Embarking

(written back in August… but forgot to post)

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 who is emerging 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.

The other thing I find so intriguing is the issue of “who” these churches reach.  My take is that not only mega-churches, but most contemporary evangelical churches are fairly good at reaching those who are part of Christendom… meaning they’ve been raised with Jesus and the church, and they have been educated in Christianity.  They may be “de-churched” because they were one-time churched, but maybe they never took the step to enter the Kingdom and submit to the Lordship of Jesus.  Those people do need to be reached.  But what I think is being argued in some of what Fitch is saying is that those who are part of the emerging postmodern, post-Christendom culture have very little or no knowledge of Christian theology or of Jesus other than what they learned on the Simpsons, King of the Hill, or in political campaigns.  These folks are a slower burn because they have so much knowledge to gain before they have a clue what they are saying “yes” to.  I’ve heard Alan Hirsch talking about this at a church planting portion of the RCA’s OneThing conference in San Antonio when he said that the “forms” of church we are using today are reaching a certain group of people, but that the culture shifts of post-christendom require new forms of church plants to reach new people who will likely never be reached by our current forms.

Ok, so I’ve been gone for awhile.  You may notice, I blip on and off like a bad TV that’s been hit by lightening.  True.  When busyness hits, I go underground - at least on the blogosphere.  I wish it weren’t so because it’s wonderful to write for no other reason that to write, process, and share.  Anyway, this week in September is the busiest week of my year and September is generally the busiest month.  But this summer in general was just plain busy.

There are a couple new books I’m reading, or almost done with.  The first is GloboChrist: the Great Commission Takes a Postmodern Turn by Carl Rashke.  If you’d like to read an excerpt, click here.  Tall Skinny Kiwi has been blogging about it, and I hope to engage it a bit in the coming weeks.  I’m pretty much done with it.  I’m also half way through Andy Crouch’s new book Culture-Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling.  Both are good books, and I’ve enjoyed them both.  Lots to say about Crouch’s book.  Raschke’s is provocative, interesting, sometimes overstated, and just OK.  I’m going to be starting Gordon MacDonald’s book Who Stole My Church soon as well as Four Views of Youth Ministry and the Church with one of my youth pastors.

On to McLaren.  I wanted to share a quick metaphor that McLaren used when he was talking about The Gospel and salvation and Kingdom.  To truncate it a bit, Brian was talking about what I’ve mentioned before about the message from many that the penal substitutionary theory of atonement or receiving Jesus as one’s personal savior is the Gospel.  Someone in the audience had questioned him about where he stood on this theory, etc. as the Gospel.  McLaren used a metaphor in which he said something to this affect, “People want to talk a lot about going to Florida and what I think about Florida and how to get to Florida, when I thought we were going to California.”  I didn’t really like his metaphor, although I thought it raised some important issues.  When you talk to people (like me… and Brian) about the Gospel, our view is wider than the theory of substitutionary atonement or receiving Jesus as Savior.  However, when many people here that, they think we’ve forfeited the gospel.  I would argue that we are actually saying that the Gospel is more than that, not less.  And for sure, Christ’s work on the cross as our substitute to atone for our sin and rebellion against God is key, and core to the Gospel.  However, it is not itself the gospel. 

So, I have an alternative metaphor.  Think for a moment about the St. Louis Archway.  It was originally built in the ’60’s to commemorate Thomas Jefferson and the Westward expansion of the Americas.  So, imagine with me that the Arch were the actual gateway to the the West, that you would have to pass through the archway to get to the western frontier.  And let’s say that the Eastern United States was ruled by a different king and under different rules than the Western United States.  So, let’s say you live in the east, and friends of yours have told you about the King and Kingdom of the West, how different it is, how much more humane, how much healthier, etc. it was.  So, you head West from your home in Washington DC and you come to the St. Louis Archway.  You take pictures; you go to the top of the Arch; you even take the helicopter ride.  Then, you settlt there on the banks of Illinois just to the East of the Mississippi river, or maybe you cross over and you set up your new home on the western banks in St. Louis, Missouri.  But, you never go West (young man).  You never see the sprawling Iowa and Nebraska plains, the deserts of Nevada, the mountains of Idaho, or the California coastline.  Even so, you think you’ve travelled West. 

That’s the metaphor I think of when we truncate the Gospel to a theory of atonement, to a sinner’s prayer (which much of the time is misunderstood while it’s happening), or being born again (not in the biblical John 3 sense - which is more like the West , but in the contemporary sense like the banks of the Mississippi).  Those are all gateways, are all part of going West, but the Gospel is about the King and his Kingdom that are both coming and have come.  And as CS Lewis said, we must go “further up and further in” to experience the beauty and wonder of the place Aslan has prepared for us. 

I’m certainly interested in the St. Louis Arch and getting across the Mississippi, but I also really want to see the Rocky Mountains, the Snake River, the Tetons, the Black Hills, the Grand Canyon, the vineyards, and pacific coast beaches.

After McLaren’s talk, my friend and I had the highlight of the evening when we stopped at one of my favorite places:  Traverse Bay Pie Company.  If you’re ever near one, you have to stop and have at least a piece of pie, but don’t go alone.  Make sure you have a good conversation partner along.

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 5, Chuck Colsen, Breakpoint, Defending The Faith

We have bought into a lie:  we’ve transferred our allegience from truth to therapy.

Leadership lessons from the marines:

• The test of leadership is to serve your troops.
• Then you give them the bigger vision.
• Follow me.

If you are a shepherd, your job is not to pander to your people, it is to lead them.

Don’t be ashamed of truth.  Defend the law of non-contradiction.

Stop blaming the culture for everything that’s going wrong in the world today.

God’s judgement comes first on the people of God.

In our country we are in Babalyonian Captivity.

Defend the faith once for all delivered to the saints.

What is Christianity? 

• It is a worldview, a system, a way of seeing all of life through Jesus Christ. 
• Abraham Kuyper:  “There is not a square inch on the whole plain of human existence over which Christ, who is Lord over all, does not proclaim: ‘This is mine.’” [Souvereiniteit in Eigen Kring, 1180, p. 32.]
• It rests on basic truth claims.  1)  It starts with a very simple declaration, “God is.”  It is the most rational choice.  Alvin Plantinga: “The first presupposition about reality is that God is.”  2) God speaks.  The bible is authoritative and inerrant.  3) The fall.  When asked the question, “What’s wrong with the world today,” GK Chesterton said, “I am.”  4) The incarnation.  5) Conversion/ transformation is essential.  6) The Trinity. 7) Unity - we are reconciled to one another. Judgement
• The Christian view must propose rather than impose. [axiom}

Comments:  I get what Colsen is doing, and I think defending the faith is important.  However, as you can see in previous posts, introducing people to a system or converting them to a system or a set of propositions as our manner of apologetics or evangelism is not my preferred modus operandi and I don’t think it speaks to a postmodern culture.  He’s not wrong, by any means.  I just think the strong emphasis on this type of apologetics and propositional truth defense isn’t so helpful these days, but rather something that makes us feel pretty good because we’re defending the faith, which is important, but we aren’t necessarily reaching people through it.  He quoted a lot of people I love (Alvin Plantinga, GK Chesterton, Cornelius Van Til), but we take different approaches to these things.  I also am a huge fan of both cultural engagement, of Christians living as a peculiar people in the culture, and of people understanding a Christian world and life view, especially being able to articulate how the Lordship of Christ makes my life different because of the commitments I have.  However, I still think that spending the bulk of our time defending propositions and a system to our current culture creates a barrier of entry for those outside.  Our time should be spent introducing people to the Lord Jesus, allowing the Spirit to work in their hearts, and then helping them to understand what a commitment to Jesus and a transformed life requires.  I would say that we pretty much agree on foundational elements, but we probably disagree on where to place emphasis in our current postmodern culture.  To put is succinctly, I’m less interested in contending for propositions or even for Christianity than I am for Jesus Christ.

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.

Welcome to the Gum, Geckos, and God Blog Tour!  I was delighted to be invited to participate.  I not only enjoyed reading the book, but interacting with Jim has been fun, too.  Jim Speigel is Philosophy Professor at Taylor University in Indiana. (Also, Jim and his wife just launched a new blog as well, called Wisdom and Folly.)  I had a hard time confining my questions, so I asked Jim a series of questions.  I’ll be posting a new one every couple of hours, and I hope you find these engaging.  Here’s the fouth installment.

Embarking:  You seem to walk on some potentially dangerous territory with some evangelicals when you say, “…if fetuses and infants can be saved, then belief in Jesus Christ must not be necessary for salvation.  So whatever must be necessary for saving faith, it can’t be belief in Jesus.” [p. 198]  “One lesson here is that we must reject the narrow concept of explicit faith as necessary for salvation.”  [p. 199] And then again when you open up salvation to those who have an implicit faith limited by the amount or type of information or understanding they receive this side of heaven.  If I were CS Lewis, I would tend to agree with you, since he opens up salvation to a post-death experience in his Great Divorce (although admittedly, almost no one survives the trip to heaven from hell and goes further up and further in).  Most people would at least say that faith in the God of Abraham is the same as faith in Jesus, but in those cases, Moses, Abraham, David, and Elijah all knew Yahweh - who even then was the same Trinitarian God.  Can you make any type of biblical case for salvation outside of faith in the Trinitarian God - whether people encounter Christ or not?  A couple things come to mind: 

1. We are post Jesus, so we’re in a different situation than the OT people.  
2.  Would Paul open salvation to those he talks about in Romans 1, but who never encounter Christ?  
3. On what grounds can we possibly open up salvation for those who have not heard the gospel?

SPIEGEL:  I addressed this in my response to one of Roger Overton’s questions on the A-Team blog last Friday.  To answer your specific questions, in reverse order: 3) my main basis for believeing God can save some who haven’t heard the gospel is consistency with the fact that infants (who die) and O.T. saints never heard the gospel but they (or many of them) are saved, which shows in principle that hearing the gospel (or having explicit beliefs about Jesus Christ) is not a necessary condition for salvation; 2) yes, I think Paul would allow for this-see my comments on the A-Team blog for my reply to the counter-argument from Romans 10:14-17; and 1) to say that our temporal location, relative to the life of Jesus, changes the criterion for salvation is arbitrary and groundless.  This is one reason why one may not hear the gospel.  Note that it is temporal in nature (applying to those who lived prior to Christ coming to earth).  Another is spatial (applying to those who don’t hear the gospel because of their geographical location-that is, they happen to live in places where the gospel has not been preached).  Now if God can show mercy to some who are temporally removed from the gospel (as we must believe from Scripture), then why can’t he also show mercy to some who are spatially removed?  To say that one is decisive while the other is not seems utterly arbitrary, particularly since Scripture makes clear that God transcends both time and space.

Welcome to the Gum, Geckos, and God Blog Tour!  I was delighted to be invited to participate.  I not only enjoyed reading the book, but interacting with Jim has been fun, too.  Jim Speigel is Philosophy Professor at Taylor University in Indiana. (Also, Jim and his wife just launched a new blog as well, called Wisdom and Folly.)  I had a hard time confining my questions, so I asked Jim a series of questions.  I’ll be posting a new one every couple of hours, and I hope you find these engaging.  Here’s the first installment.

Embarking: My question comes from pages 20 and 21.  You are talking there about how you realize that no matter how hard you try, you cannot shield your kids from the evils of life.  Then you talk about Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings Trilogy (a favorite of mine as well), the Black Riders, and the intent of “this present darkness” and the rulers of this age to hurt, intimidate, and influence your children against the Kingdom of God.  Then you mention that you didn’t realize how your training in philosophy - what you call “the study of wisdom” would prepare you to be a better parent.  The question, then, involves your appropriation here of Tolkein, and later Star Wars and your mention of art and the aesthetic in the spiritual formation of your children (see p. 131).  I love your appropriation of art and aesthetics to develop a creative imagination for what it might be like to in another person’s shoes to better live out the Golden Rule.  Throughout the book, we can see clearly your appropriation of both philosophy and your training in biology, but can you tell us a little more about the use of art and aesthetics in such things I imagine as training children in a biblical worldview, increasing their sensibilities to beauty and its malformations, and strengthening them for engagement with the world in which we live?  And beyond children, how can we increase and imaginative vision that boosts morality practically in our churches today?  (By the way, I think such creative imagination and imaginative teaching is seriously missing from our arsenal for a number of cultural reasons, particular in the Protestant and evangelical manifestations of Christian faith.)

SPIEGEL:  The category of beauty is crucial to a Christian worldview, and both adults and Christians should have a strong aesthetic sensibility.  This is so for several reasons.  First, we believe that God is the Cosmic Artist.  He created everything, and he made his creation beautiful.  Now as we struggle to comprehend both God and the nature of the universe, the concept of God as artist will help us in both respects, especially as we encounter confusing or mysterious aspects to the world and the divine nature.  Since good art has many layers of meaning and needs to be interpreted, we can better understand why there would be so much mystery in the world given that God is an artist.  Beauty is often confounding, even in human-made art.  How much more so, then, in divine art?

Second, God himself is beautiful.  Scripture frequently refers to the “glory” of the Lord, but rarely do Christians-especially evangelicals-recognize that the term “glory” is an aesthetic concept.  So when we consider the truth that God does all things for his “glory,” we discover that the meaning of everything is ultimately aesthetic-for God to demonstrate the beauty of his being.  It was through reading Jonathan Edwards’ The Nature of True Virtue that I came to this realization, and it has transformed the way I think about and apply theology.  I now see, as Edwards points out, that even moral concepts are subcategories of the aesthetic.  For example, virtue is a kind of moral beauty.

Third, God’s primary special revelation-the Bible-is itself a work of literary art.  This not only reveals God’s high regard for aesthetics but it also implies that a sound biblical hermeneutic must be aesthetically savvy.  And those of us who handle Scripture in a leadership capacity-as theologians, biblical scholars, preachers, youth ministers, etc.-must learn something about aesthetics if we are to maximize our effectiveness.  Minimally, I think this implies that Christian leaders should regularly “consume” good art, in the form of quality music, film, literature, etc.  This point answers your last question, I think.  We, as a church, will develop a stronger “imaginative vision” as we become more aesthetically literate.  Christians should be connoisseurs of all kinds of art forms.  As churches become more aesthetically trained, a number of salutary effects will follow, from increased discernment to greater creative ability among Christian artists themselves.

Finally, to address something you allude to in your question, in Gum, Geckos, and God I explain why aesthetic development is a boon to moral-spiritual development, particularly as regards our ability to apply the Golden Rule.  Since application of this rule requires a strong imagination (as one tries to imagine what it is like to be person X in a certain situation), the more we can develop our imagination, the better we will be at applying the Golden Rule.  Well, of course, this rule is at the heart of a Christian ethic, so it follows that the more imaginatively skilled one is, the more morally mature one will be-other things being equal, of course.  In other words, whatever one’s state of moral-spiritual formation, it can only be improved through aesthetic development.  Here we see, then, a strong recommendation for training in the arts and aesthetics.

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.

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.

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).