Tuesday, 28 February 2012

  • Liberals, Conservatives and Diversity

    Neo-Anabaptist Scot McKnight has written a response to a recent Slate article entitled "Liberals: Don't Homeschool Your Kids."  The primary argument of the Slate article is that #homeschooling can never be progressive because homeschooling by its decentralized nature cannot serve the needs of society at large. 

    McKnight counters that a diversity of perspectives benefits a polyglot society more than the monolithic perspective a 100% compliant public school system would foster.  He writes,

    Aren’t we better off in a society that draws on folks who got different sorts of education? Some progressives seem to think a diverse society is one where every 14-year-old in America arrives at school, pledges allegiance to the nation’s flag, takes out an American history textbook shaped by panels of bureaucrats in California and Texas, and proceeds to be guided by a teacher with a state issued credential in how best to pass a standardized test. Who is celebrating diversity, the champions of putting every kid in the education wonk’s vision of the ideal classroom, or the folks who want some kids to start their day interacting with multi-ethnic classmates while others start their school day praying and still others learn about raising backyard chickens?

    It is interesting to me that liberals/progressives generally claim a monopoly on embracing diversity, when my understanding of conservatism (based largely around the local agrarian insights of a Wendell Berry or, dare I say, Thomas Jefferson) is based precisely around preserving specific instances of diversity. 

    As McKnight summarizes, "society as a whole requires people who challenge the prevailing system if it is to identify the few who can offer new insights."  Clipped from its context defending homeschooling as one choice among many (and McKnight emphasizes that it may not be the best choice), this could be part of any progressive mantra.

    What do you think?  Who has the corner on diversity?  Is either homeschooling or its eradication more likely to benefit society as a whole?

    -NDSR

Monday, 27 February 2012

  • The Market's Protection

    During his Ash Wednesday broadcast, Stephen Colbert dedicated his segment The Word to looking at the role that corporations like Target take over as they use predictive analytics to track and predict consumer behavior, to more effectively cultivate customer loyalty.

    His segment: Surrender to a Buyer Power

    This puts me in mind of a point D. Stephen Long makes in his book-length dialogue with Nancy Ruth Fox called Calculated Futures.

    In the opening chapter, Fox observes that theologians feel that the market is aggressive, even encroaching on traditionally non-economic areas.  Long takes this critique of the market to its fullest limits, arguing that the global market has become a counter-church: the global agency to which individuals look for salvation, albeit a salvation redefined along economic lines.

    At one point, Fox points out that this claim is baffling to her.  Long responds:

    At a general level we would all agree that family life should not be thought of primarily in terms of its monetary value.  But when we move  from the general to the particular, economists and theologians soon part company. For instance, should the distribution of health, sex, body organs, and infants be conceded a value that allows them to be efficiently exchanged through a market mechanism?  We find neoclassical [that is, neoliberal or libertarian] economists who argue in favor of commodifying all four of these goods.  But are not these goods precisely related to family life?  If the economic facts suggest that a more efficient method of distributing body organs, sex, health, and unwanted infants is through the market, then are not those theologians (such as myself) who fear the encroachment of the market in all aspects of life justified?



    Colbert seems to share this view of the market.

    What do you think? Does the market encroach into areas of our lives that should not be marketed or monetized? How can we avoid becoming mere statistics to be analyzed?

    -NDSR

Sunday, 26 February 2012

  • And Yet Very Thankful

    Currently my wife is an engineering student at Wichita State. She is going to school full-time, which means that my education is currently on hold. I am working a couple of jobs (teaching English as a second language and serving at a restaurant), which gives us just barely enough income to keep afloat and gives me little time for recreation and less for blogging.

    Understandably, this is a difficult time for me, largely because I don't feel like I'm "doing anything." Of course I'm doing a lot, but I feel like what I'm doing is mundane work, and not the important work I set out to do when I went to university.

    And yet I am very thankful.

    I am thankful that I am living up to my wedding vows. I get to support my wife financially and emotionally through college. This is a great gift, and not everyone is able to do this.

    I am thankful that I have this opportunity to live out my love. Paul particularly mentions "being willing to do menial work" or "associate with people of low social standing" under the rubric putting love into action (Romans 12). It is easy to professionally speak about putting love into action, and much harder to do it. I am grateful for an opportunity to do it.

    I am very thankful that I have the chance to live on less than I can realistically afford. There are things I used to consider necessities (soft drinks, occasionally eating out, buying socks) that I have had to dispense with, because they are not currently within our budget. And yet I am grateful, especially because my wife and I still put aside some money out of each paycheck, and out of each day's tips, to give to the church. It hurts, and we feel it. And I am very thankful, because I have hope that this pattern of giving more than we can afford will remain with us when we make more than we need. We may never become that family who says, "We need a raise so we can buy the cabin at the lake. Now we need another raise so we can redecorate the den." And to be possibly saved from that fate, I am very thankful indeed.

    -NDSR

Monday, 20 February 2012

  • The Whole Gospel?

    A rallying cry in the Reformed community is the place of the gospel in the sermon.  According to a widespread and conventional view in the Reformed churches, a sermon is only properly called a sermon if its subject is the gospel.  Any passage of scripture preached on must be mined to find its oblique reference to Christ.  This led Nietzsche to cynically applaud Christians for their ability to find a cross in every piece of wood, and a resurrection in every cave. 

    But Luther was emphatic on this point, and when his parishioners asked him why we preached the gospel every single week, he responded that "I preach the gospel every week because every week you forget it." 

    So mainstream Evangelical preachers like Rick Warren are criticized for "not preaching the gospel."  I am not familiar enough with Warren's sermons to comment on this point, though I plan to download a few from the website to listen to and hear for myself.  But I would not be surprised if I discover in them aspects of the gospel that my Calvinist brothers and sisters would not recognize as the gospel. 

    I (clearly) do not name myself as belonging to the Reformed stream.  My roots are equally in the Anabaptist tradition (the so-called Radical Reformation, though this can become confusing) and in Wesleyan thought.  And this is perhaps the point of the widest divergence between the Reformed traditions and other Christian streams: not free will vs. determinism, not individual vs. corporate election, but soteriology: the doctrine of salvation.  What does it mean to be saved, and what does that salvation consist of? 

    And on this point, I feel that Calvinists think of the gospel as both too much and too little. 

    Adding to the gospel

    Scot McKnight and N.T. Wright have both argued from opposite contexts (one a neo-Anabaptist, who blogs out of Portland coffee shops, and the other an Anglican bishop who writes 1000-page tomes out of abbeys and anchorages in Canterbury) that contemporary Christian teaching has confused the gospel with the message of salvation.  The gospel, they have both concluded, is simply the message that Jesus has completed the Old Testament story of Israel, ending their exile and reestablishing the people of God around a new temple in himself.  It is the message of Jesus' death, burial and resurrection, his enthronement as the Son of God, the rightful king of all the earth.  The message of salvation ("how we get saved") follows from that, and that's where discussions about justification, regeneration and imputation come in.  But those discussions are not the gospel; they follow the gospel. 

    Many of my Reformed friends say very explicitly that if someone does not believe in imputed righteousness, for instance, they do not believe the gospel, and I think that's a category mistake.  Where is this gospel presented in Acts 2, when the church made three thousand converts?  Where is this gospel in 1 Cor 15, when Paul says, "By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you," and then goes on to cite the word he preached, which amounts to saying that Jesus was dead, buried, resurrected and many people saw him?

    So I am concerned that in some cases the gospel is being added to and weighed down, when we tie the message about Jesus with our beliefs about how the message of Jesus functions to reconcile us to God. 

    Yet subtracting from it?

    And the deep irony is that in doing this, we are at the same time undercutting the scope of the gospel, which is not just about getting out of hell free.  The gospel is a message of cosmic importance.  It is not just about saving human souls, getting them safely off to heaven when they die.  It is about redeeming the whole creation, every particle of it, and sanctifying human life and (even) community, every aspect of it.  God doesn't care only for the soul, but for the whole person. 

    Here I think a comparison of Left Behind and some statements from John Wesley is instructive.  I believe Left Behind is a work that could only emerge from a Reformed tradition (in this case sort of quasi-reformed, as both its authors are Southern Baptists). 

    The Left Behind books were extremely evangelistic, and present their salvation message repeatedly, beginning within the first four pages of the first book.  Here is their first and most representative account of what salvation means: "Saved people aren't good people, just forgiven."  Salvation here has only to do with forgiveness, not with being people who "live holy lives."

    John Wesley, on salvation: "By salvation I mean, not barely, according to the vulgar notion, the way it is popularly talked about, deliverance from hell, or going to heaven. But a present deliverance from sin, a restoration of the soul to its primitive health, its original purity, a recovery of the divine nature, the renewal of our souls. I mean that God actually changes us here to be ready for that future."

    Left Behind shows its Calvinist view of salvation particularly in who salvation is open to.  There are numbers and quotas.  In the sixth book of the series, we're informed that less than 25% of the world was raptured, and the books stress that there are set limits of how many will convert during the seven year period between the rapture and the end of the world, for instance, among the ethnically Jewish, there will be 144,000, no more and no fewer. 

    Wesley, by contrast, believed that God empowered all to accept salvation, if they choose to turn to God.  He did not believe all would be saved, but believed all could be saved.  He believed "the love of God from which comes our salvation is free in all and free for all." 

    But we can really see how Left Behind limits the scope of the gospel by asking what salvation does.  Is it just for the soul, or is it for all aspects of life?  What changes when someone is saved?  In Left Behind, it is primarily a change of status, being moved from one list to another.  Then, when you die, your soul goes to heaven instead of hell: one of the books is even titled "Soul Harvest."  In another book, salvation is described like this: "Those who have trusted Christ have been written in the Lamb's Book of Life, so that when they die physically they remain alive spiritually and are never blotted out."  One of central themes of the Bible, resurrection, is not hinted at as part of what salvation. 

    For Wesley, on the other hand, God cares about human life as a whole, body and soul.  He wrote in a letter, "It will be a double blessing if you give yourself up to the Great Physician, that he may heal soul and body together. Unquestionably this is God's design. He wants to give you, my dear Mrs. Knox, both inward and outward health."  God cares not only about your soul, but about your body, mind, emotions and relationships.  There is no "health-and-wealth gospel" here, as Wesley realizes that not all things will be perfect, and  thatsuffering is part of the bargain ("take up your cross and follow me").  Further, Wesley recognized that the gospel is for all of creation, including animals.  God raises all things up. 

    John Calvin actually did believe in the presence of animals in the afterlife.  He didn't want to, but he was convinced that the way to read scripture was to take its plain meaning, and there is just too much talk of animals in the new creation to ignore.  So Calvin creatively posited that there would be animals in the afterlife, but that they would exist in a physical world on which humans would only gaze from heaven, like a kind of free-range zoo.  For Wesley, animals, the creation and humans were interrelated in such a way that God would raise them all together, as a redeemed whole.  And because God cares about the whole creation, so should we. 

    But my point is this: the neutered gospel of Left Behind is the logical conclusion of the way that the gospel is conflated with the message of salvation in Reformed circles.  Many Reformed Christians rise above their doctrine in the same way many atheists live good lives despite their nihilism.  But the gospel as a message of how to get saved is simply insufficient to the whole scope of the gospel message. 

    So what about our sermons?  Is it incumbent on us to make the message of Christ's kingship the subject of every sermon?  Is there no room for sermons exploring the ramifications of that enthronement, sermons about the role of the church in the city, or in the nation?  Sermons about restoring relationships?  Granted that these all these must be shaped around the cross of Christ, but are they not subjects worth preaching about in their own right?

    What do you think?

    -NDSR

Tuesday, 07 February 2012

  • From Outside the Mainstream: A very basic context for the Church of God

    There was a clearly identifiable mainstream Christian bloc at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. It was the precursor of modern evangelicalism, and identified largely with the Evangelical Alliance, an alliance primarily of socially influential Methodist, Congregationalist and Presbyterian churches (src).  Many Christian groups could not accommodate themselves to this mainstream.  Historian Sydney Ahlstrom identifies five streams of Christianity that either already existed or developed during this time that found themselves in conflict with the Protestant mainstream.

    The first were the developing agnostics, free religionists, socialists and others who left the church altogether to develop alternative forms of thought and values.  The developed out a specifically Christian context, but left the institutional churches.  The second group consisted of more moderate liberals and "social gospelers" who attempted to adapt Christianity to what they saw as more urgent modern needs. This stream led to many Christian organizations and parachurch ministries like the Salvation Army and YMCA.  The third group Ahlstrom identifies is the cluster of those churches who either due to ethnic background of some "special revelation" had always remained aloof from the Protestant mainstream: Mormons, Christian Scientists, Mennonites, Unitarians, Catholics and black churches.  The fourth group was a large movement within the churches who resisted innovations such as critical method and rejected the move toward theological liberalism and the passing of Puritan moralism.  This group called itself Fundamentalism, and makes up a good deal of the current Evangelical mainstream. 

    The fifth group Ahlstrom describes more fully:

    The fifth and final group effected a more distinct separation from mainstream Protestantism than most Fundamentalists sought. A desire for a rebirth of life in the Spirit often led its adherents to schism and sectarian withdrawal. Its chief doctrinal concern was sanctification, and the "gathered" communities which it founded were Holiness or, if more radical in their innovations, Pentecostal churches.  Finding its adherents chiefly among the disinherited and the uneducated, this movement was primarily a protest against the birthright church membership and a Protestantism that had settled for a religion of conformity, middle-class respectability, and self-improvement.  Since the Wesleyan emphasis on Christian perfection was very prominent in its teaching, the Methodist church was deeply involved in the attendant strife. Many of these sectarians, however, came to share the Fundamentalist's concern for biblical inerrancy, and Christ's Second Coming often loomed large in their thought. 

    The largest of the church movements that sprang from this stream called itself the Church of God reformation movement, and locates its ministry headquarters today in Anderson, IN.  The movement is more significant worldwide than within the United States, and more than half of its people (Church of God rejects the language of church membership) are found in South America and India.  It is this church movement that I am happily a part of. 

    Another historian, John W. V. Smith, however, feels that Ahlstrom overstates the significance of the Methodist element in the holiness movements.  Many other streams at the time emphasized holiness, including the Finney revivals and the Oberlin theology.  George Winebrenner was extremely influential in the early formation of the Churches of God (then so-called), and was himself Reformed, though the Churches of God soon rejected Calvinism and declared themselves Arminians.  Part of this was due to their rejection of creeds and their taking of the "Word of God as their only rule of faith." 

    Winebrenner replaced the emphasis on doctrine with an emphasis on ecclesiology.  He said,

    It was agreed, as the unanimous sense of the meeting: First. There is but one true church; namely, the Church of God. Secondly. That it is the bounden duty of all God's people to belong to her, and none else. Thirdly. That it is 'lawful and right' to associate together for the purpose of cooperation in the cause of God.

    As such, the Churches of God opposed membership and denominational loyalty. 

    Eventually the Churches of God collapsed into various sects, each one taking with them the name of Church of God.  Three of these exist today, the two most prominent being a Tennessee pentecostal church, and the Church of God reformation movement of Anderson, IN.  When I speak of "Church of God" it is the latter group that I refer to. 

    The Church of God was pioneered by Daniel S. Warner, whose main divergence from Winebrenner was his embracing of Anabaptist social postures.  So by this time the lines had so crossed and converged that Warner's Church of God could be criticized by Methodists for their anti-denominational stance, by other anti-denominational holiness groups for their pacifism, and by other pacifist groups for their support of Wesleyan notions of total sanctification.  And despite a hundred years of distance between us and Warner, those lines are largely intact. 

Thursday, 02 February 2012

  • The Sword and the Rider

    Detractors of Christian nonviolence often point to one of the central images of Revelation as a counterpoint to the straightforward commands of Jesus to his followers to love even their enemies and do good to those who would harm them.  In one of its most extreme permutations, we have Mark Driscoll saying,

    “In Revelation, Jesus is a prize-fighter with a tattoo down His leg, a sword in His hand and the commitment to make someone bleed. That is the guy I can worship. I cannot worship the hippie, diaper, halo Christ because I cannot worship a guy I can beat up.”

    But Revelation consistently relates depicts Christ's beat-up form as normative, as it refers to him over and over as the lamb, the lamb that was slain.  As Richard Hays has said, "A work that places the Lamb that was slaughtered at the center of its praise and worship can hardly be used to validate violence and coercion."  Revelation, taken as a whole, seems to depict a pacifist church seeing its members killed off by an oppressive tyrant, while singing hymns to a God who was himself tortured to death by an oppressive tyrant.    The task of the church seems to be to wait and hope. 

    So what do we do with the sword and the rider?  Even when we notice that the followers of the Lamb do not participate in any kind of battle but are simply to remain faithful, are we left with the idea that Jesus will do our dirty work for us?  It's not so clear.

    Notice that it is specifically the "the Word of God" being depicted in chapter 19 as the rider, and that the sword is not held in his hand (contra Driscoll), but comes from his mouth.  Notice also that the phrase sharp (double-edged) sword is the same one used elsewhere to refer specifically to scripture, which is also called the Word of God.  It seems that the tyrant is overthrown not by steel but by truth, truth so powerful the author can only depict it in martial imagery.

    As Willard Swartley summarizes,

    Christian resistance - not returning evil for evil, but a willingness to suffer for the cause of Jesus Christ - echoes the central theology of other parts of the NT. What Revelation adds is the central figure of the slain Lamb. The paradoxical image of victory through suffering love forms the heart and soul of Revelation's christology. Suffering love marks the authentic followers of the Lamb.

    Willard then cites with approval from Walter Pilgrim,

    The Apocalypse adopts a stance toward the state that is radically different from the two other New Testament traditions. Here we find an understanding of the political structures as demonic, historical embodiments of injustice and evil. In response, the church is encouraged toward an ethic of uncompromising resistance.



    What do you think?  Does Revelation depict a pacifist church, waiting and hoping for God's action?  Does Revelation depict a military Jesus, whipping up support for a grassroots militia?  What is the central message of what is likely the most political book of the New Testament? 

    -NDSR

Thursday, 26 January 2012

  • Kingdom Concerns

    I was having a discussion with my sister and self-admitted friend Amy earlier tonight.  We were discussing the nature of corporations and the extent to which Christians are free to support companies that go against our morals, or simply do awful things.  I'm an Augustinian, so my perspective is that all corporations (families, nations, church congregations, etc.) are fallen but that whatever concrete goods come out of them are in fact God working subtly in the world. 

    I mentioned in particular the work that Starbucks does with its growing partners.  Starbucks partners with growers around the world, offering incentives for positive development.  For instance, Starbucks will pay their growers more if the estate will allow Starbucks and its partners build schools and medical facilities for their workers.  Everyone benefits from this arrangement: the estate makes increased profits, the families of the workers have access to education and medicine, Starbucks gets to represent itself as an ethical company to buy from, and you get to feel a little less first-world guilt over your $3 Americano. 

    Starbucks is hardly alone here.  All companies, from Wal-Mart to Toms shoes, want to project a positive image, so they do some concrete good acts, in local neighborhoods, in federal government or across the globe.  So far, so unremarkable.  But where this discussion became theological is where I said the Kingdom of God is being advanced through these sorts of initiatives, even if sometimes against the true intentions of the companies involved. 

    Amy protested that the Kingdom of God is not a matter of earthly concerns like improving people's standard of living.  That's a fine thing to do (though, she said, most people who are concerned with global poverty reflect a misunderstanding of how economic systems work), but it's not what the Kingdom of God is about.  Jesus preached the kingdom, and did not dispense money to the poor, but the message of salvation.  Earthly conditions are immaterial if you're going to spend eternity cut off from God. 

    And while I agree with her sense of scale and urgency (one of Augustine's radical insights was that empires are insignificant compared to individual souls, since empires only last a few hundred years, and souls are eternal), I don't believe the kingdom is merely about spiritual or evangelistic matters.  The Kingdom of God in my understanding reflects a creation rightly ordered.  When the strong take advantage of the weak, God's hierarchy is being subverted.  A dishonest scale is something the Lord abhors.  Where a person or a corporation makes moves toward a more comparatively just ordering of society, that reflects what God's reign looks like - and thus reflects the way the Kingdom of God manifests itself in the world.  As Jesus said, it is like a seed planted, that grows into a tree in which many birds may roost.  

    What do you think?  Do earthly agencies accidentally reflect Kingdom concerns when they do good works?  Or is the kingdom of God specifically a matter of evangelism? 



    -NDSR

Tuesday, 24 January 2012

  • The Center of the Scriptures

    I was having a discussion with Travis earlier about the nature of Bible study.  I want to put together a study not on the Bible, but on the nature of Bible study.  This is not because I think the study of the Bible unimportant, but because I think it so important that we ought to examine ourselves in light of the way we examine the Bible.  I think this will bring us to a better position before the scriptures. 

    For instance, what are the most important themes of scripture?  Justification?  Justice?  The creation of the people of God?  God's love for the world?  God's anger at sin?  And even if we agree that, say, soteriology is the main subject of the whole Bible, how do we phrase that?  Man's guilt before a holy God?  Humanity's fallenness from God's standard?  God's actions toward the righting of the world? 

    For instance, what is the central text of the scriptures, around which the others orbit as mere satellites?  Are the gospels the center, with the epistles and the Old Testament as extended setting and commentary?  Is Romans the sun, with narrative functioning only to illustrate the theology found therein?  Are the relational Psalms at the heart of scripture, with theology only preparing the way? 

    These questions are fundamental to how we study scripture, yet most often they exist only just out of sight, never questioned or even identified.  We just take it for granted that of course Revelation is the most important book, or of course the Temple is the main idea.  So I want to pull the foreground into focus a bit, and ask why, and which, and how that makes a difference.  Who thinks differently, and what would that mean? 

    What do you think?  What is at the center of the Bible, and what do people emphasize that actually belongs on the periphery? 



    -NDSR