lifeasmission
exploring the mystery of life and mission as one and the same
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Archive of "bible" Category
The Role of the Bible in Society
As Christendom continues to unravel and the Church loses its privileged role within culture at large, we live in an increasingly biblical illiterate society.
– Quoting Scripture will mean less and less.
– Bible stories will be increasingly misunderstood or forgotten altogehter
– And the battles that Christians wage with one another over the objective nature of Scripture will continue to damage our reputation in a broken world.
For these reasons and more, there is an incredibly important conversation to be had regarding the role of the Bible in society.
In contributing to that conversation, here’s a 40 minute panel discussion from the recent Q conference here in Chicago between Tim Keller, Alastain McGrath, Dempsey Rosales-Acosta, and Brian McLaren (you can find brief bios on all these panelists here) on that topic. I’m anxious to see what kinds of responses others might have to the questions and discussion here.
(For those reading in a feed reader, the video is flash and may not come through, so you might want to click through to the actual post to view or download.)
An Interview with N.T. Wright
The guys over at Homebrewed Christianity recently posted an interview they did with N.T. Wright. The interview was full of some really great sound bytes that I went ahead and divvied up to make your life easier
You can listen to or download the interview in its entirety here.
On being a bishop.
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On the unfortunate split between church and academy.
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On returning to fulltime academic work.
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On Bart Ehrman.
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On Marcus Borg & John Dominic Crossan.
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On Jurgen Moltmann.
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On E.P. Sanders.
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On Karl Barth.
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On Stanley Hauerwas.
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On his most recent book, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters and why he chose to write about eschatology before ethics.
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On the difference between Aristotelian virtue and Christian virtue.
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On the role of character and virtue in other religions.
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On cultural virtue.
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On the renewing of our minds when they have become largely detached from the rest of who we are.
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On Christianity Post-Postmodernity.
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On the after-after life.
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What NT Wright is reading, thinking, and planning for his “big book on Paul” as the next in his Christian Origins series.
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What we can expect from NT Wright in his new role.
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Reviewing Deep Church by Jim Belcher
Jim Belcher, the author of Deep Church: A Third Way Beyond Emerging and Traditional, and I have much in common.
We both did masters degrees at Fuller Theological Seminary.
We both have a heart for church planting.
I teach a class on the Emerging Church based on the intensive that he references in his book. (35)
We get frustrated when people talk past one another, defaulting to caricatured stereotypes rather than embracing a posture of openness.
And we both value looking for a “third way” to approach dichotomistic thinking.
He is right when he says,
It seems that every time someone criticizes the emerging church, they pick the worst-case scenario or the most extreme statements. (49)
He is also correct in noting,
It seems the emerging church, for rhetorical purposes, uses sweeping generalizations about the traditional church that are unfair. (76)
The larger Body of Christ would indeed be served well by discourse that is deeper, more specific, and marked by a sense of humble openness. Belcher’s chapters on Deep: Truth, Evangelism, Gospel, Worship, Preaching, Ecclesiology, and Culture, are essentially his attempts to facilitate just that – a worthwhile enterprise in my opinion.
While Belcher’s book is truly helpful in this regard, I’m not sure he really hits the mark in terms of articulating a true “third way” as a means of engaging these topics. Very often, his conclusions in these chapters are a combination of a chastened version of the EC position he articulates and an expanded version of the traditional position he articulates (usually w/ reference to Tim Keller and his church!). I suppose this is a kind of “third way,” maybe even precisely the one Belcher desires, but I’m not certain it’s the most helpful kind of third way for the Church to pursue.
The mistake, I believe, comes in the assumption that one can simply pit the positions of the EC against the positions of the traditional church. The main problem here is that many in the EC camp are themselves trying to articulate and maneuver a “third way” between the modern categories of conservatism and liberalism, a feature that Belcher seems to either overlook or discount w/o comment. An indication of this is his quick dismissal of the Anabaptist tradition from which many in the EC draw as one which is able to circumvent many of the dichotomies addressed in this book on account of its fundamentally, Christendom-rejecting, stance. Belcher never seems to ask, “How might people in the EC camp already be searching for a third way in response to classic approaches to these issues?,” but assumes that their positions are simply reactions against the positions of traditional churches.
Belcher sets himself on this course in stating,
We need to define it [the emerging church] as a movement, particularly its theology. The best way to do this is to look at what the emerging church movement is against – the things they are protesting and the rasons why they are calling for change. (38)
For the life of me, I can’t grasp why someone would want to define a movement by what they are against (even it it is a protest movement) rather than what they are for. We certainly regard what the classic reformers were for as far more more important than what they were against! But more than this, Belcher fails to identify missiology as a core motif for the EC. For many, if not most, in the global EC movement, it is an attempt to participate with God and God’s mission in the world that is reshaping how they understand the sorts of topics that Belcher raises in his book, not vice versa.
These criticisms notwithstanding, I am glad that Jim wrote this book and don’t doubt for a second that it has an will continue to help many.
**Jim has recently decided to resign from his position as lead pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach, CA. You can read a letter he wrote to the congregation regarding this transition here and some additional discussion about this sort of trend here.
Discussing Church, Christ, and Community
While Amy was away I had the chance to read some books that has been on my hitlist for a while.
Deep Church: A Third Way Beyond Emerging and Traditional by Jim Belcher
Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge by Dallas Wilard
Free for All: Rediscovering the Bible in Community by Tim Conder and Daniel Rhodes
I plan to offer some thoughts on all three eventually, but I was wondering if there might be some lifeasmission readers out there who have read any of these and were anxious to have some discussion on one in particular.
(Books link to BetterWorldBooks.com, my book supplier of choice).
Toward a Missional Vision of Theological Education: Character Formation
Previous posts in this Series:
Preliminary Thoughts | The Root of the Problem | The Fruit of the Problem | New Soil | Community Rootedness
In my last post I tried to make a case for the necessity of theological education of missional leaders being rooted in missional community. With this as a contextual prerequisite, I would further suggest that the ultimate aim of a missionally oriented process of leadership training is the formation of Christlike character.
more of this artist’s amazing photography here
It is too naive to suggest that Christendom was wholly uncritical of the character of Christian leaders. It is more accurate to say that there’s an inherent assumption within Christendom that if we can only ensure that our leaders believe all the right things, their character will follow suit. This has turned out to be a deeply lamentable mistake.
It may be necessary for me to reiterate at this point that I am no anti-intellectual. You would never find me downplaying the importance of continuing study, exposure to new perspectives and ideas, or deep, thoughtful reflection. Instead, I would suggest that a missional vision of theological education will only value intellectual dimensions of training inasmuch as they contribute to the formation of Christlike character in missional leaders. Therefore, we might expect a missional vision of theological education to…
1) Train leaders how to think as opposed to telling them what to think. This is only possible when we humbly buy into the reality that our systems of truth are all fallible and trust that encouraging leaders to follow Jesus is preferable to warning them of the dangers of venturing outside of a particular theological grid. Thus, through books, articles, media, speakers, discussions, conferences, etc., we may freely (and wisely!) expose leaders to various biblical/theological traditions and perspectives. Where the rubber meets the (missional) road, so to speak, is in the questions we encourage students to ask of what they are being exposed to. I won’t go into them here,* but I submit that a missional vision of what it means to be the Body of Christ inclines us to ask different questions of all that we learn than that of Christendom.**
2) Conjoin all intellectual study with missional practice. Only given the assumptions of Christendom could we have divorced religious study from community based missional practice and witness. A missional vision of the church and theological education is characteristically and relentlessly incarnational. Missional theology is nothing if not that which we come to know about God as we participate in God’s mission in the world through the Body of Christ. In this light, I would suggest that each and every aspect of intellectual study find its place within a structure of missional practice which includes both personal and corporate spiritual disciplines.
3) Develop a community based assessment of a leaders process of character development. When character formation is the central issue in the equipping of missional leaders, time frames are perfunctory. It’s not one’s ability to make it through a process that qualifies them as a leader, but the manner in which they participate and their holistic development from start to finish. It takes a community to discern these things. As valuable as having the commitment and support of a community is to a leader in training, their willingness to speak the truth in love regarding their development is every bit as essential. Incorporating various means of mentorship and scheduling regular checkpoints between leaders and communities are key components of a missional vision of theological education.
What we know and what we can do as leaders isn’t just meaningless w/o Christlike character, it’s actually negative, destroying the very nature of what it means to follow Jesus and participate in God’s mission in the world. As Jesus was only worth following inasmuch as he said and did as God said and did, so too are his disciples w/o power and authority if they are not leading out of this sort of Christlike character.
This is all relates to the subject of my next post, the shaping of convictions. Hope to have some helpful dialogue before then though, so let’s have at it!
*You can find a very helpful article on this subject here.
**In proposing this I readily (and happily) admit that we will always be coming from a particular (hermeneutical) vantage point. I will explore this further in a future post, but the notion of some completely objective posture in the formation of leaders is neither possible nor desirable.Some Struggles with John Piper
When I was a sophomore in college, I helped to lead a high school mission trip to Russia. On the plane, I was reading a book someone had recommended, “Desiring God,” by John Piper. Through the first 1/2 of the book, I was looking for a way to throw it off the plane – I thought it was crap. By the end of it, I was transformed. I had a completely different take on the nature of Christian faith and discipleship that has stood the test of time.Once I started to get into Podcasts, Piper’s was one of the first ones I subscribed (iTunes link) to. I still listen to it with some regularity and commend it to you.
When I was contemplating resigning my role as a student pastor in 2004 to pursue more theological education, I decided to take some time off to think, pray, reflect, and ask questions. I traveled to Minneapolis, visited Bethlehem Baptist Church where John Piper preaches, and had the chance to talk with him for a while after one of the services. An alum of Fuller Theological Seminary, I expected him to be encouraged that this was one of my options. He wasn’t. He said that they had gone down a dangerous to path toward Christian liberalism.
I went to Fuller anyway and discovered that John was wrong.
My idolatry of Piper broken, I began to notice some other aspects of his theology that I had a really hard time with.
I think he gets the issue of God’ sovereignty wrong – not because I believe the opposite, but because I think the whole Calvinist/Armenian debate is flawed at its core. Both positions assume that salvation is something one can have and therefore argue about who secures our having it – God or man. With good intention, some will attempt a middle road and say it’s a both/and issue. It’s not. It’s a neither/nor issue. When you begin to understand that “salvation belongs to God” (Rev. 7:10) and is therefore something we can only participate in, never have, the whole debate changes.
I also lament Piper’s view on women. Again, he will argue the “conservative” side of the complimentarian/egalitarian debate, which I think begins with flawed premises. Do men and women compliment each other or are they equal? That question isn’t nearly biblical enough to be of any real value. A more important question, at least as the Bible is concerned, is, how do men and women, who only together image God, as couples and singles, function together in doing and equipping others for ministry. And the plain answer is that they serve as co-laborers – that each and every aspect of ministry, from preaching and teaching, to caring for children, suffers when not practiced by both capable and gifted women and men.
There was much bally-who in the blog-o-sphere last week when Piper connected a tornado in Minneapolis to a meeting the ELCA was having regarding the issue of homosexuality (here’s the original article and a follow up one). I have listened to Piper enough that I think what he meant to say was that whenever natural disaster strikes it is an opportunity for us to remember and turn to God, but he seemed to be saying quite a bit more than that and it calls for some accounting.
Lastly, he’s got a bad take on the woman at the well (John 4). Like perhaps the majority of preachers, he is quick to assume the moral degradation of the woman Jesus encounters, frequently noting that “she’s sleeping with her boyfriend.” As I take into account the cultural factors at play in this passage as well as the fuller scope of Jesus’ ministry, I find this interpretation to be maddening.
Women had not rights in Jesus’ day; they had not power to divorce a husband; they were property. Unless they were from a royal or extremely well off family, they had almost no hope of being able to provide for themselves. As the Bible makes clear, the ability to produce children more often than not determined a woman’s worth.
While we might trip over some of the translated language, I think it’s much more faithful to the text to understand this Samaritan woman, not as a whore (essentially what Piper and others tend to d0), but as a shamed and broken victim of injustice. When Jesus notes that this woman had had five husbands, he’s not digging her for her sin – when did Jesus ever do that except for the religious leaders?! And when he says that the man she now has is not her husband, he’s not some *&$%^&# calling her out for “sleeping with her boyfriend” – again, just doesn’t fit the Jesus of the gospels. He is calling out the source of her shame and injustice so that he can heal it – something he did all the time.
I love John Piper as a brother in Christ. His passion and zeal for the supremacy of God captivates and inspires me. But here’s the final thing about John and this gets me more than anything else. I have never heard him say (and he’s really public!), “I might be wrong. There are other followers of Jesus who believe differently than me and they just might be on to something.” Even if he has said something like this at some point – it is quite definitely not a theme in his teaching the way I wish it was. I’m not talking about being wishy-washy. I am taking about some good ol fashioned humility and firm trust in God’s work over his theology.
I am not writing this to disparage. Beginning with myself, I would ask anyone who has some theological issues with another brother or sister in Christ, to think first and foremost about who they really are and what they have done for the sake of the gospel. I am no anti-Piperian. I consider John a true partner in the gospel and would run to his defense on most occasions. But this is just some stuff that I really struggle with enough to hope that others would as well.
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