Embarking

I went to see Brian McLaren tonight with a friend at Baker Book House in Grand Rapids.  He was on a book tour for his new book in Phyllis Tickle’s series on Ancient Spiritual Practices called Finding our Way Again.  He didn’t talk a whole lot about the book, but instead talked for a bit about his last three books (The Secret Message of Jesus, Everything Must Change, and this new one) and the kernels of thought and heart that have produced them.  You can tell that McLaren is passionate about change in the world in which we live more in line with the Kingdom of God.  It’s always great to hear McLaren, not because he’s super-inspiration or charasmatic, but because he opens up the Scriptures often in a new way and his questions are challenging.  I also am particularly fond of his almost fearless (now) prophetic words towards the secular culture and towards the church, particularly the evangelical church.  He answered the typical questions I figured he’d get like “What do I say to my conservative friends who don’t like you or think your dangerous” and “what do you really think of hell and the afterlife.”  The second one, he really danced around and I wasn’t fully satisfied with, but he consistently went back to his reading of Scripture through the lens of the inbreaking Kingdom of God in peace, love, generosity, and goodness.  Here are a couple highlights for me (paraphrases):

“The evangelical church is not meant to be a chaplaincy to secular capitalistic consumerism.”

“If you read the passages of the bible literally about some things, you have to read it literally about others.”  His example here was the story of the Rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16, in which he says, “If you read this passage literally, it seems like the way to get to hell is by being prosperous, and the way to get to heaven is to be a poor beggar with nothing.”

McLaren also talked about what the Gospel is and how it relates to things like penal substitutionary atonement and he also responded to Driscoll’s comments (although Driscoll was unnamed) attacking McLaren - the jist being that McLaren’s Jesus is too soft and sissy, and Driscoll’s Jesus who appears again in on a war-path of violence against his enemies.  McLaren was excellent on this point and gracious to his detractors as always.  I’m not going to sum it up except to say that McLaren is thinking about writing a book that responds to the misunderstandings of his critics.  On this note he talked about exclusivism, inclusivism, and universalism in terms of salvation - and I think I’ll try to post on that next.

Overall it was an uneventful but stimulating discussion as always.  McLaren speaks today at Mars Hill, in case you’re interested. 

from Willow Creek Leadership Summit 2008: Session 4 Part 1, John Burke, Gateway Community Church, Leading in New Cultural Realities

The right kind of soil matters.

I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it grow. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow. The man who plants and the man who waters have one purpose, and each will be rewarded according to his own labor. For we are God’s fellow workers; you are God’s field, God’s building. –1 Corinthians 3:6-9

Spiritual leadership is all about creating the right soil, the right environment.

• Spiritual leadership/ church is messy.  Jesus’ ministry was messy.
• Does the soil you’re creating allow room for authentic questions and struggling?
• We have to be willing to get our hands dirty, cultivating the soil as necessary.
• Who should we be ministering to and reaching?  Messy people.
• If we are not seeing messy people around us who are becoming part of the church, then we are not leading like Jesus.

The Messy Leadership That Cultivates Environments

1. Cultivate the soil with grace-giving acceptance.  Come as you are.  God will accept you as is and walk with you to become more and more what he intended for you.  Most people don’t experience this kind of grace-giving acceptance from Christians.  [Note:  this reminds me of the book The UnChristian and many of the findings there.  See my posts on UnChristian.]  U2 - “Grace makes beauty out of ugly things.”  Too many churches are making it difficult for messy people to come to God.  (cf. Acts 15:10-11,19)  What are the barriers to grace in our context (our particular church/ perceptions, etc.) ie. hatred of gays, how we think about other religions.  How do we answer the culture’s questions well without creating barriers to grace?  In every culture, there are cultural barriers to grace.  What are they in yours?  And how do you do that without compromising truth?
2. Cultivate the soil with authentic confessing community.  Jesus couldn’t stand the game-playing, saving face of the Pharisees.  Phariseeism is pretending that we’re better than we really are.  When we really live in authenticity with one another, God shows up and something amazing happens.  And that is something the world is looking for.  “…calling out the masterpiece underneath the mud.”
3. Inspiring constant connection to God’s spirit.  [John 13-17]  This is one of the most difficult things for self-centered Christians to do.  Stay connected; fruit happens.  [axiom] Spiritual fruit is scandalously simple.

I’m impressed with John Burke because he’s connecting a couple of things together that I really like.  He’s authetic.  He’s leading an effective church reaching many who are far from God.  He’s connected to an emerging culture and meeting real people who are really in the real world.  He doesn’t back off from solid scriptural truths about spiritual transformation.  He’s seeing real fruit in the younger generations and doing creative ministry that is both meangingful and impactful. 

I’ve found the conversation around mega-churches and emergent churches lately quit fascinating. (cf. Fitch’s first post, and his redux post] I’ve heard many people for awhile saying, “the fruit just isn’t there with the Emergent Churches.”  By fruit, this usually means converts.  So, when David Fitch went after Mark Driscoll and talked about this issue, I found it quit interesting.  Being someone emergent at heart and history (and in some ways theologically, but not others) but also being currently a pastor at a mega-church (where I sometimes fit in, and other times feel like an odd-ball) these conversations are quite intriguing.  I’m particularly interested in numbers 4 and 5 of the 5 points Fitch makes, which I’ve listed below - this from the Out of UR Blog:

4. Having said all this, I think that the missional communities that do persist probably have a higher conversion rate than the Driscollesque mega churches. Missional churches are much smaller, so 6 conversions from a group of 25 over ten years would match (or exceed) the percentage growth of a typical mega church. I think it would be interesting to measure how many dollars per conversion are spent in missional churches versus mega churches. It makes me smile knowing missional churches are probably more cost effective when it comes to conversions because we resist spending money on buildings, programs, and “the show.”

5. We must recognize that “missionary conversions” take longer than megachurch conversions. The conversion of a post-Christendom “pagan,” who has had little to no exposure to the language and story of Christ in Scripture, may require five years of relational immersion before a decision would even make sense. If you do not have this immersion/context, any decision that is made is prone to be little more than a consumerist decision—it is made based on the perceived immediate benefit. It lasts as long as this perceived benefit remains important. It does not lead to discipleship.

So a true missionary conversion, which I believe missional churches are after, takes a much longer period of time than the kind of conversions most often generated through a megachurch. The megachurch is largely appealing to people who grew up in old forms of church and know the Story but quit going to church many years ago. These “unchurched people” require the old messages to be made more relevant. They need to be “revived” or called back into a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ. There’s nothing wrong with that, but we should recognize there are fewer and fewer of these kinds of people left.

These are some arguments that I myself have made in the past.  Knowing, realistically two things: 1) how inefficient mega-churches really are in reaching the lost per dollar spent and 2) how really unconcerned most members of these churches are to reach anyone.  Emerging churches are still too young to measure long term fruit and effectiveness, but it will be interesting to see the longer term effects of churches that spend less money, focus more on community, tend to care more about “holistic transformation”, and are committed to individual people over programs.  The percentages of transformed lives to Jesus Lordship and Kingdom per capita and per dollar (though even talking about it that way seems, somehow, wrong) would be very intriguing to see.  So… someone do the study already.

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 mentioned in an earlier post that one of the course corrections that some people are advocating for in cultural shifts of the last couple of decades is a move away from reliance upon the philosophical foundationalism (or strong foundationalism) of modernism that has moved from playing a supporting position to Christian theology to something more center-stage.  In this move away from the “God of metaphysics” and a reliance on objective principles to what some would say is a more biblical approach to the Trinitarian personhood of God rather than the principles of God causes a lot of concern… not to mention confusion and misunderstanding.  Those advocating a “postmodern approach” to scripture can often be attacked by virture alone of the use of the word postmodern.  Or those, like myself, who use the word “deconstruction” to talk about more clearly understanding the cultural, historical, and philosophical influences on our understandings of Scripture so that we can possibly discover more clearly the revealed Word of God sometimes are misunderstood becuase of the fears attached to the philosophical history of deconstruction.  I’m trying to speak into this issue a little bit in order to help provide - possibly - a little clarity that we are not easily labelled as relativists, liberals, or post-Christians.  It’s simply not true. 

I’ve advocated earlier for some different understandings of truth that are more personally grounded.  Not personally in the relative sense, but personal in the Trinitarian sense in which we seek to know God in three persons as He is self-revelatory through his written, spoken, and incarnated Word.  A few weeks ago, when I was reading a book on culture studies (which I might comment on later), I read this quote from Calvin’s Institutes 1.7.4 [I have not yet looked up the reference, so I hope it's right]:

…the testimony of the Spirit is superior to reason, for as God alone can properly bear witness to his own words, so these words will not obtain full credit in the hearts of men, until they are sealed by the inward testimony of the Spirit.  The same Spirit, therefore, who spoke by the mouth of the prophets, must penetrate our hearts, in order to convinces us that they faithfully deliver the message with which they were divinely entrusted.

I’ll say it again:  The Spirit leads us into all truth.  God is relational.  He apprehends us by interacting with us.  We do not apprehend Him by acknowledging, believing, or assenting to philosophical categories, truths, or principles about Him.  Principles, categories, and even the traditional “omni’s” are helpful to understanding God, but we need to be careful that we do not replace God himself in Three Persons with our philosophical, psychological, or otherwise categorical understanding of Him.

Think of if this way for a moment:  my best friend could go to a psychotherapist.  That psychotherapist along with a doctor and maybe even a metaphsycian could tell me a lot about what it means to be human, what my friend’s characteristics are, how his brain tends to function, and even give me a diagnosis based on the DSM IV.  I can learn a lot about my friend that way.  But are those diagnoses a correct description of my friend?  Are they exhaustive?  Do they replace what I learn and even experience of him when I sit down with him for coffee or listen to the pain or joy he might currently be experiencing?  And even what  I learn in that interaction, as I give language and thought to it, I will not have discovered the objective truth about my friend.  I will have learned some basic things that have truth value about him, but do not constitute his being or his truth in being.

Relationship with God takes faith in the leading and guiding of the Spirit as God reveals himself personally to us in ways that defy categories, that blow our minds, that overwhelm our spirits, and that cause our hearts to leap with excitement.  Objective truth categories can never do that.  Believing the truth - consenting to objectively true principles - does not even lead us to salvation.  Remember, even the demons believe and shudder, as James tells us.  Knowing what is objectively true isn’t bad (if we can know it), in fact it’s very helpful.   It’s just way less than enough, less important than trusting and obeying the One self-revealing God who reveals himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  The God of metaphysics is a a construction of the modern philosophical age of enlightenment - not of the Scriptures.   The God of the Scriptures is a living, powerful, and interactive Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer.

On his blog, Peter Enns has been sharing portions of a paper he delivered to the faculty at Westminster Theological Seminary in response to his book, Incarnation and Inspiration that got him into trouble and now into suspension.  In a recent post on the authority and cultural expressions of Scripture, first speaks of the mixing of Jesus divinity and humanity in his person.  Enns says that these are “essential” to who Jesus is, and that the combination is important.  I would be wrong to try to pit the humanity against the divinity or to raise one above the other.  Interesting, I was just relistening to a podcast recently by Seattle’s Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Seattle  entitled “The Supremacy of Christ and the Church in a Postmodern World.”  Driscoll was making a similar argument, accusing the Emergents of raising the immanence and incarnation of Jesus too high and accusing the New Reformers of raising the transcendence and exalted Jesus too much.  In any case, Enns argues that the authority of Scripture comes from its divine origin, in other words - in God’s words, but that it is encased unescapably in humanity, or cultural expression.  Here is a short passage from his post:

What I argue in I&I is that Scripture works in an analogous (not identical) way. Scripture is God’s word because it is of divine origin. That is the locus of authority, and no discussion of its humanity in any way compromises that authority. What a study of Scripture’s humanity does do is help us see the manner in which the divine author speaks authoritatively into particular ancient cultures. How this authoritative Scripture translates to different times and places, in both its timeless affirmations and contextualized particularity is (I trust this is not too reductionistic) the task of theological study. It is my firm experience, however, that evangelical lay readers, those to whom the book is addressed, are not accustomed to understanding the nature of Scripture this way.

This is one of the issues that I find so fascinating about how we understand Scripture, and one that I’ve mentioned in various ways here on my blog.  One of the ways it has been raised among some like myself is how much we can “purge” the human side, the cultural side, and get to pure propositional truths.  Again, don’t read what I’m not saying, and from what I’m reading of Enns, he’s not saying either but being accused of.  I’m not saying there isn’t truth, or objective truth for that matter or that God’s truth isn’t propositional in any way.  What I am saying is that our access too it is always enculturated, always incarnated, always spoken through word and cultural and interpretation from God into human cultures and persons.  God communicates, he doesn’t philosophize.  God relates, speaks, and loves rather than providing pure platonic visions of himself.  God is God, “I am who I am” and not philosophical categories and platonic idealism or Kantian pure reason.  God is interactional and in his divine goodness has chosen to speak, act, and even come incarnationally.

God is still who he is.  He is still the King and the authority.  What he says goes.  What he wants, will be.  There is no other name under haven by which we can be saved.  But let us be careful not to turn scripture - or God for that matter - into pure philosophical Kantian metaphysics.  We need to find a way to accept the way God has communicated with us - not through theological treatise, but through narrative of his relationship with his people - and then figure out how it speaks to us today, and what God really intends and who he is.  That’s much harder work than black and white propositions, I know, but that’s the work.  Driscoll is right (although I don’t like saying that) that we need to balance the transcendent and immanent God as he is.

In the year that I was born, Joseph Sittler, former professor of biblical theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School wrote the following in Essays on Nature and Grace. 

As biblical and theological scholarship moves toward a more inclusive and precise formulation of the hermeneutical problem, more serious attention is being given to what theological implications inhere in style of speech and forms of rhetoric as these come to us from the earliest Christian communities. [from "Evocations of Grace," p. 98}

The hermeneutical issues inherent in the way communities are formed, what we believe, how our social systems are shaped, how our biases are generated and solidied, how power is used and abused... these are not new issues.  The "linguistic turn" as it's usually called, and the move towards a non-foundationalist epistemology (which are two critical cultural/ philosophical/ theological changes underneath postmodernity) are not new on the scene.  The hoopla in the church today over these questions, their potential danger according to some, the risk of moving towards a hermeneutic more sensitive to these issues, and the emerging church are played like the bogie man has suddenly arrived.  As the quote above reminds us from the year of my birth... this is an issue that goes back well over 36 years, and even more.  Theologians and philosophers and linguists have been working on these issues for decades.  It is only lately that the cultural tide of postmodernity has really begun to rattle the things that so many of us  have held dear.  Had we been paying attention all along, we might have been more prepared as a church to engage with this shifting cultural and philosophical paradigm without running scared and immediately becoming defensive or reactionary.

Again... one more reason for the church to be constantly listening with one ear to the culture.  Hear me clearly... not so that we can change what we believe to suit the culture or that culture holds even a candle to the revelation of God and his interaction with creation, but so that we can more clearly understand who God is, who we are, and what we believe in the midst of shifting cultural sands, emerging global and local (glocal) realities and communicate with that culture in the language it is using.  We must stop creating bunkers to retreat from a changing culture or we truly fail to be salt and light in the world because we salt food people aren't eating or light up places where no one lives. 

Ask yourself:  "What good does it do to put an extravagant lighting system in abandoned factory built for making Polaroid film when even Polaroid has decided to stop making Polaroid and go digital?"

Or, "Why dump your greatest investment dollars in Jolt Cola if everyone's now drinking Starbucks, Rockstar, and Green Tea?"

I know those are strange questions... or analogies... but that's what it sometimes feels like churches do because we like Jolt and Polaroids.

Here is one of my favorite verses as of late:  "No one, after drinking old wine wants the new, for he says, 'the old is better.'" [Luke 5:39]

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]

Henry asks some great, probing questions.  [see his comment under "How Deconstruction Saved My Faith 2] And just as an aside… Henry… I really appreciate how you’ve written these questions and challenges to myself and to the emerging postmoderns in the church.  You show your concern, raise real issues, and do so in a way that is not condemning, hostile, or out of fear.  How I wish more people would approach conversation in such a careful and honorable manner.

I’ve struggled with your questions, too.  I address a few of the issues you’re asking about in a limited manner in the follwoing posts:

• Truth, Beauty, and Resonance
• The Future Communication of the Gospel 5
• The Future Communication of the Gospel 6

The question really is, what can we know for sure?  What is true?  What doesn’t change?  And how do we know what is truly true?  What is orthodox, and aren’t there certain, base objective truths?  I hear in some of your questions some of the key concerns that some are raising around the Emergent church like the virgin birth, the atonement wars, the wideness or narrowness of salvation, etc. 

The first thing that I would say is something I’ve said briefly before:  truth is personal.  Not relative, and not “this is my truth” personal, but instead, truth is personal because Jesus is the truth, and he is a person.  Knowing Jesus is knowing the truth.  Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes to the Father but through me.”  I believe that.  Do I know it for sure?  I know Jesus, and I trust what he says.  I trust that the Scriptures are God’s word and that it’s true and that it tells me about Jesus and that I can encounter him through the Scriptures.  That means I also trust the virgin birth.  I trust that my sins are atoned for and covered by the death and resurrection of Jesus.  Can I say those things are objectively true?  You see, here is where I get stuck.  I believe - have faith - that it’s true.  I put my trust in it.  I believe it is “objectively” true, I suppose, but more and more I don’t really care much about objectivity.  I don’t really care much about proof.  I don’t mean to be glib, but what I mean is that what I think is objective, someone else will likely see differently.  Is there an unmoveable reality out there that is truly true?  Yes.  Do we have access to that truth in a way that is ”descriptively” true for everyone?  If we did, we wouldn’t be having this discussion because it would be clear.  But I don’t think that means I can’t say someone is wrong.  You see, because we cannot ascertain what is true on our own because of our cultural embededness, our biases, and even more - our sinfulness, we rely on the personal nature of God as he speaks to us in individuals within communities of faith.  The community of faith - throughout the ages, and in our current context - is really important as we discern what God has said and is saying.  

I really like what Franke and Grenz say on this matter in which the Holy Spirit speaks in the context of our culture through the trajectory of Christian history and creates our current reality as he interacts with us in a living way.  (that’s a bad simplification… but it gives a broad brush).  That is alive and relational and faith-based and dependent upon the God of history who continues to live and speak today.  He doesn’t speak in contradition to himself, but He does help us to interact with a changing world.  There is, then, a historical theological continuity combined with a contemporary constructive creativity consistent with his character and unfolding plan.  We discern this in conversation with God through faith, engaging his Word within the living community which is the body of Christ.  It is this living body, grounded in the Word and birthed out of Christian and Jewish history that gives us the boundaries and rules of engagement.  And here is where the deconstruction (or reforming) comes in.  The body, because it is always embeded culturally, doesn’t always get the picture of what God is saying right, and so our theology develops as our relationship with God develops as we continue to deepen in our understanding of his revealed Word as we live into new historical, cultural situations.

Does that make truth relative and not objective?  I don’t think so.  Relative to God’s working with a fallen community, maybe.  Certainly our ascertaining the truth is always positioned, encultured, and understood within the eyes of our times, families, language, etc.  I just don’t think the categories of “objective” and “relative” are all that helpful anymore.  I’m more concerned with how we hear God, how we read the Bible with an understanding of our cultural, linguistic baggage, and really hear God’s living word through the Scripture, how we find more faithful understandings of his revelation, and how we can trust him more and hear his voice more clearly. 

You ask what my gold standard is:  God’s self-revelation primarily through the Scriptures (sola scriptura) and secondarily through his body, the church, as we hear, speak, and live the Word together.  I know that’s not as easy to nail down, but faith and trust rarely are. 

I think things like the virgin birth, the life, death, burial, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, the Trinity, the missio dei, and many more things have been clearly spoken, heard, and lived out by the church throughout the ages.  But I also share the concern of many emerging leaders that we have attached many cultural, philosophical, and historical items to these that are inappropriate and have functionally become a part of the core for many Christians - especially evangelicals and fundamentalists.

What I think a lot of the detractors of the emerging church miss is that much of the movement (not all of it… there is much wrong with the emerging church movement) is a back to the bible movement.  The problem comes when going back to the bible challenges our current biases, our current comfortable ways of life, our preferable politics, our desirable economics, or our (forgive me here) mostly upper classs suburban cultural mores. 

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.