love.

Why did you write this book? What’s your big vision?

I want to share the good news that if God is perfect love revealed perfectly through Christ, then the gospel is more beautiful than we ever imagined. People who find that God is actually Christlike might be freed to love him again.

So many people, from Christian to Muslim to Atheist, believe in soul-damaging images of God. They either live in fear and bondage within that abusive belief system; act as its agents who perpetuate the abuse, or reject faith altogether because of their distorted conceptions of God no longer work. This book is especially for Christians who are ready to consider the Christlike God, especially post-Evangelicals who already instinctively know something is “off” and want confirmation that their faith has not been in vain.

Can you give us an overview the book? What should we expect to find?

Part I is called What is God like? Competing images of Will and Love. When we ask, ‘What is God like?’ we soon discover many toxic and un-Christlike images of God, even among Christians. These images range from the almighty God of raw will to the good God who reigns by love and consent. The New Testament claim is that the perfect image of the invisible God is revealed in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ.

Part II is The Cruciform God where I state that the God revealed through Christ is seen most clearly at the Cross. A ‘cruciform’ God, by nature, consents to the afflictions caused through natural law and human freedom. But he also participates in and transforms our suffering world as self-giving, radically forgiving, co-suffering love.

Finally, Part III is Unwrathing God. Since Christ reveals God as cruciform, the biblical notion of ‘wrath’ shifts from any active violence in God to a metaphor for God ‘giving us over’ (consenting to) the intrinsic, tragic consequences of our own defiance. It establishes the Cross, not as a place where God demands wrath as appeasement, but renounces wrath in favor of forgiveness. This plays out in a more beautiful gospel, where God never turns from or against sinners, but is relentless in his mercy, demonstrated on the Cross.

Can you give us 3 compelling quotes that really capture what the book is about?

“We believe Jesus has shown us the face and heart of God through the fullness of his life on earth: revealed through eyewitness accounts of his birth, ministry, death and resurrection. We regard this life as the decisive revelation and act of God in time and space. That’s still a faith statement, but for Christians, it is our starting point. To look at Jesus—especially on the Cross, says 1 John—is to behold the clearest depiction of the God who is love (1 John 4:8). I’ve come to believe that Jesus alone is perfect theology” (9).

“When I personally turned my gaze to the God who is completely Christlike, I was confronted with how un-Christlike the ‘church- God’ or even the ‘Bible-God’ can be. Setting Jesus as the standard for perfect theology, many of our current Christian beliefs and practices would obviously face indictment. Even significant swaths of biblical literature don’t line up well with the Christ of the Gospels. Claiming that God is revealed perfectly in Jesus triggers tough questions about the God I once conceived and preached” (13).

“For our own sakes, we might take a break from trying to convince ourselves that Jesus was and is God and to spend this twenty-first century meditating on the truth that God is like Jesus. Exactly like Jesus. When the veil that obscured God was torn in two, what did it reveal? A Suffering Servant who hangs on the Cross (Zech. 12:10)! Thus, every human conception we previously associated with ‘God’ is uprooted, root and branch!” (22)

If you had to name them, what 1-2 parts of the book are you particularly excited about?

I am enthusiastic about introducing and explaining the language of ‘cruciform’ (cross-shaped) and ‘kenotic’ (self-giving) so that any thoughtful person can ‘get it’ quite easily.

I also work hard to explain ‘wrath’ in biblical context as a metaphor for the intrinsic consequences of sin rather than active violent intervention. Clarifying the language we use for God is important because the words themselves become images that either reveal or distort our perception of who he is.

I am even more excited about chapter 14, our description of ‘The Beautiful Gospel,’ which is an adaptation of a presentation called ‘The Gospel in Chairs’ (originally composed by Fr. Anthony Karbo). It demonstrates how God does not turn from anyone until they turn to him, but rather, is always for us and always toward us, as seen over and over through the life of Christ … supremely on the Cross. A growing network of friends has been trying to popularize the presentation in many settings (including prisons, S. African townships, university classrooms) with incredible responses. As people’s image of God becomes Christlike, the gospel once again is heard as good news.

Foundations for a Radical Christianity, Part 1 - Change

Over the past four years of writing Relevancy22 I have from time-to-time summarized past explorations so that new readers might get a glimpse of what I have been working on within the broader concept of a postmodern global Christianity. I will do this again today utilizing past articles and topics found on the sidebars of this site as the seed beds for formulation.

This website was developed to be contemporary with current events regardless of historical events occurring within those current events. As such, older articles should be as helpful as newer ones, especially since I try not to cover the same ground twice once its been established. If it was written well once than there should be no need to duplicate the topic discussed. Moreover, as I have had time, I try to re-read the past articles I've written to edit out any mis-statements or oversights I may have committed or to make reference to newer articles I have since worked through and created.

What began my investigation into postmodern Christianity was a result of a "crisis of faith" which might more aptly be described as a "gross personal disruption." One demanding from my conservative evangelical context a broader sense of theology and reform that might expand a lively faith heritage towards the kind of societal currency which could be contemporary with the cultural norms I was sensing amongst today's younger generations. Especially if it was to move forward with the postmodern trends, thoughts, and theologies I was observing. I knew I did not wish to remain where I was spiritually, and felt a deep, passionate, burden from the Lord to educate both myself and any who would read with me, of a classic Christian orthodoxy that must become both postmodern and Jesus-centric in all its many forms starting from the very text of the bible itself to a faith that could be lived out within a postmodern context.

I also knew that my Christian family and friends could not travel this same disruptive road with me. It was not their burden. Nor did they wish to upend whole lifetimes committed to specific cultural viewpoints of theology and mission. Viewpoints which I was the more willing to disrupt against the platitudes and enfeebled mysticisms I was questioning and then made all the worse by the voices in my head condemning me with Scriptural verses of judgment and apostasy for my undertaking.

Personally, I found this to be a very difficult period of my life on every level of my being. But curiously, I never felt forsaken or abandoned by God. No, rather a deep burden of the Holy Spirit pervaded over me as if the very hand of God had descended to particularly guide me in my journey of displacement. Not unlike the prophets of old who also once were moved against oppressive energies, human wills, and unrelenting dark regimes along their faith journeys.

What I needed to do was to read and develop resources that I found helpful against the deep darkness that gripped me for the better part of a year. As such, my journey has been discussed as plainly as I can explain it. Moreover, it has been both a long journey (since university years) and a relatively short journey (these past four years in digital dialogue). I write to share a new kind of postmodern Christianity which has given to my faith heritage a bigger God, a more sure word of Scripture, and the divine life of the Spirit measured by the abundant grace of our Lord Jesus.

And so, what would a contemporary Christian theology look like? One that might be described as Emergent, or postmodern, or progressive, or lately, as a Radical Christianity (which term I like a lot as described in a recent past post). A Christian faith that might be "for the rest of us" unpersuaded by its classic dissident forms focusing on a Utopian view of heaven and hell, sin and righteousness, while ignoring human rights and oppression, human reforms for societal justness and care-take, or good earth management and restoration.

We need a Christian theology that has a lower view of God - of a God who was the more willing to live with us on this earth for a brief moment of time rather than reside in the eternal richness of a kingdom too far away for us to glimpse. A God who was the more willing to minister to the dispossessed, unwanted, unprivileged remnants of society rather than looking to the halls of kingships and religious institutions for personal satisfaction. We need a theology that sees the small and not the great. That implores the haves to consider the have-nots. That seeks an earthy gospel of the here-and-now rather than a gospel of death forever seeking the faraway glories of eternal Beulah lands.

This, for me, is what a postmodern Christianity should be about. Its messy, dirty, guttural. It is less heavenly minded than focused on the present tense of living. Of bringing in God's kingdom by willing hands and hearts praying for restitution to one another rather than fleeing from society's present demands and academic difficulties. That is discontent with the greed and banal apathies observed in our human institutions towards our brothers and sisters suffering from sin and evil. Who flee to evangelic lands promising freedom only to find a distorted reality that doesn't quite measure up to the visions they once had held of God and His reign.

But then, in the midst of our personal crisis and discouragement, comes interference from human agencies promising to dispel all theological questions and desires for a more earthly hope of God. Bearing gospels couched in fear and distrust. Or a pertinent theme or a way of thinking about the Bible that would save us from doing the hard work of upsetting those more classical theologies borne on yesteryear's Greek and Medieval thought to present day witticisms. Spreading false messages by false prophets who would remove the shaping that might come by diligent postmodern, theological thinkers, who see more promise of health and healing to the societies of man than through the doubt and disruption caused by their more formalistic breathren bearing literary device and obstruction.

Let us, then, be the church of God which reclaims every institution of man for the fire of resurrection and renewal. Let us be the people of God who roll up our sleeves and chose a passion to become passionate about. Who seek a justice that would rebirth ourselves into the lives of those we've separated from and are desperate for help. Let us be the cups and vessels of the Lord who replenish the body and re-invigorate the soul of mankind. Who measure patience with kindness. Thoughtfulness with generosity. Courage with bolder undertakings than we knew were possible. Let us become the new Kingdom of God upon this earth. Let us be life-givers, compassionate strangers, and aliens no longer to an alien world we've once feared and fled by older, more foreign gospels unworthy of Christ Jesus.

Peace,

R.E. Slater

April 28, 2015
edited April 29, 2015

* * * * * * * * *

Postmodern Christianity

source used: Wikipedia

Although the term "postmodern" is hotly debated as to its variety of meanings, as used here at Relevancy22 it refers to a Christian theology which has its roots in post-Hegelian, post-Heideggerian continental philosophy, developed from the 1960s to the present.

Postmodernism is a reaction (or redaction) to the secular modernism of the 20th century since the 1960s. Moreover, it is not static (no philosophy ever is) but is transitioning in form in the 21st century by a process of syncretization towards a type of post-postmodernism, or metamodernism. Especially as it is found in the clash between modern and postmodern developments within global technological societies.

1 - As pertaining to Christian theology, postmodernism is used in attempting to communicate post-Christian forms of post-structural, philosophical, and theological thought relating to contemporary events and developments displayed in a global world becoming tightly knit in language, thought, cultures, economies, and technological communications. Each culture clashing with another foreign culture, then adjusting itself to clash yet again like waves upon the sea onto the rocky shores of bastioned fortresses.

2 - Furthermore, postmodern Christianity (as used here at Relevancy22) is not a liberal form of Christianity but may utilized liberal thought, discoveries, and arguments, especially in the contemporary formation of a postmodern theology. And especially in the evangelical sense of understanding all theology as founded upon our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, the second Person of the divine Godhead. To write of a postmodern evangelicalism is less an literary oxymoron and all-the-more-possible than once thought.

3 - Most especially postmodern Christianity wishes to communicate with contemporary global societies in the missional sense of the  Christian faith as it relates to the postmodern world in its theologies, doctrines, dogmas, and religious practices. This is done by updating classic Christianity from older modernistic philosophical / societal forms into a contemporary context for the postmodern world. Hence, a postmodern Christian theology will feel-and-sound differently from a Colonial American theology once thought to be the sum total of a Westernized Christianity.

4 - Nor is postmodern Christianity strictly Kierkegaardian existentialism but a synthesized form of 20th Century existentialism borrowing from Tillich's existential philosophic analytic tradition as well as from past neo-orthodox theologians such as Karl Barth and Emil Brunner. Especially as Reformational theology  was perceived in enlightened / modernistic terms until experiencing the horrors of a world-wide economic depression and World Wars I and II. At which point "Theology came into Crisis."  No longer could Christianity pretend a form of government and outlook to the deconstructions occurring at the holocausts of millions, and later, to the many civil wars roiling through the world in the wake of colonial displacement of rule and law. It marked both an end and a beginning for many.

5 - Nor is postmodern (Radical) Christianity a form of John Millbank's espoused Radical Orthodoxy that is preferred by neo-Calvinistic (strong sovereignty) groups leaning towards some kind of neo-Platonic Christianity divorced from the contemporary sciences and consequently couched within a mystical thought construing perception with reality (sin, evil, natural disasters). However, postmodern Christianity does evidence similar sympathies with Radical Orthodoxy in that each system works within the philosophical frameworks of postmodernism and continental philosophy.

Moreover, to theologically displace Calvinism requires a re-focusing on its opposite Reformational  twin - that of Arminianism - as found in many Protestant denominations today (Wesleyanism, Baptists, Charismatic faiths). This is also the reason the topic of Arminianism has been discussed ad nauseum here at Relevancy22 to solidify the differences between a Radical (Arminian) Theology to that of a Radical (Calvinistic) Orthodoxy. Each is radical in their own separate ways but each bears a vast philosophical / theological gulf from the other as postmodernistic views. Even as each tries to re-interpret Christian orthodoxy in an uplifted sense from 20th century secular modernism.

6 - Moreover, a postmodern Christian interpretation can be found in the anthropological hermeneutic of philosopher Paul Ricoeur who utilized the Continental tradition of existential and phenomenological thought to develop a narrative interpretation of literature and legacies such as the kind found within the Bible. Too, Alfred Whitehead's Process Theology ("God is as much in process to His experience as we are") may be applicable here as it relates to "in-time" interpretations of human thought and elucidation of being along with contemporary discussions of Open Theology ('the future is as open for us as it is for God"). These are the "earthy views" of theology I referred to in my concluding remarks to the article above.

R.E. Slater

April 28, 2015

* * * * * * * * *

Process Theology

source: Wikipedia

Process Theology is a type of theology developed from Alfred North Whitehead's (1861–1947) process philosophy, most notably by Charles Hartshorne (1897–2000) and John B. Cobb (b. 1925). Process theology and process philosophy are collectively referred to as "process thought." (Process theology is unrelated to the Process Church.)

For both Whitehead and Hartshorne, it is an essential attribute of God to affect and be affected by temporal processes, contrary to the forms of theism that hold God to be in all respects non-temporal (eternal), unchanging (immutable), and unaffected by the world (impassible).

Process theology does not deny that God is in some respects eternal (will never die), immutable (in the sense that God is unchangingly good), and impassible (in the sense that God's eternal aspect is unaffected by actuality), but it contradicts the classical view by insisting that God is in some respects temporal, mutable, and passible.

Although process theologians all share certain similarities (particularly a stress on becoming over being and on relationality), there continue to be ongoing debates within the field on the nature of God, the relationship of God and the world, and immortality.

Construed in a wide sense, process theology might be understood to refer to all forms of theology that, for the metaphysical foundation of existence,

look to creative activity rather than passive matter, and to

evolutionary becoming rather than changeless enduring.

Such an interpretation would include, for example, the theology of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, or theology influenced by Georg Hegel. Nevertheless, the term is generally understood as referring to the Whitehead/Hartshorne school.

* * * * * * * * *

Continental Philosophy

vs. Analytic Thought

source: Wikipedia

Continental philosophy is a set of 19th- and 20th-century philosophical traditions from mainland Europe.[1][2] This sense of the term originated among English-speaking philosophers in the second half of the 20th century, who used it to refer to a range of thinkers and traditions outside the analytic movement. Continental philosophy includes the following movements: German idealism, phenomenology, existentialism (and its antecedents, such as the thought of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche), hermeneutics, structuralism, post-structuralism, French feminism, psychoanalytic theory, and the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and related branches of Western Marxism.[3]

It is difficult to identify non-trivial claims that would be common to all the preceding philosophical movements. The term "continental philosophy", like "analytic philosophy", lacks clear definition and may mark merely a family resemblance across disparate philosophical views. Simon Glendinning has suggested that the term was originally more pejorative than descriptive, functioning as a label for types of western philosophy rejected or disliked by analytic philosophers.[4] Nonetheless, Michael E. Rosen has ventured to identify common themes that typically characterize continental philosophy:[5]

• First, continental philosophers generally reject the view that the natural sciences are the only or most accurate way of understanding natural phenomena. This contrasts with many analytic philosophers who consider their inquiries as continuous with, or subordinate to, those of the natural sciences. [But this would not mean that it is anti-intellectual - re slater]. Continental philosophers often argue that science depends upon a "pre-theoretical substrate of experience" (a version of Kantian conditions of possible experience or the phenomenological "lifeworld") and that scientific methods are inadequate to fully understand such conditions of intelligibility.[6]

• Second, continental philosophy usually considers these conditions of possible experience as variable: determined at least partly by factors such as context, space and time, language, culture, or history. Thus continental philosophy tends toward historicism. Where analytic philosophy tends to treat philosophy in terms of discrete problems, capable of being analyzed apart from their historical origins (much as scientists consider the history of science inessential to scientific inquiry), continental philosophy typically suggests that "philosophical argument cannot be divorced from the textual and contextual conditions of its historical emergence".[7]

• Third, continental philosophy typically holds that human agency can change these conditions of possible experience: "if human experience is a contingent creation, then it can be recreated in other ways".[8] Thus continental philosophers tend to take a strong interest in the unity of theory and practice, and often see their philosophical inquiries as closely related to personal, moral, or political transformation. This tendency is very clear in the Marxist tradition ("philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it"), but is also central in existentialism and post-structuralism.

• A final characteristic trait of continental philosophy is an emphasis on metaphilosophy. In the wake of the development and success of the natural sciences, continental philosophers have often sought to redefine the method and nature of philosophy.[9] In some cases (such as German idealism or phenomenology), this manifests as a renovation of the traditional view that philosophy is the first, foundational, a priori science. In other cases (such as hermeneutics, critical theory, or structuralism), it is held that philosophy investigates a domain that is irreducibly cultural or practical. And some continental philosophers (such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, the later Heidegger, or Derrida) doubt whether any conception of philosophy can coherently achieve its stated goals.

Ultimately, the foregoing themes derive from a broadly Kantian thesis that knowledge, experience, and reality are bound and shaped by conditions best understood through philosophical reflection rather than exclusively empirical inquiry.[10]

Foundations for a Radical Christianity, Part 1 - Change

Foundations for a Radical Christianity, Part 2 - Thriving

Foundations for a Radical Christianity, Part 3 - Jesus





Index to past articles on "Phase III"