Embarking

I’ve been away from blogging for awhile now.  For those of you who read regularly, I apologize for not writing.  I don’t share much personal/ family stuff here, but for a long time now, my family has been very sick and I’ve been on a couple of vacations.  We’ve had a number of crazy illnesses, including all 3 kids each having pneumonia twice.  We’ve had an average of about 2.5 doctor, hospital, or ER visits per week since November, and it’s been wearing us down.  In addition, our house got struck by lightening and our dog almost died twice.  (No, I’m not joking).  I don’t talk much about spiritual warfare, but nothing else explains it.  Yesterday I was talking to a doctor from the Infectious Disease Clinic at Devos Children’s Hospital, and told him to continue to run tests, but that I was asking a lot of people to pray for us. 

I’ve been continuing to read as much as I can, which isn’t enough, and continued to think.  I had a lot of ideas for posts, and then they got lost along with the sleep that seemed to disapate right before my opened eyes.

Recently, I’ve been reading some critics of what are called either postfoundationalists/ postconservatives like Stanley Grenz, John Franke, Roger Olson, et al.  I’m interested in the conservative evangelical response to projects which seek to take postmodern thinking seriously while also holding strongly to evangelicalism and scripture.  I’ve been reading all sides, but I tend to tip towards the Grenz, Franke, Olsons as well as some of what James KA Smith, Carl Raschke, Kevin VanHoozer, John Stackhouse, and others like them would say.  I like to read the critics because it helps to clarify and challenge my own thinking. 

I’ve also been toying with some article and book ideas, but haven’t recently found the time to write with the kids’ being sick and life in general.  Some space/ time to write would be awesome.

Anyway, I’ll be back with what are, I think, some interesting posts coming from my interchange with Jim Speigel on Gum, Geckos, and God starting on Monday.  I couldn’t limit my questions to one, so we’re going to go back and forth a bit on a number of questions.  I hope you enjoy it… and the book is a lot of fun to read.

I’ve talked in previous posts about what it means, has meant, and might mean in the future to be an evangelical.  There are lots of definitions, but there is some remarkable similarity among them.  I want to mention a new document here entitled “An Evangelical Manifesto” which seeks to give some definition to Evangelical identity and public commitment.  The document seeks from within evangelicalism to give self-definition in a sort of apologetic against or in contra-distinction to the labels that can come from culture, media, and those who might speak against evangelicals.  I don’t think, though, that it’s primarily defensive.  There’s certainly a view towards the future of evangelicalism in the midst of a shifting church, culture, and theological debate.  There is certainly a focus here on the place of evangelicals in public life and some “redefining” based upon evangelicalism’s wedding itself too much in the past to religious right.  The document on first glance looks to be pretty good.  People like Timothy George, Os Guiness, Richard Mouw, and Dallas Willard were a part of the steering committee, which is good.  I’m still reading it, so I’m not ready to comment, yet.  There are a few things about the tone, the wideness, and the heart of evangelicalism that I like.  Not sure if I’ll sign it, yet. It’s been noted by CNN (actually AP) and USA Today among others (and you can find an article at CT here).

Speaking of the eyes with which we look at the world, I want to quote another thing from McLaren in The Other Journal Interview.  He says the following:

…the headlines of the newspaper tell us what the crises are, and that God is very concerned about the crises of our world, and when you are touched by those crises and you open the pages of the Bible, you begin to notice things that you wouldn’t notice otherwise.

In other words, as you read culture and find out what humans are struggling with, what we are longing for, where our brokenness is showing up, it gives you new eyes into the Scriptures.  You go to the Scriptures with eyes seeking a God who interacts with these realities that we deal with today: poverty, injustice, violence, power, war, identity, etc.  The Scriptures come alive as we reach back into the living Word and God speaks to what we deal with today.  But the reverse is true as well:

If you read the Bible, you begin to notice certain themes, and that enables you to see certain things that others migh miss when you read the headlines…

In others words, the Bible gives us eyes to see our world in new ways.  As William Placher would say, “how the world looks from a Christian perspective.”  A Christian world-view gives us a different slant on the world, the headlines, and the crises.  We bring an understanding of history and a future hope to the present crises in a context that includes a powerful, loving God who is unfolding his developing story.  Being able to speak that history, hope, and our place in the story gives us a voice and content to speak into the world.  So, as we hear and apply the Word, the Spirit forms us (spiritual formation happens to us).  We then “speak” and “act” upon the world as agents of God and his Kingdom.  We herald his voice - we announce the good news - we participate in the unfolding of a new reality.  God, then, does his constructive work on and in the world by creatively speaking his Word into our hearts through the power of the Spirit as he constitutes the present incarnation of the body of Christ in the world, the church.

McLaren, in the interview I mentioned earlier, talks about how this deconstruction works.   I mentioned that the emerging church is a kind of “back to the Bible movement,” even though many see it as unorthodox.  It may be, in some ways, but that might not be bad.  Reforming - including Luther, Calvin, Wesley, and many contemporaries - is about going back to the Bible, deconstructing how culture has influenced us, and “reforming” to the word of God - which is the norming norm (to use Grenz/ Franke language).  Here is one way that McLaren says it:

…mentioning different lists of names isn’t that important, but what’s really important is that this stuff has been simmering in the biblical text itself, and we’ve been very well trained not to see it.  We’ve been trained to look for certain things and not for others… “What you focus on determines what you miss.”

Deconstructing your faith is not about losing your faith - or at least it doesn’t have to be.  It’s about discovering where the things we believe come from and how we ascertained them.  It’s about discovering what “eyes” or through which “glasses” we see the world, the bible, and ourselves.  Then, it’s about trying to figure out what God is really saying both contextually and extra-contextually.  That’s just normal exegesis - discovering what is enculturated and what’s not, and how God incarnates himself in our own culture, in these times.  When we admit and understand our cultural, theological, and personal biases, we can compare those to the biases of others, and we can try to understand what God speaks outside of those, as well as to them.  Then, we begin to reconstruct our faith - keeping some of our biases, and shedding others.

Although he doesn’t get into the technical side of this (and I would nuance this much more), I like how Olson says it in ”How to be Evangelical without being Conservative”:

For me Scripture (including Jesus Christ as the interpretive center) trumps tradition, reason, and experience.  To be more precise about how I do theology, I recognize Scripture and tradition as the two sources and norms of theology (with Scripture primary adn the Great Tradition of Christian belief secondary) and reason and experience as interpretive tools to help us sort out and understand Scripture and tradition. [p. 145]

I was reading an interview with Brian McLaren on his book Everything Must Change from The Other Journal, and I read something in his narrative from the early 90’s that is very similar to what I was going through during 1990-1999.  Here is what he says:

[Lost people's] questions re-opened for me something I had encountered a long time ago in graduate school, and that’s postmodern philosophy, and this cultural shift from modern to a postmodern culture.  So in the early nineties I started grappling with that shift, and it was really tough… If you want to use a term that comes out of that postmodern world, the word would be deconstruction.  I was undergoing a deconstruction.  Not a deconstruction of my faith as a personal trust in God, but of my theological categories and of my theological methodology.  So that’s not an easy thing to go through, but once you do a lot of deconstruction, then you have to start reconstructing or else you end up with nothing but a bunch of fragments.

The difference here for me from McLaren is that I actually discovered a more personal trust in God after the deconstruction of my theological categories and cultural history.  In about 1993, I began the reconstruction even as I continued the process of theological, cultural, and denominational deconstruction.  In fact, I think today I still go through a continual process of deconstructing.  I would prefer to call it reformata et semper reformanda - reformed and always reforming.  And here is the key to so many things right now for me (and for people like Roger Olson, John Franke, Stanley Grenz before he passed, Kevin VanHoozer, Nancey Murphey, LeRon Shults, John Stackhouse Jr., NT Wright, Rob Bell, Scot McKnight and many many more people).  I could probably write a book right now about how so many people in the evangelical world are misunderstanding some new theological and practical movements in the emerging church as heretical, when what these people are honestly trying to do is reform the church according to the Scriptures.  In fact, they’re trying to re-read the Scriptures in a way that takes seriously the impact of cultural and theological history upon our reading in good ways and bad.  More on this in a couple follow-up posts to come.

So, I’ve been writing a lot about being an evangelical, the core of evangelicalism, and in previous posts, what it really means to be a Christian living in the Kingdom of the resurrected King Jesus.  I’m focusing on evangelicals, because that’s what I consider myself.  I’m have also occassionally wrtitten about and am going to write more at some point about the emerging and Emergent Church (which is widening quite a bit beyond evangelicalism these days).  The question is, what do I think about Christianity in general?  Are only evangelicals Christians?  By no means. 

There are a lot of Christians, and we all have some pretty serious agreements and differences.  I prefer to talk about the differences within evangelicalism right now for a lot of reasons, but I want to affirm that we have brothers and sisters who love Jeus Christ, but who come from different streams and have a lot of different beliefs.  Sure, I think they’re often wrong on a lot of things, we disagree on biblical exegesis and hermeneutics, and we often have differing ideas about where authority is based.  However, do I think many if not most of them are Christians and will be with us in eternity?  Yup.  Do I think that praying to Mary means someone will go hell?  No way.  Do I think that being saved by grace through faith is key?  Yup.  Still believe that.  In fact, awhile back I was listening to a podcast interview of NT Wright when he shared interesting similar sentiments with which I have a lot of affinity.  His comments here reminded me of my study of the changes that happened with Vatican II as well as a document called “Evangelicals and Catholics Together” and an evangelical assessment by Timothy George that have been important in my growth over the years and helpful in my relationships with Catholic friends to find common ground.  Here’s what NT Wright said (you can find the transcript of the interview here):

Trevin Wax: You mentioned earlier Hans Kung. How would you distinguish your views on justification from that of official Roman Catholic teaching?
N.T. Wright: Well, it’s a nice question as to what official Roman Catholic teaching really means these days. I remember once, after there’d been an official agreement on the doctrine of salvation between Anglicans and Roman Catholics, I went to do a public debate with Ted Yarnold who’s one of the great Catholic theologians at Oxford, sadly dead now. We went off to a big ecumenical gathering in Reading, between Oxford and London, and we chatted in the car about who would speak first. I said, “Well, you’re the senior here. You better go first and lead off.” So he did. He began by saying, “Let’s just remind ourselves what the doctrine of justification is. It is that there’s nothing whatever we can do to earn God’s favor. It must come entirely from God’s grace. And the only thing that we can possibly do is nothing of ourselves, merely believe in the astonishing goodness and grace of God.” And I stood up and said, “We might as well go home because obviously we’re on the same page here. If your chaps had been saying this 400 years ago, we mightn’t have got into all this problem.”

There’s a lot too that.  Back in 1999 I wrote an article called Broadening the Scope that I never sent to anyone to be published (a bad habit of mine, many articles never sent out) as I was beginning to really get to know some Catholics (yes, true, I didn’t know many before that.)  Since that time, I’ve made a lot of friends with Catholics - some of my most favorite were connected to the Word of God community from Ann Arbor, some of whom are evangelicals and to whom much of this would apply in some ways (although there is a tension still in the issue of authority of the church in relationship to the biblicism as a core belief).  Anyway, I reread this article of mine recently and thought I’d post it for some perspective on where I’ve been.  You can link to it here if you’re interested.

So, back to the future of evangelicalism.  I’m talking, then, about “evangelicals” not everyone who is a Christian.  In a sense, I’m still trying to figure out who “we” are by looking to the past and not really looking to the future at all.  However, having a starting point might actually help move us forward, so in that sense, it does have to do with the future of evangelicalism.

Anyway, as I’ve struggled to figure out whether I’m “in” or “out” (because some people say people like me are “out” of evangelicalism), I’ve learned something that’s been quite helpful to me.  Some evangelicals prefer what is referred to as a “bounded set” of beliefs by which to draw boundaries in order to determine “who’s in” and “who’s out.”  This approach takes a set of beliefs or statements or propositions or doctrine, and draws a circle around them, creating a bounded set of accepted beliefs.   If you’re in the circle, you’re orthodox, if you’re out, you’re unorthodox.  Others talke about what is called a “centered set” which refers instead to the important core center and focuses on whether our theology and practice are moving towards (orthodox) or away (unorthodox) from the center.  This style seeks not to see who’s in and who’s out, but to be committed to moving towards the center and core beliefs without worrying as much about the theological edges. 

Guess which one I prefer?  In my estimation, the second type promotes a ministry and style that seeks to be “winsome” rather than “boundaried” and in which someone can “belong” before they “become,” whereas a bounded set of beliefs tends to only allow those who are “in” to truly belong.  A more generous evangelical practice seems to be our history as a faith community.

I recently spoke with another pastor friend of mine, and we did some drawing on a white board.  His drawing was helpful to me, and since then I’ve expanded upon it.  I’m going to try to put it in visual form and put it up soon.

I’ve commented on the Reveal Study before, but given my last post on the subject, I want to follow up a little bit. 

• Reveal Spirituality Survey Results
• Reveal Small Group Data

After reading MacDonald, it reminded me of something that Bill Hybels said in response to the Reveal Data.   I heard him share some of these thoughts at the Willow Creek Leadership Summit, but here is how he said it as quoted at the Out of Ur blog of Christianity Today called Willow Creek Repents (There’s a second post as well from Greg Hawkins of Willow.

We made a mistake.  What we should have done when people crossed the line of faith and became Christians, we should have started telling people and teaching people that they have to take responsibility to become ’self-feeders’.  We should have gotten people, taught people, how to read their bible between service, how to do the spiritual practices much more aggressively on their own.

Out of UR then goes on to says, “In other words, spiritual growth doesn’t happen best by becoming dependent on elaborate church programs but through the age old spiritual practices of prayer, bible reading, and relationships.”

Have we gotten so far away from the basics that we’ve lost the very core of what it takes to develop a disciple?

I’ve been writing a bit lately about the issues of “who’s in” and “who’s out” and drawing firm boundary lines within evangelicalism. There are some these days who are tightening up the theological borders, while others are in favor of open borders and new cultural expressons of our faith so long as we maintain our core identity (see posts on The Future of Evangelicalism).

In the midst of this has come the controversy surrounding Westminster Theological Seminary and Peter Enn’s. Apparently, Enn’s published a book (which I have not read) called Inspiration and Incarnation, using an incarnational analogy to describe inspiration and Scripture. He was recently suspended by the board from his position for this book because it apparently went against the Westminster Confession of Faith.  What I’m gathering Enns means by incarnational analogy (again, without having read the book), is that there is a co-mingling (as in Jesus’ incarnation… the human and the divine) of humanity and divinity in the project and development of the Scriptures. My hunch is that the rub here is around inerrancy and defining what “God-breathed” means. If there is too much “humanity” and culture in the Scriptures, then that might soften our understanding of it’s authority, it’s special nature, and inevitably create a slippery slope away from inerrancy. Again… I haven’t read it, but if that’s what it’s about, I can see the issues here. The interesting thing to me just on first blush is that even though Jesus was human, even though Jesus was “enculturated” as a Jewish man in first century Palestine, born into the home of a carpenter - we don’t tend to worry that Jesus is somehow tainted or less than perfect, or diminished in his God-hood. So, why would we worry about an incarnational theology of inspiration? Maybe there’s a lot more too it.

In any case, what bothered me were a couple of things (you can find this info at Christianity Today in an article entitled “Westminster Theological Suspension.” There’s also a good deal of discussion on Scot McKnight’s blog). 

First, it was interesting how split both the faculty (12 for 8 against) and the board (9 for 18 against) were on their decisions to support Enns or not.  Clearly, this is not a cut and dried issue, and one that took 2 years to get through.  Apparently there were not “personal” issues involved.  I guess this was theological.  And yet it came down to such a split vote in both places within Westminster?  Just ask yourself this question… “What does this tell us about the state of evangelicalism?”  I won’t answer that for you.

Second, even though this was supposedly a theological issue, CT said this, “…the board failed to give Enns an opportunity to be heard” and that that boards staement said, “while theological ocncerns were mentioned, there was little board discussion of theological specifics.”  Hmmm.   That’s a head scratcher.

Well, obviously I don’t know enough about the story, but it’s disturbing none-the-less.

As a Pastor of Spiritual Formation, I’ve been giving a lot of thought into the development of people into disciples of Christ.  I’m continuing to work on a process at my own church that will hopefully begin to launch in the fall that takes people from the starting point of faith, and gives them some next steps until the point when they’re multiplying other disciples.  Sounds very modern and linear of me, doesn’t it!  It is and it isn’t.  More on that later.

But, given that, I ran across an article by Gordon MacDonald from the Leadership Insight called ”So Many Christian Inants.”  I definitely resonate with the sentiments in this article.    Here is a poignant moment in the article:

I have concluded that our branch of the Christian movement (sometimes called Evangelical) is pretty good at wooing people across the line into faith in Jesus. And we’re also not bad at helping new-believers become acquainted with the rudiments of a life of faith: devotional exercise, church involvement, and basic Bible information—something you could call Christian infancy.  But what our tradition lacks of late—my opinion anyway—is knowing how to prod and poke people past the “infancy” and into Christian maturity.

So true.  Remember that famous quote (who said it… people disagree… Packer, Colsen, Chesterton… I think Chesterton first?) “American Christianity is thousands of miles wide, but only an inch deep.”  Evangelicalism has so focused on conversionism (see The Future of Evangelicalism 4, The Future of Evangelicalism 5) and the atonement that we’ve forgotten some of the important depth that the whole sciptures teach, and our part in multiplying disciples.  Multiplying converts is of course of first importance, but that’s only the beginning stage.  Lately, I’ve been thinking of conversion more as “changing allegiance” from one kingdom to another, and that once you enter the kingdom, then everything begins.

MacDonald also hits on something I’ve been talking a lot about lately.  Here’s how he says it:

The marks of maturity? Self-sustaining in spiritual devotions. Wise in human relationships. Humble and serving. Comfortable and functional in the everyday world where people of faith can be in short supply. Substantial in conversation; prudent in acquisition; respectful in conflict; faithful in commitments. Take a few minutes and ask how many people you know who would fit such a description.

In fact, I just gave a friend MacDonald’s book The Resilient Life because it talks about just that - how to live a life in which you become more and more Christlike as you approach death.  In some classes I’ve been teaching, I ask the following question to start to get at a definition and a starting point for growth, “If having Jesus formed in us is the goal (remember, Paul was in the pains of childbirth so that Christ would be formed in his followers - Galatians 4:19), then what would it look like if Jesus were living your life?  How would he look in your shoes, during your day, with your gifts, and your opportunities?  Now, where are you in comparison to that? (That’s not a question to elicit guilt, as you might imagine since I’m reformed)  Now, what is the next thing you can do to move towards having Christ formed in you?  What areas need the most work?  If you focused on one area, which one would bear the most fruit of transformation?”  Then, we can begin to develop a plan to develop spiritually. 

Our traditional answer to that question is to develop programs.  Again, MacDonald:

You need programs to make large churches go: kind of like the automakers need an assembly line that stamps out fenders as fast as possible… But mature Christians do not grow through programs or through the mesmerizing delivery of a talented speaker (woe is me) or worship band. Would-be saints are mentored: one-on-one or, better yet, one-on-small group (three to twelve was Jesus’ best guess). The mentoring takes place in the streets and living-places of life, not church classrooms or food courts. And it’s not necessarily done in Bible studies or the like. Mature Christians are made one by one through the influence of other Christians already mature.

So there’s the catch, and I couldn’t agree more.  I’ve been harping on this in my own church and trying to - not eliminate programs (they can serve a very important role) - but to lower their value and raise the value of the person-to-person interacdtion.  We were wired for relationships, and we don’t grow as well on our own.  And that’s what MacDonald is questioning:  how many of us are willing to really commit to discipling others?  How many of us are being discipled?  We tend to lament the epidemic of Christian infancy, biblical illiteracy, and lack of leadership, and yet our focus seems so often to be placed in the wrong area.  This is a question of mine as of late:  “How do we move away from a programmatic potluck approach to Christian Education and towards a relational people process of spiritual formation and discipleship?”

In case you didn’t see this, Rob Bell was featured in Time Magazine in early December.  It’s a nice article about Rob and stays away from all the controversy.  Although I didn’t like the sense of Rob as a rock-star pastor.  He’s much more than that.  However, he does probably earn the reputation because he seems to work hard at being hip.  I think it’s in order to reach a wider audience and to be heard, not just for his own props or to be cool.