Posts tagged ‘Brian McLaren’
Thoughts on Faith, May 2011: Part VII (Theology and real life)
It’s the end of May, so I better bring this series of random thoughts on faith to an end.
What is the point of all this musing? I’ve come up with this: Theology is worthless if it doesn’t motivate me to act on what I believe. Brian McLaren discusses this and equates orthodoxy with practice in his book, A Generous Orthodoxy:
This book can rightly be accused of blurring that distinction between orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Absurdly (to some at least) this book seems to approach orthodoxy as a tool or means to achieve orthopraxy…
In sum, this book sees ortopraxy as the point of orthodoxy.
Interestingly, I recently read that early Christians would have done things in an order opposite that of what we usually do. Tony Jones writes:
One thing that’s intriguing to note, and easy to lose sight of two millennia later, is that in the very earliest church, practice begat doctrine. That is, the early church didn’t convene theological conferences to debate the nature of the godhead and then spin out a practice of prayer.
Instead, it’s clear in the earliest Christian documents that the people prayed, and out of their experience of God’s nearness did they develop doctrinal beliefs regarding who God is and how God acts.
So what do I believe, and how should I act? About a year ago, I blogged about my creed:
I believe in love, lived out in the context of community.
And what does this have to do with all of these thoughts? I’ve been writing about atonement, Rob Bell’s book (Love Wins), and universalism, among other things. Sometimes, I seriously consider (or even embrace) ideas that are unorthodox (at least within some streams of Christianity). But it all comes down to this: I’m finding that the love of God, demonstrated in the life of Jesus, is bigger than I could possibly imagine. I’m tired of subtly being motivated by fear – fear of hell, fear of my own failure, fear that the kingdom of God is irrelevant to today’s world. I’m ready to embrace something bigger. To re-quote Bell…
What you discover in the Bible is so surprising and unexpected and beautiful that whatever we’ve been told or taught, the Good News is actually better than that – better than we can ever imagine.
The Good News is that love wins.
P.S. Greg Boyd provides a summary of all of this: “The Heresy of Failing to Love“
Thoughts on Faith:
Thoughts on Faith, May 2011: Part I (Rethinking the cross)
(I think I’ve rambled on this before, so I apologize. I didn’t go back to check my archives. But these things are still going through my head…)
Why did Jesus die on the cross? Did Jesus have to die on the cross?
A common answer (and the one that I carried with me until recently) goes something like this:
Humans have sinned. The penalty for sin is death, otherwise known as punishment in hell. This is because sin offends God’s holiness. Even though God loves us immensely, God cannot tolerate the presence of our sin. The only alternative is for a sacrifice to be made on our behalf – a sacrifice of a spotless lamb. Therefore Jesus, God’s son, stepped into history (thereby demonstrating God’s love), took on the role of spotless lamb, and died in the place of humanity. Those who accept his sacrifice are reconciled to God. Otherwise, punishment remains – an eternity in hell.
This view is often called penal substitutionary atonement. But about two years ago, I started rethinking my assumptions about God, and I’ve needed to revise my beliefs.
First, there was a general discomfort with “sharing the Good News” (with the assumption that “Good News” equaled the story above). Maybe it was just the Anabaptist in me, but if news was to be good, it needed to have some effect on the here and now. “Thy kingdom come… on earth as it is in heaven” and all that. Throw in a dash of James (“faith without works is dead”) and I had a problem seeing how that story of salvation represented Good News.
Then, I got to thinking about the nature of God. Did God really send Jesus to earth for the sole purpose of dying? Does God require death as payment for sin? Isn’t this akin to divine child abuse? Is God violent?
Furthermore, if Jesus is the image of the invisible God, isn’t that contradictory to the story above? In that story, there seem to be two Gods: one who requires death to cancel the debt of sin and whose holiness cannot be in the presence of sin, and another who had just spent his whole life walking around in the midst of sin and who freely forgave those who crucified him. In the story above, it’s hard to say that God forgives us at all. Rather than forgiveness of debt, there is payment of debt.
Many of these questions were inspired by J. Denny Weaver’s book, The Nonviolent Atonement. (Atonement is that which reconciles us to God.) I’m not sure why I picked up the book, because I tend to not read things that challenge my beliefs (to my shame). Nevertheless, I borrowed it about two years ago from a friend at church.
Through reading that book and others (e.g. A New Kind of Christianity by Brian McLaren; A Jesus-Driven Life by Michael Hardin) and through reflecting on my Anabaptist beliefs regarding God (understood through Jesus), I’ve come to see the death of Christ as the ultimate act of human evil, not something demanded by his Abba. As McLaren puts it…
Where do you primarily find God on Good Friday?
If God is primarily identified with the Romans, torturing and killing Jesus, then, yes, the case is closed: God must be seen as violent on Good Friday. The cross is an instrument of God’s violence.
But if God is located first and foremost with the crucified one, identifying with humanity and bearing and forgiving people’s sin, then a very different picture of God and the cross emerges.
God demonstrates love for us by living among us; by seeking us out; by not repaying our act of evil with more evil. God has always been in the business of atonement, inviting us to be reconciled and to enter the kingdom. Jesus has shown us how to do that by taking up his cross and returning love for hate. He invites us to do the same.
Like this:
Justice served?
Like many others around the world, I’m distracted by the death today of Osama bin Laden. These are some random (and some not-so random) thoughts going through my mind…
- There is a part of me that is relieved. Clearly, bin Laden was capable of inspiring great evil. However…
- These feelings of relief trouble me. To be clear, I’m not celebrating, but there’s some sense of “he got what was coming to him” in my thinking. But…
- Isn’t the tragic message of Good Friday that we are each capable of evil? But Christ calls us to live in Easter…
- Bless those who curse; forgive; seek reconciliation; renounce hate and embrace love.
There are plenty of people who are calling this death “good news”. We are told that “justice has been served”. But we conveniently forget that our government has inflicted 40× the civilian deaths experienced in the United States on September 11th. We have spent over a $1 trillion destroying and tearing down. I cringe when I imagine what other uses there are for that money. Has justice really been served? I don’t think so.
I’ll conclude with some wise words from Brian McLaren this morning:
Joyfully celebrating the killing of a killer who joyfully celebrated killing carries an irony that I hope will not be lost on us. Are we learning anything, or simply spinning harder in the cycle of violence?
As you talk about this news, I hope you will consider how your response can counter rather than reinforce the cycles of violence that spin around us. And please God, help us bring healing beauty to the ugliness of violence in whatever small way we can. Today.
More on ANKoC – Q#2
A couple of weeks ago, I reflected on the second question in Brian McLaren’s book, A New Kind of Christianity. Brian suggests that Christians usually read the Bible in a “constitutional” manner, when in fact a better approach would be to see the Bible as a community library. It turns out that some of our Supreme Court justices don’t think that we should even read the Constitution in a “constitutional” way…
Souter v. Scalia at Harvard Yard
By Stephen Prothero, Special to CNNScore one for David Souter. In the fisticuffs that is the Supreme Court, the recently retired justice often found himself on the losing side of 5-4 decisions. But in delivering Harvard’s 2010 commencement address last week, he gave the co … Read More
A New Kind of Christianity – Q#2
Question 2 – How should the Bible be understood?
Brian introduces this question by noting three different quandaries that we now have with the Bible:
- Science – We treat it as a science text containing answers about psychiatry, biology, physics, and the environment.
- Ethics – We extract decisions on a whole host of ethical problems which the Bible doesn’t address.
- Peace – We use the Bible to prop up an “us vs. them” mentality that perpetuates violence.
Our problems with the Bible aren’t new. Brian spends time discussing how slavery proponents in pre-Civil War days used the Bible to support their position. Since then, we’ve repented of our support for slavery, but we haven’t repented of our approach to the Bible that allowed us to support slavery in the first place. That approach (according to Brian) is to treat the Bible as a legal document – specifically, a constitution.
The problem with a legal approach to the Bible is that sometimes the Bible contradicts itself and sometimes it can be made to support any number of different views based on one’s hermeneutic. And since we like to be right, we find an interpretive method that best meshes with the outcome that we desire.
Brian argues, however, that the writers of the Bible never understood their writing to be a kind of legal document that would be applicable forever in an unchanging manner. Instead, they saw their work as a record of a community’s struggle to be faithful to God in a specific time and place.
Based on this, Brian suggests that the best way to understand the Bible is not as a divine constitution, nor as mere human literature, but rather as a divinely inspired library.
Response
This is one of the questions that I’ve wrestled with most, so I’m pleased that Brian has considered it. I even wrote a huge blog entry last year that I was going to post over the course of two or three days, but it became so ungainly that I gave it up.
I reflected in that earlier “non-post” on the way I approach the Bible and described how for most of my life I used a “constitutional reading”, as Brian describes it. Except that I couldn’t quite read the Bible that way all the time. For example, at some point I couldn’t understand the creation account as a literal six-day story anymore; and I realized that there was a context that needed to be considered when Paul talked about the place of women within congregations; and so on. But you might describe my approach as remaining as close to a literal reading as the text and my conscience would allow.
But gradually it occurred to me what was happening when I read the Bible this way. Every time I encountered a situation where my conscience could no longer agree with my old understanding of scripture and where scripture could be understood in multiple ways, I found a way of reading the text that bent it to my viewpoint. To be clear, I’m not saying that every new viewpoint was bad – in fact, I was convinced that the opposite was true. But my approach to the Bible was inconsistent, and this caused a mini crisis of faith for me.
It was at that point that I started exploring the idea that the Bible didn’t have to be read as a textbook (or constitution, if you prefer) – that one could also read the Bible as the unfolding story of how God’s people learned to know God. The culmination of that story (in other words, our fullest understanding of God and the primary lens through which we read the rest of the Bible) is found in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
And I further realized that my Anabaptist faith was not in opposition to this approach. We affirm the authority of scripture, but we don’t claim that it to be inerrant or infallible. We believe that it is important to for the community believers to work together with the help of the Holy Spirit in order to understand that which is “God-breathed” (a term that implies that the Bible is living and vibrant, as McLaren notes; not static and unchanging).
In many ways, I feel much more at ease approaching the Bible now. Inconsistencies or contradictions within the text are no longer challenges or threats to be surmounted. Rather, they reflect how the community of faith grapples with hard problems.
One thing does still bother me – that there still exists the very real danger that I’ll find a way of reading scripture the way that I want. I alluded to one possible solution above: to read the Bible with the community. Then the new danger is that I can simply find a community that shares my opinions. At some point, though, I think two things are important: faith that the Holy Spirit will work in mysterious ways, and a commitment to working with community to understand what the Bible is saying.
And in the end, I trust that God’s grace will cover my hermeneutical faults.
A New Kind of Christianity – Q#1
Earlier this year, Brian McLaren’s book, A New Kind of Christianity, was published. I was anxious to read it because of how valuable his other books (especially A Generous Orthodoxy) have been to me. Brian and others have suggested that God’s Spirit is causing Christians to explore new ways to live faithfully in a post-modern world (“Emerging Church” is one name that is often given to this movement), and that there are some common questions that people are asking as a result. In his new book, Brian raises ten of these questions. I think that the questions are exciting: first, because I was asking many of the same things, but more importantly because I believe that they provide space for new life in the Church.
The goal (says Brian) is not to arrive at a set of answers, but rather to begin a conversation. Now – Brian is sometimes accused of presenting his (unorthodox? heretical?) answers to these questions as being definitive and not open to discussion. However, I decided it would be healthy for me to take him at his word – that this really is a discussion – and enter into it, as well. I even recruited my Ordinary Spouse to read the book and discuss it with me. My goal is to do some reflecting here on each of his questions. We’ll see how this goes, starting with question #1…
Question 1 – What is the overarching storyline of the Bible?
Western Christianity (according to Brian) tends to read the Bible in reverse, looking back through the influence of our modern teachers and preachers, through the Reformers, through the Church fathers (where are the mothers?), through Paul, eventually seeing Jesus. The result is that we see a biblical narrative that is strongly influenced by Greek thought and Roman empire. This storyline consists of six segments: 1) it begins with perfection in Eden, 2) veers downward through the Fall 3) into Condemnation, 4) which then leads farther downward to Hell 5) or to back upward via Salvation 6) to a restored state of perfection in Heaven. This “six-line” narrative reveals the influence of Greco-Roman thought by morphing the garden into an ideal, neo-Platonic state of being. This perfect “state” (in which God also exists) is glorified; change or “becoming” (which reflects Aristotelian influence) is discouraged – in fact, God avoids it (which is why Jesus had to die for the sin of humanity… but that comes up in a later question).
Brian then asks a question which is troubling: “Can we dare to wonder, given an ending that has more evil and suffering than the beginning, if it would have been better for this story never to have begun?”
In contrast, what would we find if we set aside some of the usual lenses through which we view the Bible and tried to see Jesus and his ministry through the Old Testament? Brian points out that words like “fall” and “original sin” aren’t used in the Hebrew scriptures; that Eden isn’t described as “perfect”, but as “good”; that God doesn’t avoid humanity and has no problem looking at sin; that in fact, God has always been intimately involved in guiding human development. He outlines three parts to the biblical narrative that are suggested by Genesis, Exodus, and the prophets (especially Isaiah). First, we have a tendency to mess up God’s good creation, but God works for reconciliation. Second, we oppress others and suffer oppression ourselves, but God works as liberator. Third, God has given us a vision of a coming kingdom – not one in an eternal heaven, but rather one that we are to work toward here and now on earth.
Response
Ordinary Spouse and I are in agreement with Brian’s assertion that the “six-line” narrative is a common way of approaching the story of the Bible. We recognize the dualism inherent in that approach, although we don’t have the knowledge to critique its origin in Greek thought. (Indeed, Brian acknowledges that he simplifies things quite a bit.) In our experience, Mennonites often tweak this story line by adding an emphasis (either lived or preached) on our responsibility to our neighbors – to pray for “God’s kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven”, if you will. Yet, it seems to us that in the absence of any motivation to do otherwise, Mennonites adopt the predominant, Evangelical “six-line” narrative that Brian outlines. Sermons often emphasize personal salvation, and altar calls occurred with some regularity (though perhaps not weekly). But no one asked Brian’s question: why would God create a world where the ultimate average trajectory is downward, rather than upward?
I have never thought about the issue of being vs. becoming to the degree that Brian does. However, I don’t think I’ve viewed God as static in the way that Brian associates with the “six-line” narrative. A random thought: it’s fascinating that God views creation as “good” and then “very good”. Why wouldn’t God just make everything “perfect”? One might argue that God values the creative aspect more highly than the finished product (which isn’t to say that the finished product isn’t important). To consider this thought a bit more, we see throughout the Biblical story that God allows (even encourages and invites!) a creative struggle with humans. Already in the garden, we see Adam naming the animals. We see Abraham striving for the future of Sodom and Gomorrah. Jacob wrestles with God. Prophets demand justice. And so on. And we see an upward trajectory throughout the Bible as the human creative urge learns to align with God’s.
I do wish that Brian would have addressed the concept of Hell a bit more in this section (and maybe that’s still to come in the book). There are some pretty vivid images of Hell in the New Testament, and though it is clear that the images are not intended to be literal and that the New Testament understanding of Hell is different than what the modern Church seems to have inherited, we still should understand how these images fit into the story.
Overall, though, I really appreciate the effort that Brian makes to give us a view of the Biblical narrative as an unfolding relationship between God and God’s people – one that is moving toward the prophet’s vision of God’s peaceable kingdom here with us.
What am I focusing on?
Back in January at the Music and Worship Leaders’ Retreat at Laurelville, Brian McLaren shared a wise and cautionary statement with the participants:
What we focus on [in scripture] determines what we miss.
I think that the natural tendency of someone hearing that statement (especially if that someone is me) is to say, “Ah-ha! You see – you are looking at the Bible in a different way, so you don’t understand my point.” And that, of course, would immediately underscore Brian’s warning to be aware of your own blindness. In fact, if I remember correctly, this same warning was given a long time ago with a slightly different phrasing:
Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbor, “Let me take the speck out of your eye”, while the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.
Matthew 7.3-5
I’ve been trying to live with this warning. It’s not that I have concerns with what I’m focusing on, but I do realize that sometimes my thinking drifts away from what might be defined as “orthodoxy”. And since Anabaptists are big on understanding scripture within community, I should at least be honest with my differences and open my thoughts to critique.
In that light, this is how I find my focus directed these days:
I understand God’s word in the light of God’s Word – In other words, I interpret scripture through the primary lens of the ministry of Jesus. How did Jesus live? How can I emulate that?
What are our lenses? – I mentioned the lens of Christ’s ministry, but I think that there are others – our cultural perspective, the writer’s context, and so on.
New Testament vs. Old Testament – I focus on the New Testament. I think that I understand the Old Testament in a more contextual, as opposed to authoritative, sense. (I keep turning that over in my brain, but I’m influenced by the instructions to the new Gentile believers that Paul talks about in Galatians. They weren’t asked to submit to the requirements of the old covenant. They were simply asked to act with compassion toward the needs in the community.)
Scripture as narration vs. dictation – Is the Bible a set of words transmitted from God to paper, or is it the unfolding story of God’s people and their understanding of God? I lean toward the latter.
Grace vs. holiness – Or, what do we do with gray areas of life? Are we so afraid of getting our hands dirty that we isolate ourselves from the world? Jesus hung out with everyone. As Martin Luther said, “Sin boldly.” Allow grace to be amazing.
A God of peace – I’m thinking quite a bit about a God who isn’t violent. And in turn, I’m thinking about a non-violent atonement vs. the popular penal substitutionary theory.
Well – that’s at least an initial list of how my focus may differ from that of other Christians. Have at it, folks. Am I a heretic yet?
Scripture: What do we see? What do we miss?
On another blog, I’ve been continuing some conversations inspired by Laurelville’s Music and Worship Leaders’ Retreat last weekend. I was reminded of something else that Brian McLaren said that really resonated with me.
On that site, we were discussing various concerns related to the future of the Church, and I mentioned the challenges facing my congregation:
Some of us are concerned that we not miss scripture’s moral imperatives. Others of us are concerned that we not lose sight of the clear biblical emphasis on social justice. Still others of us are concerned that members of either of the first two groups could leave the congregation, and in the process minimize the importance of Jesus’ prayer for the unity of his followers.
Given all of that, you may perhaps understand why I could identify a cautionary word spoken directly to me within Brian McLaren’s statement that
What we focus on [in scripture] determines what we miss.
I think that this is vitally important to the broader denomination right now. How we carry on these conversations will be quite important in influencing how the world perceives the Church.
On the road again…
Well – I’ll be on the road again if today’s big snow doesn’t thwart my plans. As my grandfather used to say, “God willing and the creek don’t rise…”
I’ve only been home from our Christmas travels for five days, but I’m leaving again for the east this evening. I’m going to Laurelville* for their annual Music and Worship Leaders Retreat. I’m really looking forward to an intense, jam-packed weekend. The resource people (Marilyn Houser Hamm, Marlene Kropf, Ken Nafziger, and Ted Swartz) will be outstanding. And Brian McLaren will be present as a participant. I’m hoping to come home invigorated with lots of ideas for Lenten worship.
* Did I mention that Laurelville may be my favorite place on earth? Oh, yeah – maybe half a dozen times.
In the meantime, I was looking over my blog reader recently at the things that others have written and I have found to be insightful. I wanted to share a few of them.
“War as Theft” by Michael Danner
Michael begins with this quote:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
You might be surprised who said it.
“Hunger, food, obesity, starvation” by Brian McLaren
Check out the fat map.
“Evangelism will change the world” by Peter Rollins
Maybe not what you think of, when you think of evangelism.
“What’s in a joke?” by Michael Danner
One more by Michael. This one about poverty.
