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    Part 2: Reviewing “Knowing Christ Today” by Dallas Willard

    June 18, 2010 // 2 Comments »

    A few weeks ago I kickstarted a review of Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge, by Dallas Willard (part 1 here).

    After a comment by my friend Josh on that post, I thought I’d hop back in with some further reflections.  Josh asked about Willard’s reflections on knowledge and their connection to virtue, to truth/Truth, and the works of Polyani and MacIntyre.  To my recollection, Willard is not interacting with other contemporary philosophers (at least not directly), but he does speak to the matters of virtue and truth/Truth.  Regarding virtue, Willard says,

    We today live in a curious period when almost no one is willing to discuss the question of how one becomes a truly good person.  There is now a widespread tendency in American culture to think that everyone is already good.  This probably arises out of confusion concerning the dignity of the individual or the equality of all people.  It seems to many that all you have to do to be worthy is just to be.  They mistake worth for worthiness; the most unworthy of persons still has worth, value, a certain dignity to be respected.  On the other hand, as we shall discuss later it is now widely thought that there is no objective difference between a good and bad person, or at least that we do not know what that difference is.  So, if that is true, a method for becoming a really good person would be presumptuous and pointless.  (49)

    Willard is saying that there is such a thing as objective virtue, but more provocatively, he is saying that we can know it.  Let me trace his argument briefly by noting his comments on Jesus’ answers to the 4 core worldview questions.

    1) What is real? Jesus’ answer, God and his Kingdom.

    2) Who is well-off, blessed? Jesus’ answer, Anyone who is alive in the Kingdom of God.

    3) Who is a really good person? Jesus’ answer, Anyone who is prevaded with love.

    4) How do you become a really good person? You place your confidence in Jesus Christ and become his student or apprentice in Kingdom living.

    The key to Willard’s line of argumentation here, I believe is found in this passing comment he makes – one that I think he would ave done well to devote an entire chapter (if not a book!) to.

    … ‘knowledge’ as the biblical tradition speaks of it is always interactive relationship.

    If indeed the sort of knowledge that the Bible is concerned with is characterized by interactive relationship, then it, by nature, has a dimension of subjectivity to it.

    The apologetic value of this sort of knowledge therefore is found not in intellectual argumentation, but in inviting people into a relationship with the risen Jesus, manifested (uniquely though not exclusively) in and through the Church as the Body of Christ.

    Let me stop there for now and see if anyone wants to engage with what Dallas is doing/saying here.

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    Posted in Jesus, books, church, review, spiritual formation, theology, truth

    Reviewing Deep Church by Jim Belcher

    May 19, 2010 // 6 Comments »

    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.

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    Posted in Fuller Seminary, bible, books, christendom, church, church planting, culture, doctrine, emergent, emerging church, evangelical, gospel, kingdom, modernity, post-christendom, postmodernity, theology

    Discussing Church, Christ, and Community

    May 14, 2010 // 5 Comments »

    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).

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    Posted in bible, books, church, community, review, theology, truth

    Lessons in Entertai… er… Excellence

    May 7, 2010 // 8 Comments »

    As a guy who used to swim in this world, this is simultaneously the funniest and saddest thing I have seen in a long, long time.

    Granted, this is apparently a piece of self-deprecating satire by Northpoint Community Church (as others have noted), but sometimes the easiest way to get people to overlook what is most obviously wrong, is to make light of it.

    Some comments on the video here.

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    Posted in christendom, church, funny, video

    NT Wright and the Emerging Church

    April 21, 2010 // 14 Comments »

    I had the opportunity to catch some of The 19th Annual Wheaton Theology Conference this past weekend.

    N.T. Wright was the keynote speaker and the name of the conference this year was, “Jesus, Paul, and and the People of God.”

    Bishop Wright was spectacluar as usual, but one of my favorite talks was given by Jeremy Begbie, Research Professor of Theology at Duke Divinity School.

    The title of his talk was, “The Shape of Things to Come: Wright Amongst Emerging Ecclesiologies.”  I offer this (40 min) talk to you here, but you can also go here to download or watch the rest of the excellent talks from the weekend.

     Begbie - Wright Amongst Emerging Ecclesiologies: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

    Begbie begins by noting 5 features of Wright’s theology and ecclesiology that have immediate resonance with those who identify with the Emerging Church.

    1. Intrinsic – The Church is intrinsic to the vision of the purposes of God and the fabric of salvation.  God’s vision of putting the world to rights involves, at its heart, God forming a community.

    2. Eschatological – Thinking from God’s future to the present, providing a pneumatological vision of worship and mission.

    3. Cosmically Situated – God’s putting the world to rights involves creation-wide, Christological, reconciliation.

    4. Material – Shunning the ideas of the Church as a disembodied ideal and all the material/spiritual dichotomies of modernity.

    5. Improvisatory – Combining obedient responsibility to Scripture with flexibility to cultural and contextual circumstances.

    After offering these, Begbie suggests 3 features of Wright’s theology and ecclesiology that many Emerging Churches would do well to pay more attention to.

    1. Ascension – Christ is not localizible, but is universally accesible through the Spirit.  Failure to recognize Christ as universally reigning over the Church can lead to strident triumphalism on the one hand or painful disillusionment on the other.

    2. Israel – Gounding of Trinitarian enthusiasm in the history of God’s mission in and through Israel.

    3. Catholicity – Refusing to allow consumer choice to become the defacto foundation of church unity by rallying around the cross as the focal point of unity in God’s Kingdom.

    This was an insightful talk that I would commend to anyone seeking to get a better handle on the Emerging Church and its resonance with the theology of a professor and church leader who lives and ministers in a context where the Church is all but extinct.  Here, emergence, far from being a fad, is the only choice the Church has if it wishes to participate in God’s mission.

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    Posted in church, conference, emerging church, theology

    Alan Hirsch – Making Missional Marketable

    March 31, 2010 // 22 Comments »

    I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Alan Hirsch.  The book he co-authored with Mike Frost, The Shaping of Things to Come, was the first I read that began to help me understand the angst I felt with the attractional model of church so prevalent in the US.

    This is why I was so thrown a few days ago when I read that Alan Hirsch had asserted that American Christianity is the great hope for the Church in the West.  He made comments to this point in the opening remarks of his talk at a conference called “Verge” in Texas.  You can view the video (Session 2) here.  At one point he said,

    If we don’t win the battle of the decline of the church here in the states, then it’s not going to come from anywhere else.  We will win or lose the battle over here in the states.

    His rationale seemed to be that 1) the Church is the rest of the West is all but dead and 2) that Americans have a built-in entrepenurial (apostolic) sort of spirit.

    On this count, I was surprised and disappointed on 2 levels.

    First, he seemed to communicate a latent assumption that “the West” maintains a position of superiority in terms of global Christianity.  He admitted that Christianity is growing in non-Western parts of the world, but never suggested that our hope might lie in learning from what God is going there.

    Secondly, he referenced the American entrepreneurial spirit as the key factor in our ability to “win the battle of the decline of the church.”  I was blown away!  I was immediately reminded of a quote by Einstein, which, even more surprisingly, he referenced later, but totally misused,

    We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

    It is American entrepreneurialism that got us into the mess of creating a church system predicated on the cultural values of individualism and consumerism.  Relying on the same characteristic is hardly a promising solution.

    Over and above all these disappointments comes a more biblical/theological one, namely, that putting our hope in anything except for a willingness to sacrifice what is most dear to us, to listen to the voices of those on the margins, and to trust God with our future (which may very well mean the increasing marginalization of the church), is, in any sense, in keeping with God’s desire for the Body of Christ.

    There was a 2nd major part to Hirsch’s presentation that really made me nervous.

    He made the claim that the dominant expression of church in America, that of the seeker-sensitive/attractional model, has a market appeal to about 40% of the American population.  This yields what Hirsch called a “strategic problem” and a “missionary problem.”

    The “strategic problem” is that 95% of the churches in the US are seeking to become the kind of church that appeals to this same 40% of the population.

    The “missionary problem” is that 60% (and growing) of our population is being virtually ignored.

    So far so good, but at one point Alan was commenting on attractional types of churches that are “reaching” the 40% of the American population and said, “Those who do this well should strive to do it better.”  Not change what they are doing, just do more of the same, better.

    In affirming an attractional (or what he is now calling ex-tractional) model of church simply because it succeeds in drawing a crowd, he fails to critique the most devastating reality, namely, that these churches, on the whole, don’t make disciples. By and large, they facilitate the already pervasive nominal christianity that pervades at least 40% of the American population.

    Let me try to summarize my push back on what I am hearing and seeing from Alan Hirsch as of late.

    1) Putting our eggs in the basket (Easter week!) of the American church is futile, if not sinful.  This is exactly how we got where we are and trying harder ain’t gonna cut it.  It may very well be that God is at work killing off a defunct ecclesial trajectory and we would do better to repent and ask for mercy than to rely on any ability we think we possess to save the day.

    2) Alan is right, there is a descent portion of the American population that has some natural affinity with the sort of church which thrives in Christendom.  But, merely because people will respond to an attractional model of church does not make it ok.  A pragmatic victory is almost never a biblical one.  Attractional models of church are built on the cultural values of individualism and consumerism and, save for the grace of God, are incapable of yielding the sort of disciples the world desperately needs.

    I have a serious and growing concern regarding the temptation to make missional marketable.  The temptation is especially seductive to those who, like Alan, have a deep love for the church as the Body of Christ and want to see it thrive.  But, if God means for missional theology/ecclesiology to benefit the church, it will remain an invitation to repentance, sacrifice, and death.  This sort of invitation has never had much market appeal, especially in the US.

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    Posted in christendom, church, consumerism, culture, discipleship, individualism, missional, theology, western culture

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