The Rebel God

My article in Sojourners on wrestling with violence in the Bible

noreply@blogger.com (Sharktacos) — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 04:15:00 +0000

My feature article just came out in the latest edition (Jan, 2012) of Sojourners Magazine. It is called:

"The Way of Peace and Grace: How Paul wrestled with violent passages in the Hebrew Bible"

You can read it online at the SoJo website for free (you just need to register).

As the title suggests, it deals with how we can faithfully wrestle with really disturbing passages in the Bible that seem to advocate and even command committing violence in God's name. As I've mentioned before, most commentaries tend to either justify or downplay these passages. What I propose is a very different approach: if we learn to read the Bible the way that Jesus and Paul did, we can deal with them like they did.

In the Sojourners article I deal in particular with how Paul wrestles with violent passages from the Old Testament, disarming them and putting them under Christ. You'll need to read the article for the details, but Paul's approach is pretty awesome. If Paul read the Old Testament like this, then I think its fair to say we would be on pretty solid ground if we read it that way too.

I'm really excited about this article, and am thrilled to finally be able to share it. As far as I know, it represents a unique contribution to biblical scholarship. I've found scholars making similar conclusions about Paul, buried in the middle of some obscure footnote in a dense technical commentary, but I have not seen anyone connect all the dots like this. In fact, books like the Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament miss (or intentionally omit?) this pattern in Paul's reading entirely, even though Paul does this constantly. In doing so, they completely miss how Paul reads his Bible and arrives at a gospel of grace that is so different from how he previously read his Bible before his conversion to Christ.

What's more important than scholarship though is how we, as followers of Christ, read the Bible as Scripture. Adopting Paul's way of wrestling with these violent passages opens up a way for all of us to read the Bible that does not force us to check our conscience at the door. Jesus and Paul didn't, and neither should we!

So if you've ever wondered how Jesus or Paul could have read the Old Testament and arrived at a loving, radically grace-focused understanding of God, then check out the article.

The Real War on Christmas

noreply@blogger.com (Sharktacos) — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 05:45:00 +0000

Well, it's that time of year when Fox drums up outrage about the alleged "war on Christmas." This time around they are declaring victory because as they report,

"Walgreens is the latest store to return to explicit references to Christmas, switching its position a day after some Christian groups threatened to boycott over its generic holiday wording."

What I'd like to remind these "Christian groups" is that Christmas isn't actually supposed to be about shopping at all. We Christians don't need to fight to have Christmas associated with shopping, we need to fight for it not to be. You're fighting the wrong war guys.

So let's take a moment to remember what Christmas is really about: Christmas celebrates the story of God coming among us in the most humble of circumstances. Christ was born in a manger to a homeless teenage girl named Mary. These humble beginnings are in keeping with the ministry of Jesus which was focused on the poor, the sick, and the outcast. Jesus teaches us that the way we treat "the least of these" is how we treat him. It's a story about God coming among us, meeting us in the middle of our need.

With that backdrop in mind, let's also remember who the real Santa Claus was. Yes, Virginia, there really was a Santa Claus, but he didn't live on the North Pole, he lived in Asia Minor. Saint Nicholas was known for his love for children, and his generosity to the those in need, often given in secret. For example, one story tells of a poor father who was unable to provide a dowry for his daughters. At the time that meant that they could not marry, and so were destined to be sold into slavery. As legend has it, Nicholas secretly placed bags of gold in the girl's shoes and stockings, hung by the fire to dry. So those Christmas stockings you hang by the chimney are symbols of liberating the poor from the bondage of slavery.

The moral of all this is that the original Christmas story and the story of Saint Nick are both focused on caring for the least and on compassion. So what if we remembered that this Christmas, and spent a little less money shopping for all those gifts we don't really need. Then instead of standing in line at the mall or stuck in traffic, we could spent more time with people we love. And what if we took all that money we saved, and gave some of it away to people who are really in need? To the poor, the hungry, the hurting, the lonely, the sick? That's what the folks at Advent Conspiracy are asking.

So maybe the way we really should be celebrating Christmas is by caring for the least, rather than shopping til we drop. Maybe we should be teaching our kids lessons about compassion and giving, instead of about getting more and more stuff. And... just maybe... Christmas should be about showing "peace on earth and good will towards all mankind," rather than on getting mad at people who say "happy holidays" to us.

Does Defending the Bible Mean Advocating Violence?

noreply@blogger.com (Sharktacos) — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 16:54:00 +0000

There are many unsettling passages in the Bible. Consider these two verses that you will probably never hear read from the pulpit on a Sunday morning:

"This is what the Lord Almighty says ... attack the Amalekites ... Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants" (1 Samuel 15:2-3).

"O daughter Babylon ... Blessed is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks!" (Psalm 137:8-9).

Note that these passages are not simply about God's judgment. They are commands for people to kill other people in God's name -- to kill infants in fact. How can we, as Christians, reconcile passages like these with the God revealed in Jesus who commands us to love our enemies? The two pictures could not be further apart.

Many biblical scholars attempt to defend Scripture by downplaying or justifying the violence in some way. The 1984 Bible Knowledge Commentary, for example, argues that the genocide recorded in the battle of Jericho was justified so that Israel would not be "infected by the degenerate religion of the Canaanites," declaring that "pure faith and worship" could only be maintained "by the complete elimination of the Canaanites themselves." This argument bears a chilling similarity to those used by the Third Reich. Yet, this seems to be completely lost on the above commentator.

Commenting on the Psalm above, the more recent 2008 Two Horizons commentary suggests that this prayer would be less more palatable to us if it we thought of it in more abstract terms: "The modern reader ... would be much less troubled by the simple statement that it would be good when the evil Babylonian empire came to its divinely predicted end." In other words, atrocities and violence are less disturbing when its victims are thought of in impersonal and abstract terms. Wow.

It is frankly hard to imagine anything more morally abhorrent than smashing a baby's heads against rocks, or committing genocide in God's name. Such actions are simply and always categorically unjustifiable. It would be hard to conceive of something more self-evident than this. In fact, the only reason one would even think to question this is because of an a priori belief that biblical commands override conscience. When the Bible helps us challenge and deepen our moral vision and character this is surely a good thing, but when it leads us to abandon our most basic notions of morality, something has gone horribly wrong. The fact that so many biblical commentaries continue to attempt to justify the biblical genocide accounts reveals a profoundly disturbing disconnect between biblical scholarship and ethics.

So what causes otherwise decent and loving people like this to defend genocide in God's name? I think the problem lies in the basic approach they take to reading the Bible, which seeks to show how it all fits together in harmony. It's not just conservative scholars either; I was taught this same approach, and I'd bet you were too. In a way, it makes sense: If the Bible is the inspired word of God, then shouldn't it have one consistent message? So we seek to read in a way that weaves all these disparate parts together and end up with a rather schizophrenic picture of God. As we can see, when applied to passages like the ones above it leads otherwise decent people to become advocates of appalling moral atrocity. And what is perhaps even more shocking, they think that in doing so they are defending God's honor by defending the Bible.

I'd like to propose another way of reading the Bible that, rather than trying to justify everything the Bible says, instead seeks to identify a trajectory of moral development, and then follow in that same trajectory. I'll illustrate this principle with two examples:

The first is the Apostle Paul's core message that the Gospel is available to both Jews and Gentiles. Now, if we read the Bible with a proof-texting approach, we would need to conclude that Paul is out of line with Jesus here whose ministry was focused on his fellow Jews. As Jesus put it when a Canaanite woman appealed to him to heal her son, "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel" (Matthew 15:24). We do not see Jesus establishing a new religion, but rather him reforming his own. Paul in contrast breaks with Jewish law in order to open up the Gospel to all people, going beyond the boundaries of religion. So there seems to be a conflict here that many scholars have noted.

However, if we look at the teachings of Jesus we can also see a trajectory he sets away from nationalistic and racial boundaries. He expands the definition of "family" to include "everyone who does the will of God" as his true "brothers" (Luke 8:21). Here he is redrawing familiar boundaries of solidarity to go beyond family, tribe or nation. All the more, Jesus was known for siding with the sinner, the outcast, the marginalized, the least. Perhaps the most striking example is his well known command to "love your enemy" which completely shatters all categories of "us vs. them" thinking.

Looking at this trajectory Jesus sets up, we can see that Paul, in expanding the Gospel beyond the confines of his own religion is in fact following Jesus in that same trajectory. He is taking it farther than Jesus did, but in doing so he is following in the trajectory Jesus set. Based purely on building proof-text evidence of what Jesus taught, there is insufficient grounds for Paul to declare that followers of Jesus no longer need to be circumcised or to follow the food laws of Moses. What Paul is doing, however, is not following the letter, but the spirit of what Jesus taught. This allows him to run with it, and to take it to places beyond where Jesus did, following in that same trajectory.

Next, consider the example of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement. King looked to the Bible as his inspiration. However, it would be hard to make a clear case for the abolition of slavery from a proof-texting approach to the New Testament. One can find verses that seem to support it, and others against it. Yet, Christians today take it as self-evident that slavery is wrong and even sinful. Again, what we see King doing (and all of us doing with him) is an example of following in the trajectory set by the New Testament that declares that "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28). Looking at how Paul championed opening up the Gospel to all peoples, it's a safe bet that he would have cheered King in his seeking equality for all people regardless of race. Again, King was going beyond where Paul went, but he was following in the same trajectory.

Returning to the violent passages mentioned at the outset of this article, it is rather clear that there has been a clear shift from the time of their writing to Jesus' command to love our enemies. There is a clear and obvious discontinuity here between these two understandings of God. What we see here is a major change in trajectory within the Bible itself that leads us away from a violent tribal conception of God, and towards a God seen in Jesus that demonstrates enemy love.

If we read the Bible as a proof-text, then we will find there are passages that command violence in God's name, and those that forbid it. However, if we instead step back, taking a larger narrative view that recognizes the Bible's developing trajectories, then we do not need to try and justify or embrace these violent passages any more than we need to cling to passages that advocate slavery (or food laws for that matter). Rather, we look to identify the upwards trajectory away from violence, oppression and dehumanization that the biblical record chronicles.

Jesus said, "Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these" (John 14:12). If that's true, then perhaps faithfulness to Scripture does not mean holding on to it with clenched fists and white knuckles no matter how wrong it seems. Maybe it instead means learning to make it soar by following in the trajectory it sets. Maybe it means we do not need to get stuck in the old, but can faithfully follow its trajectory into the new.

The More I Follow Jesus, the Less I Like His Teaching

noreply@blogger.com (Sharktacos) — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 17:41:00 +0000

Over the years I have been increasingly troubled by the doctrine of Hell. As my love for God and my neighbor increased, the horror at the thought of many of those I love suffering eternal punishment had increased with it. In other words, this was not a crisis of faith, it was the result of my faith. The more I experienced God's grace in my life and grew to share Jesus' heart for the lost, the more I was troubled by Hell.

Now what makes this even more complicated is the fact that most of the statements about Hell found in the Bible are said by Jesus. The one who is leading me to question Hell, is the very one who teaches it. Similarly, Jesus is known for preaching love of enemies and nonviolence, yet many of his teachings use very violent imagery. Again, how can we understand these apparent contradictions? How can we think of Jesus as compassionate and loving when he says such harsh things?

There's a movement among emerging folks like me to focus on the teachings of Jesus over the doctrines of Paul as a way to get away from legalism and back to grace. I like the idea of getting to grace, but I've always had a problem with this for two reasons: First of all, Paul is all about grace, and any legalistic dogmatic interpretation of him is a misinterpretation. Second, Jesus (as we have seen) is anything but easy to interpret. In fact, if one takes a literalistic approach to the teachings of Jesus they are sure to come up with the most un-Christlike teachings imaginable. So in light of that, I'd like to offer a more sophisticated approach to interpreting the teachings of Jesus that take all of this into account.

Let's begin with the parable of the unmerciful servant (Mt 18:21-35). Jesus tells the story of a king who forgives his servant for a huge debt, but then when he hears that this same servant has refused forgive very small debt, the king becomes enraged. Jesus tells us that the king "handed him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed." and the concludes “This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”

Now the debt the servant owed was basically unpayable. Scholars say that it was more money that an entire kingdom would have had, and so it would be like us saying "a zillion dollars" meaning he would never be able to pay it, and would thus be tortured forever. So are we to conclude from this that if we don't forgive others that God will torture us in hell forever? It is crucial here to look at the context: Jesus tells this parable in response to a question from Peter were he asked Jesus "how many times must I forgive, seven times?" Jesus answers "no, seventy -seven times" (v. 21-22). So if we read this like an accountant we would need to conclude that we should forgive 77 times, but God does not do this. God (according the parable here read in a pedantic fashion) does not even forgive seven times like Peter suggests, or two times for that matter. Just one chance and then that's it. God here appears at first infinitely merciful, forgiving a huge debt, and then suddenly flips and wants to torture us forever.

Does God suffer from some form of borderline personality disorder where he is at first loving and forgiving, and then suddenly becomes brutal and merciless? Are we more merciful than God? No, this is a parable, and a parable is essentially a loose analogy. As everyone knows, if any analogy is pressed too far it becomes absurd (as we can clearly see here). The broad point Jesus is making here is that it would be really horrible if we were forgiven a great debt, but then turned around and were merciless to others. We should treat others with the same grace that we need, and which God has richly shown us.

This is an interpretation that fits with the overall point of this pericope. To read it literalistically would mean that the point Jesus was making to Peter was completely undermined by Jesus' own parable -- be merciful as your Heavenly Father is... who is not merciful at all! Clearly, that cannot be what Jesus was trying to convey. To understand Jesus we need to listen to context of his larger point which is always about showing mercy to others, about radical unconditional grace.

Now, so far I've just been following rules of basic biblical interpretation -- considering genre (a parable), reading a passage in context (explaining to Peter why we should forgive more than seven times), and focusing on authorial intent (teaching that we should show great mercy as God has shown us great mercy). Let's take that a step further now: In the above parable Jesus compares God to a king who -- in the way dictators do -- flies into a rage and orders torture for an ungrateful servant. Yet if we keep reading in Matthew, we see that a couple chapters later, Jesus questions the entire idea of comparing God to a king. "You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave — just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many" (Mt 20:25-28). In other words, Jesus models the way of God, not as one who "lords it over others" but as the servant Lord, and calls for us to embody that way too. Following Jesus means rejecting the way of domination, the way of kings.

So to the extent that you have embraced that idea, you will have a problem with the above parable of the king. You'll read "God is like an angry king" and think "No, Jesus teaches us that God is not at all like a king, God is like a suffering servant," and you would be absolutely right. In each of these parables, Jesus is turning our thinking upside down. He begins by turning the idea of payback on its head. When he says "not seven times, but seventy-seven" he is alluding to a passage from the Old Testament where Lamech says "If Cain is avenged seven times, then Lamech seventy-seven times" (Gen 4:24), and reversing it. Jesus replaces escalation of violence with the escalation of mercy. In the second parable he is similarly dismantling our understanding of greatness, and redefining how we see God. God is the servant. Power is about lifting people up, not pushing them down.

In doing this, Jesus not only dismantles our traditional concepts of what justice and power are about, at the same time, he also dismantles his own parables. Once we have embraced Jesus' understanding of servant lordship, we cannot accept the crude comparison of God to a volatile dictator. So when reading these parables as disciples of Jesus, we need to keep in mind that each one is beginning with the assumptions of the crowds. He begins there, with their familiar ideas of kings and slaves and torture and then introduces a radical new idea into the mix which flips one of those ideas on its head. The more we embrace these ideas of Jesus' "upside-down kingdom," the more we will have trouble with the worldly assumptions that these very parables are situated in. That's not because we are disagreeing with Jesus here, but because we have fully embraced his new way of thinking. So the more we follow Jesus, the more we'll question the worldly values the parables are set in. That is, we can embrace the idea of forgiving a great debt (which is the point Jesus is making), but reject the idea that God is a torturing dictator (which reflect the worldview assumptions of his first century audience -- assumptions Jesus is repeatedly challenging).

That means that when we read statements about Hell and "torture," we need to ask whether these are the main point Jesus was trying to teach, or whether it is in fact part of the worldview that the people had already accepted -- like they had slavery and dictatorship -- which Jesus is dismantling bit by bit.

Consider the parable of the sheep and goats just a few chapters later in Matthew (Mt 25:31-46). Here we hear Jesus make some very harsh statements about Hell, "Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels" (v. 41). But again, what is the central point that Jesus is illustrating here? It is not a description of how the last judgement will look. That is the assumed setting, just as the first parable we looked at assumed a king and servants. Here Jesus is drawing on the familiar apocalyptic imagery of his Jewish audience, and once again he is turning the tables: The righteous will not be determined because they are part of the right race or religion (as his audience thought), but rather by how they love the least. Jesus redefines what makes a person "in" or "out" -- you are in if you care for those who are out. In doing this, he tears down the very barrier separating insiders from outsiders. Once again, he begins with a common assumption (the image of the final judgement) and turns it on its head: you show your allegiance to God by how you love those who are condemned.

If you study all the passages that allude to hell in the Gospels, you will see this pattern over and over: Jesus is not in fact teaching "this is the way hell is" any more than he is teaching "God is like a emotional dictator." Rather, these are the people's assumptions that he begins with in order to introduce a radical new idea focused on grace. That's how we need to read Jesus, and that's a point that even many biblical scholars miss. Because in order to really get it, you need to follow. You need to adopt the way of Jesus, and let his heart become your own. The more I do that, the less I think God looks like a king or a judge, and the more I think God looks like Jesus who redefines all those terms, and indeed redefines how we conceive of God.

Peter Rollins Insurrection - an early review, part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Sharktacos) — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 01:32:00 +0000

In part one of my review of Peter Rollins' new book Insurrection - To Believe is Human, to Doubt Divine, I focused on his theology of the cross. In this second part I would like to address his understanding of a relationship with God.

Rollins writes that "there are people who claim God is at work in the world and we can have a deep relationship with Him here and now." As many of you are aware, I am one of those people. I think that developing a living relationship with God is at the very heart of the Christian faith. Rollins, in contrast, sees it as a "world-renouncing approach to faith" because he associates it with an "addiction" to exceptional emotional experiences (in a worship service for example) which he sees as devaluing the rest of life: "[L]ife as a whole is negated, and we are left unable to fully embrace and enjoy it."

Now, I agree that charismatic worship services do have a tendency to promote this kind of hyped-up emotional experience, and as a result can lead to disillusionment and disappointment. This however reflects a broken understanding of what healthy relationships are about. Relationships are not just about good times -- all candle light dinners and feelings of bliss. Relationships are about sharing all of your life with someone -- getting to know them and letting that rub off on who you are. We hang out with Jesus, and in so doing, we become like Jesus.

This is a broken world we live in, and because of that, as Paul says, we see God "through a glass darkly." We see God in glimpses. It's true that we can over-emphasize those times of epiphany in the same way that our culture over-emphasizes romance, but that does not mean that we need to see these times as a rejection of life. Why can't they instead fill our ordinary lives with meaning and value? Maybe these times are intended to change how we see everything else, so that, as Rollins writes "the world is transfigured and rendered wonderful."

That's the way it should be, but Rollins is right to say that our "triumphalist music, confident prayers, and sermons of certainty don't necessarily reflect the beliefs of the people offering them or receiving them." The problem is not, as Rollins notes, that there is a lack of ministers who experience doubt, but that the predominant church culture does not allow them to. They are only allowed to admit struggles if they are safely in the past. That's the narrative we want to hear: I used to have a problem, but then I met Jesus and it all went away.

Wouldn't it be good for our faith if we could be real about it together? Is a Christian leader really someone who never has any struggles, or is it instead someone who can model how to deal with those real struggles of life with honesty and grace? What if worship leaders were allowed to sing songs about real struggles and doubts? Wouldn't that reflect the way we really experience our faith and our lives?

An amazing example of that is Kevin Prosch who was the personal worship leader for John Wimber. Kevin's songs have a gut wrenching honesty. Take for example these lyrics from his song Please:

I know that sometimes you win
But most of the time I get this feeling that I'm losing
And the cruel, cruel lessons of loneliness... I believe this must be my portion in life
If there really is a hereafter and after all
Maybe a moment of grace could bring the gates of heaven near
I wish someone could tell me, have I wept these tears in vain?
But even then... there's this loneliness
This loneliness

Wow. Can we please sing that in church next Sunday?

I'm totally with Rollins in wanting us to be able to be real in church, and have that honesty and depth reflected in our liturgy and sermons. But he does not stop there. Rollins does not think we can love God directly at all, because he ultimately does not believe God exists. He argues that we should "no longer approach God as an object we love. Indeed, the idea of loving God directly becomes problematic. Instead we learn that God is present in the very act of love itself." In other words, he does not believe that God is a someone who can speak to us, love us, and be known by us. Rather, God is "love" and so "belief in God" for him simply means being a loving person.

He writes that "Love does not seek out our hymns of praise and prayers of adoration. Love does not want our sacrifices or seek our time. For love always points toward the other." While I deeply disagree with this on so many levels, at the same time I have to say that if that meant that he never sang another worship song again, and never prayed again, but only focused on caring for the least and showing grace to others, I really can't imagine that Jesus would be mad at Pete for that. Because in doing that, he really is loving God.

But does that mean that we all need to stop praying? Does it mean that we need to tell Kevin Prosch to strop singing his beautiful heart-wrenching love songs to God? I hope not, because that would mean stifling the honest expression of his heart. Mine too.

I'm sympathetic to Pete when he writes that "there are numerous people who affirm the view that God can be encountered here and now, yet who experience nothing." I don't want him to fake it. I understand if he feels that he is "not getting God and feeling empty, constantly chasing God and never finding rest." I've felt that way at times too. But I have also experienced the undeniable reality of God's love in my life. I know first hand that God is real and can be known.

Let me underline here that I am not just talking about having some emotional religious experience. That alone is not a relationship. I'm talking about learning to listen to God, letting God speak into my life, changing and molding me into the image of Christ. I don't think we should lose that, and in fact, I think we need a lot more of that. I want us to be real, but that includes honestly crying out to God, both in expressing our need and doubt, and also our thankfulness and love. I would not want to lose any of that.

Peter Rollins Insurrection - an early review, part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Sharktacos) — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 19:35:00 +0000

I was asked to review the pre-release version of Peter Rollins' new book Insurrection - To Believe is Human, to Doubt Divine. There's a lot of good stuff in it, so I'm planning on covering it over a few posts. In this first post I want to deal with his theology of the cross, which is the core thesis of his book. Before I do though, I want to give a few caveats:

First, I'll be quoting from the pre-release version. Those quotes may change or be refined in the final version. Second, (and more importantly) I will be disagreeing with a lot of what Pete says. That does not mean that I don't like where he is coming from. I do. I consider this a friendly review/critique among common allies. As you will see, I strongly disagree with him on some major areas, but if you are at all familiar with Peter Rollins' thought, you'll know that he wants people to disagree, and not to just passively swallow all he says. As he writes in Insurrection, truth is found "in the ongoing testing and transformation of those claims through the fires of passionate, loving debate." So it is in that spirit that I offer this:

There are several "flavors" to the theology of the cross: Luther, Moltmann, John Douglas Hall, Bonhoeffer, etc. Rollins' theology of the cross is largely built off of Bonhoeffer's idea of becoming "religionless." Rollins refers to this as "a/theism" which he contrasts with the New Atheism of folks like Richard Dawkins which is a mere intellectual rejection of theism. Rollins' a/theism in contrast is about the emotional loss of God, the feeling of forsakenness and utter loss that Jesus felt on the cross when he cried out "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Compared to this, Dawkins' atheism is detached and cheap -- in the end New Atheism is just a type of fundamentalism with all the same intolerance and arrogant certainty. The emotional a/theism Rollins advocates in contrast rips away at that arrogant certainty.

Rollins wants to dismantle religious systems of comfort which lead us to mask over and ignore hurt and oppression. His theology of the cross therefore involves the striping way of these securities and comforts, resulting in the "trauma" of personally experiencing the absence of God where one is "crushed by a deep existential loss of certainty" and we "give up everything including God" (his emphasis). That is a very provocative statement, but if one can read on to the end of the book, we discover that what Rollins ultimately means here is the loss of the religious image of God, the loss of our immature picture of God as a sort of heavenly grandpa. This is the theology of the cross that Bonhoeffer wrote of from inside the German concentration camp before his execution. In the face of the Holocaust, Bonhoeffer knew we needed the God on the cross, the God who is there in the middle of our suffering, in the middle of an unjust and broken world.

The question is: In losing the God of religious comfort and certainty, do we also lose the God of hope? It is here that I think Rollins' theology goes astray because he mixes up the meaning of the Resurrection with the meaning of the Incarnation and Crucifixion. Rollins writes that to affirm the resurrection means "embracing the broken world." Resurrection life, he writes, is a way of "truly affirming life" in the midst of "the experience of death we find in the crucifixion." But that is not the meaning of the Resurrection, it is the meaning of the Incarnation. The meaning of the Resurrection is that, despite all the brokenness in our world, we have hope that there will one day be an end to sickness, death, and hurt. That is what the resurrection means. Rollins adamantly rejects the hope that “everything will work out in the end” as an immature illusion that he aims to strip away. In other words, his theology of the cross annuls the hope of the Resurrection. He writes, “In sharp contrast then to the idea that, at the heart of Christianity, we find the loving embrace of some Supreme Being; to participate in Christ’s Crucifixion involves experiencing the destruction of all cosmic security. Here, in this experience, radical doubt, unknowing, loss, desolation, and forsakenness are to be found.”

Rollins sees the Resurrection as “the state of being in which one is able to embrace the cold embrace of the cross.” Now, I fully agree that God embraces us in all of our ugliness and pain (that’s the meaning of the Incarnation), but I also hope Rollins would agree that God does not affirm abuse; God does not want us to be victimized by injustice, or by our own self-hatred; God does not want us to drown in our in despair and grief. God loves us in our hurt, but God does not love hurt, and neither should we. The cross, in embracing us in our ugliness, does not advocate oppression or hurt, rather it is a protest against it. As Moltmann says, the suffering God is the protesting God.

Rollins is all for protest I'm sure. (Heck, that's what "insurrection" means!) But in denying the meaning of the Resurrection, he pulls the rug out from under himself. It is a theology of the cross without a theology of the Resurrection, and therefore without Resurrection hope. So while I affirm all that Rollins affirms, my problem is with what he rejects. In the end, I think he throws the baby out with the bathwater. The gospel is more than that. I want a bigger insurrection. I want an insurrection rooted in the Resurrection.

A Personal Relationship with God?

noreply@blogger.com (Sharktacos) — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 22:15:00 +0000

(originally published in the Huffington Post)

"A personal relationship with God." It's a phrase you've probably heard before if you've spent any time around church folks. Many would say it captures the very heart of what it means to be a Christian, and I agree. There are a lot of Christians, however, who have a problem with the idea -- people I have a lot of respect for. Rob Bell, for example, correctly points out that the phrase is not found in the Bible. But then again, neither is the word "Trinity."

The real question is whether the concept itself is biblical, and Jesus says the very heart of the law is to "love God with all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself." Those sound like relationships to me. So what's the problem?

For Brian McLaren, the problem is the stress on "personal" relationship and "personal" salvation. The original intent of stressing the personal was to distinguish it from an impersonal relationship (like the orbital relationship of the moon to the earth), and stress that faith is not something we are born into by default, but involves us personally. It needs to be lived. The problem, as McLaren points out, is that the idea of something being "personal" also has an individualistic self-focus to it: personal computer, personal trainer, personal space. As a result, faith becomes focused on us as individuals -- a focus on personal morality, personal prayer, personal Bible study.

The idea of a personal relationship with God should not be taken to mean a privatized faith. If we really took the idea of relationship seriously, we would recognize that faith understood as relationship needs to be both personal and social. A relational faith, by its very definition, is inherently social. As the epistle of John so powerfully says, "if we say we love God, but do not love our brother, then we are deceiving ourselves." We simply cannot say we love God if we do not love those around us.

While salvation begins personally and intimately, it cannot end in a myopic self-focused faith. Genuine personal relationship with God must flow over into all of our relationships -- caring for the least, loving our enemies, and showing the fruit of that genuine personal connection. How could it not? If we really are in a living relationship with Jesus, then won't we come to see people the way he does, and care about the things he cares about?

I'll say it again: If we really took the idea of relationship with God seriously, we would also love others. So rather than focusing on relationship less, I think we should focus more on it. Relationships are at the core of who we are as humans. Nearly every artistic expression is about relationship, from Shakespearian dramas to the current top 10 music charts: songs of love lost and found, tales of our deepest longings and greatest tragedies. Relationships reflect our deepest human struggles. They are the source of our most profound joy and pain -- what we long for most, what keeps us up at night.

It is in relationship that we find out who we are as humans, and what matters most in life. We as humans are made for relationship, and outside of relationship cannot be truly ourselves. We have a relational identity, a social self. As babies we begin life as self-focused and gradually learn to see ourselves as beings in relationship as we learn to love and be loved. That relational love from our parents shapes our self-image, who we are. Our very identity as humans is found in relationship.

This all goes to say that relationship is central to understanding who we are and what life is about. That's why I think that speaking of having a "personal relationship with God" has the potential to revolutionize and deepen theological reflection, so long as we move beyond cheap slogans and sound bites. Again, the problem is not with speaking in terms of a "relationship with God," but that we do not take it seriously enough.

So what might it look like if we did? I've written about this in a lot more detail elsewhere, but here are a few of the consequences of what understanding faith through the lens of relationship would entail:

It would mean a focus on a loving relationship with God and others, and not a focus on abstract rules or doctrine. It would mean an experienced faith now, and not just one that looks to a book from the past. Or more precisely, it would look to Scripture not as a set of rules, but as a witness to what the disciples had experienced of God in Christ in order to get a hold of what they had gotten a hold of.

A focus on relationship would recognize that believing in God is not simply to affirm a fact, but to engage in a trust relationship. Faith means trust. It would see that sin is not primarily about a legal transgression, but more deeply it is a relational breach -- cutting us off from God, others and ourselves. A relational faith would remember that "knowing" in a biblical context is not about intellectual surety, but relational knowing. To know truth does not mean we possess independent absolute knowledge, but rather is a statement of trust and intimate surety that we are known by God.

Most of all, focusing on relationship means caring more about treating others right, than about "being right." As the Apostle Paul says, if we have all the correct doctrines in the world, but have not love, it means nothing. So many Christians use truth like a weapon, and don't seem to care who they hurt with it. But one cannot separate truth from love any more than one can separate the head from the heart. Truth without love is not truth at all.

God at the Movies: Why Faith is about Story, not Doctrine

noreply@blogger.com (Sharktacos) — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 15:48:00 +0000

This continues my series on understanding theology from the perspective of an artist. The HuffPost editors changed the original title above from "why faith is about story" to "why faith is a story" which made a lot of people think I was saying that the Bible is fictional, that it is "just a myth." That was not my point. Rather, story is a way of understanding what happens in our lives so that those experiences are filled with meaning. The Gospels do not simply report facts as a catalog of events. Instead, they weave those stories together in a way that draws out the profound significance of those events in the hopes that we will be drawn into the story of how God came among us. So that God's story will become our story too, the defining narrative of our lives.

There is a tendency for religious scholars (both the systematic theologians who pick out propositional truths, and the historical Jesus crowd who try to remove that story by 'de-mythologizing' the text) to pull the sayings of Jesus out of that narrative context. This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how story functions. So in this post I briefly attempt to illustrate the power of story, and how thinking narratively can deepen our theology.

(reprinted from the Huffington Post)

Stories play a profound role in our lives. They are how we make sense of our experiences and organize our memories. Stories are how we tell people about our day, what we hear on the news and even what we dream at night. That's probably why story is our most prolific art form. Most of us have grown up on a steady diet of stories in the form of movies and television (and hopefully a few books, too).

What is so powerful about story is not the plot-line of the story itself, but the way that we are drawn into that story, how we feel the drama and identify with the protagonist. We therefore experience what the main character is going through. That's powerful because when we do that it has the potential to bring us beyond the typical polarizing divides of right vs. left or believer vs. atheist. By hearing and empathizing with their story, seeing things from their point of view, we can see the other human being across from us. Religious and political debates often get caught up in arguing about issues and doctrines, and we miss how our words can hurt another. Listening to others' stories -- and therefore practicing empathy -- can help us reconnect with the human and personal, even when we disagree.

Stories also allow us to understand an issue much more deeply than we could when it is explained on a merely theoretical level. A good writer can craft a narrative with complex and conflicted characters and overlapping and intertwining plot-lines. The result is a story that captures the messiness and complexity of our lives in a way that propositions and principles simply cannot. Thinking narratively provides a way of understanding who we are, and how life works in a deep, messy and complicated way that can lead us to a deeper and richer understanding of an issue in all of its complexity and nuance.

Ultimately, story is a way to communicate and bring us in contact with meaning. It not only describes the complex reality of our experience, but also identifies the underlying plot which gives that existence purpose. Stories allow us to make sense of our lives, and see the sacredness of the ordinary. They make us laugh and weep and cheer because we connect them with our own struggles, stretching our own humanity and illuminating our life with meaning. As Robert McKee writes, "Our appetite for story is a reflection of the profound human need to grasp the pattern of living, not merely as an intellectual exercise, but within a very personal, emotional experience."

With all that in mind, it is not surprising that story is in fact the form most of the Bible is written in. The Gospels, for instance, are all written as narratives. Since story is such a foundational part of how we as humans make sense of our lives, it makes sense that our sacred texts would make use of story. Yet despite this biblical emphasis, Protestant theology has been mostly concerned with expressing doctrine in the form of propositional truths. That is, it reads the Bible not as story, but as a source from which to mine doctrinal statements. In doing this, we divorce Scripture from its original rich narrative context, and reduce it to simple dogmatic formulas, rather than allowing it to retain the complexities inherently found in story, which of course mirror the complexities of real life.

Christian faith is not primarily about arguing over right beliefs and doctrines, it is about letting the story of God's grace become our story and shape our lives. We all know this, I suspect, but the way most of us have learned to converse about our faith does not usually express that deep life narrative. Instead, it speaks in the detached terms of abstract universals and dogmas. As I have illustrated above, however, narrative thinking provides a much richer understanding which better captures the reality of our lived faith. That's why we need to learn to understand faith as story.

What the Church Can Learn from Artists

noreply@blogger.com (Sharktacos) — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 06:39:00 +0000

(reprinted from the Huffington Post)

Christianity has a long history of incorporating art into its liturgy and worship. Some classic examples of this are cathedral architecture with its soaring towers and stained glass windows, the religious paintings of artists like Michelangelo and Rembrandt, and of course hymns and classical music. Of course there are modern versions of all of this too that incorporate contemporary music and visual media into services.

What Christians are much less aware of is how the artist's unique perspective can enrich and deepen how we approach theology. So in this post I'd like to take a look at what doing theology as an artist looks like, and how that differs from the way theology has typically been done.

Let me begin by offering a definition of art: First of all, art is not just about creativity. That's part of it, of course, but lots of other work involves creativity too. Art in particular is about taking something in your heart, and putting it out there (on paper, a movie screen, a song, etc.) in such a way that another person can connect with it in his or her heart. A musician writes a song about a breakup, and you hear that song and deeply connect with it. It captures how you are feeling about your own breakup so much that it makes you want to sing it at the top of your lungs as you drive in your car. Art makes us laugh, makes us cry, inspires us or shakes us up because it has become ours. It moves us because we relate to it personally.

Art is something deeply personal of the artist, that becomes deeply personal to us as well. In that sense, the Incarnation can be understood as God's art. It is God's heart, presented in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. That's why the Apostle Paul calls Jesus the "image of God" (Colossians 1:15). Jesus is God's own self-portrait, and the artistic medium of the Creator is not oils or clay, but life itself. Again, that divine self-portrait, that song of God in Jesus, is successful to the extent that it connects with us, to the extent that it becomes the song we sing, too. That means that truth needs to connect with us personally to function as truth. We cannot remain neutral and detached around it. With art, to be unaffected by it is to not get it, and the Christian story, at its very heart, is God's art. It's not about abstract doctrinal formulations or moral principles, it's about us connecting with what Hans Urs von Balthasar famously called God's theo-drama, God's story. That gospel, that message from God's heart, is not primarily informational, it is incarnational, and thus personal and relational.

Now, all of this is very different from the way Protestant theology has been approached throughout the modern era. There the focus has been on formulating precise doctrinal statements. It seeks to find objective truth by observing as a neutral party from the outside. This approach works well for the natural sciences, but it does not work in human relationships because we do not live in the general. Everything we experience is particular and personal. That's why the artist insists that truth can only be encountered in the concrete and personal, and never in the abstract, never in a detached way. For us as Christians that means knowing truth is about knowing God relationally, not just knowing facts about God.

The difference between the artist's relational approach to faith, as opposed to the more typical dogmatic approach which has characterized modernism, has many implications. It goes a long way toward explaining why the church has had a history of violence, and why many still perceive Christians as being unloving today. These are of course big topics that are beyond the scope of one blog post. So I'll be covering these themes and others in future posts.

What we can see right away however is that, while the church has often viewed artists with suspicion (and vice versa), there is a lot that we can learn from the artist's perspective that can enrich, expand and challenge how we approach faith. It ultimately involves learning to think with both our heads and hearts, developing both cognitive and emotional intelligence. You don't need to know how to paint to do that.

My article on the Huffington Post

noreply@blogger.com (Sharktacos) — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 16:19:00 +0000

My article on art and faith has just been published on the Huffington Post. I'll be contributing there as a regular featured blogger on the religious section of the Huffington Post called Huffpost Religion (don't worry I'll still blog here too!), and am planning on continuing that series there on what the church can learn from artists.

As many of you know, I have worked all my life as a professional artist, and so I'm excited to talk about how the crazy way that artists think can challenge and deepen how we think about God and life together.

This is my very first post there, and your comments will really help to get it out of the basement and onto the front page. So please go check it out and leave a comment (way down at the bottom past the ads)!

My article on the Ooze

noreply@blogger.com (Sharktacos) — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 16:52:00 +0000

My article Love Wins: Rob Bell and the New Evangelicals is currently on the front page of the Ooze. Go check it out and leave a comment!

I don't blame you

noreply@blogger.com (Sharktacos) — Sun, 22 May 2011 09:32:00 +0000

A song by The Sarah Jade who's an amazing artist. I love this song.

I know there is lot of hurt in this world, and a lot of that hurt comes from religion. The reason I call this blog "the rebel God" is because I really believe that God is fundamentally on the side of all the people who walk away, of all the people who just can't believe anymore. Knowing how God has stood by me through all my doubts, how unrelentingly he has loved me through all of my failures and brokenness, I don't think for a single second that he would condemn anyone who can't believe, or who has walked away because of pain and disappointment. I don't blame you. But if that's you, what I wish more than anything, is that you could know how much you are loved right now. I pray that you could know that unrelenting love in the middle of your pain and darkness.

God wants us to be mad about suffering. God wants us to question authority. God does not want us to just put on a happy face, and tow the party line. Be real, be honest, and know that when you do, God is right there alongside you, even in your doubts. The key is to take that anger and pain and channel it into something that makes us more awake, and more compassionate. But there is also a real danger that it can break us.

That's a fine line to walk, and probably the most important thing is that no one should need to navigate through that alone. But when we are doubting, it can feel like we are walking away from others who believe. That's why it's so important that we stand by those who are doubting, who are mad at God. That can be hard, because their doubts can uncover our own fears, which can make us feel threatened and hostile. Seeing their need mirrors our own weakness back to us. It takes a lot of love, and a strong faith, but that is what real faith is about: faith to question, and be able to stand by others when they do.

Love Wins (#2) -Rob Bell and the new evangelicals

noreply@blogger.com (Sharktacos) — Sun, 08 May 2011 22:32:00 +0000

In my last post I discussed the intro and first chapter of Rob Bell's new book Love Wins where he begins by asking some really important and challenging questions about the messed up way many of us have come to see God. The book has gotten a LOT of media attention, debuting at #2 on the NY Times Best Seller List, and making the cover of Time Magazine. So for any of you evangelicals like me who thought that we were a small fringe minority in our wresting with these things, this is a big wake up call that you are not alone. This book, and the questions it raises is obviously resonating with a whole lot of people out there. Bell and other Evangelicals like him (names like Brian McLaren, Shane Claiborne, Jay Bakker, Greg Boyd all come to mind) are part of the new face of evangelicalism, and that of course has gotten those from the old (grumpy) guard pretty mad. It also has a lot of liberals confused because we don't fit into their cliche of what an evangelical is supposed to be (mean spirited, judgmental, unconcerned about the poor, anti-gay, etc.). They are left scratching their heads: "So what is an evangelical if they are not those things?" they ponder.

The back of Bell's book has a quote from Andy Crouch in the New York Times where he writes, "Rob Bell is a central figure for his generation and for the way that evangelicals are likely to do church in the next twenty years." Yet to others, Bell has left the evangelical fold all together. John Piper declared as much with the tweet "Farewell, Rob Bell." Similarly, many liberals are wondering what the difference is between what Bell says and good old liberal Christianity? Lisa Miller of Newsweek asks Bell in a recent interview "Aren’t you just a mainline Protestant posing as an evangelical?" I'd like to offer a response to that question here. I don't pretend to speak for Rob here. This is my own answer to why I continue to identify as evangelical:

The controversy with Bell's book has to do with the doctrinal claims it makes. So those who have spoken out against it are doing so based on saying that it says things that are wrong. The focus is on Truth with a big T, on authoritative doctrinal correctness. This focus on black and white right or wrongness is also characteristic of how traditional evangelicals understand morality and ethics. Their focus is on the "thou shalt nots," i.e. on opposing certain behavior that they see as immoral. So they say X is wrong, and people who practice X are a threat to the to moral fabric of our society. I'm sure you can fill in the blanks yourself.

On the other hand you have the way that liberal Christians (not to be confused with secular liberals) do morality and ethics. Instead of being focused on right and wrong, their focus is on compassion. This does not mean that everything is okay. They would insist that many things are really hurtful and bad, but that our response should be one of grace: We should be seeking rehabilitation and reconciliation, not retribution.

One focuses on something being either right or wrong, and then condemning the wrong. The other may agree completely that it is wrong, but still focus on a response of compassion because the goal is to mend and restore people--even the screw-ups and failures like us. This caries over into theology too: one focuses on saying what they think is the truth about God. The other may agree with these doctrines, but places a priority on communicating grace, and realizes that if something is said without love, without compassion, without sensitivity, that is can actaully give a wrong picture of who God is. This is at the heart of Jesus' critique of the Pharisees. Truth without love leads to a dead faith. As Paul says "If I can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, but do not have love, I am nothing" (1 Cor 13:2).

Of these two ways of doing ethics (and theology), the later is clearly more Christ-like. As far as this goes I fall very much in the liberal Christian camp, meaning that while I may agree most of the time with the doctrinal conclusions of traditional evangelicalism, I think that compassion is often absent from how they do theology and ethics, and to the extent and degree that it is absent, it is heretical and wrong. It is heretical and wrong because it gives a false witness about God, and pulls people away from faith. It's wrong because it hurts people, and thus opposes God's purpose. I use that word "heretical" here very intentionally, because while people are quick to say that wrong doctrinal formulations are "heretical," I would maintain that what is far more heretical and damaging is for people to say things in a heartless and unloving way. Why don't we see those people brought up on heresy trials? Why don't we see those people fired from their position in a seminary? Why is our criteria not focused on being Christ-like? That's a completely wrong priority. Yet so many of my fellow evangelicals seem completely oblivious to this point, even though it is blatantly obvious to pretty much everyone else.

So you might ask at this point: aren't you just a liberal Mainliner then? As far as this broad approach of compassion goes, I am. But there is something crucial that is missing here: I do not think that Christianity is primarily about affirming certain doctrines or adopting a certain set of ethical principles. It is about having a personal life-changing relationship with Jesus Christ. That focus on relationship with God is and always has been the core of evangelical faith. That is the gospel. This is what being born again is all about. It is the foundation from which all Christian ethics stems.

In the evangelical churches I have been a part of (and for what it is worth, they were pentecostal/charismatic ones of that makes any difference) this has always been the central focus. You can hear it in the worship choruses we sing, in the focus on personal prayer, devotional reading of Scripture, and of course the many alter calls. Yet to those on the outside, you might miss this. From the outside it seems all we talk about is the wrong/right morality issues. On our church webpages you will find Statement of Beliefs which focus on affirming orthodox doctrinal statements. Now, once you are on the inside you will meet with this focus on a warm and living faith that flows into acceptance, support, love. But if you are on the outside looking in, you will encounter this focus on "right/wrong" which takes the shape of threats, condemnation, and (if the person you are speaking with gets frustrated with you) mean-spirited judgement. It's all very bi-polar, but goes a long way to understanding why evangelicals are perceived as a bunch of heartless, judgmental, jerks.

For a long long time a big part of the church (usually the part with political power on its side) has been really focused on right doctrine--on finding absolute authoritative infallible truth. Heck, they burned people at the stake for making doctrinal statements they thought were wrong. Today theology professors still get fired from seminaries for having the "wrong" beliefs, and these "wrong beliefs" are exactly what Rob Bell is being attacked for. But look at the people who are calling him that. What are their fruits? As Bell has said, "When you hear the word 'Christian,' do you immediately think 'oh yeah, the people who never stop talking about God's love for everybody'? ...or... do a number of other images and associations come to mind?" We evangelicals are not known for being loving to a fault. We are known for a merciless focus on being right. In other words, we have the same reputation now as the Pharisees in the NT.

So again, I want to retain that vibrant focus on intimately knowing the Spirit of Christ relationally, and of having that love and grace change who I am. But I want to lose the focus on heartless moralism, and instead focus on compassion and grace. I think that focus of compassion fits much much better with that living relationship. But I don't really find that in Mainline liberal churches. Maybe its because they are worried about sounding too much like evangelicals (a four-letter word to them). Maybe its some other reason. Maybe there are people who do have a vibrant personal relationship with God, but who just never talk about it. I don't know. But I do know that it is something that you will hardly ever hear in liberal Mainline churches. The focus is very much on ethics and compassion--on adopting principles. So while I agree with those principles, it is not enough. It is not the core, the heart of what faith is about. I miss that there.

So from all that, I would like to propose that what makes a new evangelical is that we retain the focus on a living transforming relationship with God, but that we have a way of thinking about theology, and of ethics which is rooted in compassion and grace. Rob begins his dialog with Lisa Miller with a brief sermonette where he says that we have "lost the plot" of the gospel which he defines simply as "God is love and sent Jesus to show us this love, that we might know this love, and extend it to others." There's that focus on relationship again: "Knowing God's love," and there it is right alongside of a focus on compassion "and extend it to others."

I want to stress that I do not want to say here that doctrine or morality are unimportant. I think they are tremendously important in fact, and I'm sure Rob does too. I also am not saying I agree with everything Rob Bell says in his book. I disagree with him on a lot of things (which I think is a good and healthy thing). But what I see him doing primarily is recognizing as a pastor that people are being hurt by the way these doctrines present God, and wanting to address that hurt. His is a pastoral focus rather than an exegetical one (in other words a relational focus, rather than a detached intellectual one), and I think it is in fact a much more important focus to have when interpreting the Bible. In fact, I would go so far as to say that without that pastoral/relational focus, it is not possible to do proper exegesis. In many ways, to be a so-called "new evangelical" is to get that.

Love Wins - rethinking the gospel

noreply@blogger.com (Sharktacos) — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 05:12:00 +0000

I'm reading through Rob Bell's new book Love Wins and am loving it so far. He begins the book in the preface by saying its good to ask hard questions, that God wants us to ask them, and then proceeds in the first chapter to ask a bunch of hard questions about the "good news" of the gospel that can sound like bad news:

God loves us.
God offers us everlasting life by grace, freely, through no merit on our part.
Unless you do not respond in the right way. Then God will torture you forever.
In Hell.
Huh?

Is God really going to torture people you love forever in hell because they didn't accept his love? Is that how love acts? is that what grace looks like? Is that what justice looks like? Is that what holiness looks like?

Hell no.

Isn't God the one who teaches us to forgive and love our enemies? So if that's true, then why would God act the opposite? I'm sure you've heard people say it is because he takes sin so seriously, but really doesn't that in fact trivialize sin? Doesn't it make God look petty and unjust? That is one of the biggest reasons people leave the faith, that and all the suffering and injustice in the world. In short, the major reason people leave Christianity is because of moral outrage, because sin--real sin, the kind that deeply wounds people, the kind that destroys lives--is not being taken seriously enough.

What about rape? What about abuse? What about all the violence and oppression in our world? That's the kind of thing that I think God cares about, and he cares because these things are killing us, and he loves us. God is not concerned with his "glory" because God is not egotistical. God is love, and that means that what God really wants, what it truly means to love him, is to love each other. That's a point you will find being made over and over in the NT.

The heart of the gospel is that God does not come to judge us (even though he hates these horrible things we do to each other), he comes to save, he has come to pull us out of that world of hurting and being hurt. That's what real justice is about, making things right, and that is what Jesus was all about.

That way of making things right--the gospel--begins with God entering into our hearts and lives and showing us what it means to be loved. I'm taking here about being born again, about having a personal relationship with God where you come to know God's loving grace first hand, where God just pours his love out on you until it completely changes who you are.

One place I disagree with Rob is when he says that the phrase "relationship with God" is not in the Bible. Of course it is not there verbatim, but then a lot of things are not which are still truly biblical. Like the Trinity for example. The question is whether the concept is there, and I think it clearly is (both the Trinity and relationship with God). Loving God, Jesus says, is the "greatest commandment." But as I said, it can't stop there. If we really love God, if we really know grace, know what it means to be loved unconditionally, then this can't help but spill out into all of our life. We will feel compelled to live out that grace with others, to love like Jesus did.

That is the urgency that Jesus preaches: stop hurting each other, stop with your stupid wars and killing in God's name, stop with all the condemnation and hatred! Learn the way of the cross, the way of overcoming evil with good, the way of enemy love. That is a way that is not just some trivial religious concern which seems so tangential to life, it is about real stuff, life and death stuff, quite literally.

Living in that is the gospel. The gospel is absolutely inseparable from love of enemies. In other words, the gospel is about radically loving everyone. That means that we have to care about poverty and starvation (Jesus certainly did!), we have to care about human trafficking and war and corporate abuse and a host of other social causes because belonging to Jesus means we care about people.

That's the gospel: being loved by God so that we can know love and walk in the way of love--knowing grace firsthand so we can show that grace in a world that desperately needs it.

God's restorative justice

noreply@blogger.com (Sharktacos) — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 17:35:00 +0000

In my last post, I addressed the first part of my answer to some questions Peter's Gurry asked in the comments to another blog post. Here I'd like to deal with the second part:

"I struggle to see how your definition of God's righteousness/justice will hold in Rom 3:21-26, especially vv. 25-26. When God passed over previously committed sins, does that mean he never healed people of their brokenness? And if so, how does healing that brokenness now through the cross show that God is, in fact, restoratively just when he restores those who have faith in Christ (3:26)? In other words, I still don't see the need for a blood-stained cross in your system.

I think Paul's logic in this section of Romans makes much more sense if the question he's addressing is not "When will God restore broken, fractured lives" (important as that question is) but rather, "How can God possibly forgive punishment-deserving rebels in a way that doesn't make a mockery of the very retribution they deserve?" In other words, How can God be both just and the justifier? Remember, the question that sets this section going is a question of God's wrath against rebellious humans (1:18-3:20). It's not a question about our fractured human lives. We are victims to be sure, but far more serious is the fact that we are perpetrators and that all our sin is finally directed Godward."

As Peter notes, my definition of "God's righteousness/justice" (Greek: diakaiosyne theo) is restorative justice, as opposed to retributive justice. Peter asks about how that understanding of justice as "making things right" fits with Romans 3:25-26:

God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith. He did this to demonstrate his righteousness, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished— he did it to demonstrate his righteousness at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.

So let's back up to the beginning of Romans and follow Paul's argument up to here. Paul opens Romans with a discussion of the wrath God (beginning at Ro 1:18). Wrath here can be understood as retributive justice: it is the just punitive consequence for our sinful actions. We do bad stuff, and bad things happen to us. It is the law of sewing and reaping, quid pro quo, or if you like "karma." Paul is addressing his fellow Jews, and begins by speaking about pagan depravity. At this point his audience is thinking "yeah, those pagans sure are rotten! God's gonna get them!" It is here that Paul turns the tables and says that we have no right to judge others when we are just as bad. He then goes on to argue (Ro 2:1-3:20) that we are all under sin, and therefore when we hope for God to judge, we are in fact calling down wrath on ourselves.

This is something that Paul knew from practical experience. He had himself, before his conversion, not only wished for God's wrath, but had seen himself as an instrument of it, acting to persecute, harm, and even kill Christians based on his belief that he was doing this all in the name of God. Paul's major sin was that of religious zeal leading to acts of violence in God's name. This motivation to religious violence was common in his time, has continued to be among the church throughout its history (the crusades, the inquisitions, etc) and frankly still is today among many Christians.

While Paul begins by saying that we are all guilty of sins in general (chapter 2), he then moves on in chapter 3 to address the specific sins of religious people. Notice that the specific sins he lists here have to do with hateful speech (“Their throats are open graves; their tongues practice deceit. The poison of vipers is on their lips. Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness”) and violence (“Their feet are swift to shed blood; ruin and misery mark their ways, and the way of peace they do not know. There is no fear of God before their eyes.”) What Paul is describing here is the sins of religious zeal that results in hateful judgment and acts of violence done in God's name. Since Paul would of course include himself in his indictment, we could read this as Paul's own confession of the shape of his religious life before his conversion:

“My throats was an open grave; my tongue practiced deceit. The poison of vipers was on my lips. My mouth was full of cursing and bitterness.
My feet were swift to shed blood; ruin and misery marked my ways, and the way of peace I did not know. There is no fear of God before my eyes.”

Paul did not know the way of peace, and there was no fear of God before his eyes. So Paul's aim in this first part of his argument is to put the fear of God before our eyes: if we continue on this way of judgment and retribution, it will lead to our own destruction. This is also a common theme of Jesus in the Gospels. Jesus warns of God's wrath unless we embrace the radical way of forgiveness.

At this point in Romans, Paul introduces a new concept: "But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify" (Ro 3:21). The law here represents the system of retributive justice, of blessings and curses, that Paul has been discussing up to now. If we obey the law we receive blessing, and if we break it we find wrath. Paul contrasts this way of retribution with "the righteousness/justice of God." This is God's action, motivated by unmerited love of enemies, to make things right. It is restorative justice. So what Paul is proposing is that God's restorative justice breaks into the cycle of violence inherit in retributive justice. God overcomes the cycle of our hurting and being hurt by acting to restore and reconcile us.

With all that in mind, let's return to 3:25-26: Paul writes that God made things right through Jesus in order to "demonstrate his righteousness, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished." In other words, God leaving sins unpunished was seen as wrong by Paul's audience who wanted to see God's wrath poured out on bad people. They felt it was unfair that bad people got away with it, and wanted God to punish them. Paul has been arguing that the bigger problem is that we are all bad, and so in wanting this we are really just hoping to add to the hatred and pain, we are pulling ourselves into the destructive cycle of retribution. In order for God to show that he was not unjust in leaving past sins unpunished, in not wiping us all out (and it would be unjust to simply do nothing in the face of evil), God now acts to make things right through Jesus. "God did this to demonstrate his restorative justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus." (v 26, my translation). We could also translate this verse as "God did this to demonstrate his goodness at the present time, so as to be good and the one who makes-good those who have faith in Jesus."

So I think Peter is absolutely right in saying that Paul is not addressing the question "When will God restore broken, fractured lives" (important as that question is) but rather, "How can God possibly forgive punishment-deserving rebels in a way that doesn't make a mockery of the very retribution they deserve?" More specifically, the question is how can God just ignore sin, and not punish it? Paul's answer is that God cannot simply ignore sin and be just, but God can act to heal sin (and sinners) and make things right, and in doing so God demonstrates true justice which is God's restorative justice that comes through Jesus.

Now how exactly God's action in Jesus (in the incarnation, cross, and resurrection) acts to restore us, Paul does not detail here (he does elsewhere, but that will need to be the subject of another post). He simply claims here that what God is doing now in Jesus apart from law (that is, in contrast to the system of retribution) is about God's act to restore ("the justice of God" diakaiosyne theo) as an answer to the problem of retributive justice (wrath).

Peter Gurry writes that "We are victims to be sure, but far more serious is the fact that we are perpetrators and that all our sin is finally directed Godward." As we have seen, Paul was a perpetrator. That sin was indeed directed Godward. Jesus confronts Paul on the road to Damascus with the words "I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting" (Acts 9:5). Because God identifies with the victim, when we hurt others, even when we do this as Paul did in God's name, (or perhaps especially when we do) as do it unto them, the least, the vulnerable, we do it unto God. But what Paul the violent perpetrator encountered was grace and forgiveness instead of wrath, and that unmerited enemy love turned him around so that he renounced his former commitment to the way of retribution, and instead embraced the way of grace and restorative justice in Jesus. Paul's brokenness was precisely his hurtful understanding of religion that lead him to hatred and violence, and it is this wrong understanding of justice that Jesus undoes in Paul, replacing that with a new understanding of God's justice typified by restorative enemy love.

Following Jesus means following in that way of love of enemies, of forsaking judgment and instead embracing healing restoring forgiveness. To claim that the atonement is one rooted in the fulfillment of a retributive demand (that God punishes Jesus to fulfill the demands of retributive justice) is to utterly miss the entire point of the New Testament--that God's way is the way of radical restorative grace. That is what God's justice means. The cross is a demonstration of that restorative justice acting to overcome the way of retribution by making things good again, rather than adding hurt to hurt.

the vertical dimension of sin

noreply@blogger.com (Sharktacos) — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 18:47:00 +0000

In the comments to my post on my EQ article on the church fathers view of the atonement, Peter Gurry asked some challenging questions which I wanted to address in my next two blog posts. His first question was,

Derek, where's the vertical dimension of sin in your system? I can fully agree that we are broken and need healing but your solution only deals with the horizontal brokenness, not the vertical offensiveness. How does your system deal with profoundly horizontal human sins that are nevertheless against God and God alone (Psalm 51:4)?

Now the inscription of Psalm 51 reads "A psalm of David. When the prophet Nathan came to him after David had committed adultery with Bathsheba." So the sins that David is confessing here are specifically adultery and murder. David sleeps with Bathsheba, gets her pregnant, and then has her husband killed, telling his men, "Put Uriah out in front where the fighting is fiercest. Then withdraw from him so he will be struck down and die" (2 Sam 11:15). So when David says to God in Psalm 51 "against you, and you only have I sinned" (51:4) he says this referring to the very horizontal sins of adultery and murder. So how can these horizontal sins (sins against people) be spoken of in vertical terms (as sins against God) as David does?

If we look at Nathan's rebuke of David we read,

This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: "I anointed you king over Israel, and I delivered you from the hand of Saul... I gave you all Israel and Judah. And if all this had been too little, I would have given you even more." Why did you despise the word of the LORD by doing what is evil in his eyes? You struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword and took his wife to be your own. (2 Sa 12:7-9)

After all that God had done for David, he still did not trust in him. David "despises" all of that generosity of God in his hurtful actions. It's a matter here of David not trusting in God as his source for goodness, and taking matters into his own hands in a way that damages others. He has damaged his relationships both horizontally and vertically.

We see an even deeper insight into what is going on here in the words of Jesus "as you have done it unto the least of these, you have done it unto me" (Mt 25:40). Here we see that when we hurt others, we wound God too. In the world of king David the one who was offended by the adultery was the husband. Having the husband killed removed the problem, and David simply took Bathsheba as his wife. That was king David's messed up thinking here. Nathan saying that David's actions were also an offense to God is a way of leveling out that messed up system of honor. It says that even if we hurt someone who is without honor, even if we neglect "the least" we are ultimately hurting the one with the most honor, God. It takes the whole system of rank and honor and levels it.

The point of course is not that we should care for God's honor as opposed to caring about people's honor. David in saying "against you, and you only" is not saying he did not sin against Uriah and Bathsheba. What he is saying is that every sin against people is ultimately a sin against God their maker. As Jesus says, God sees every sparrow that falls to the ground. To love God is to love others, and of we fail to love others, we fail to love God. John says, "whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar" (1 Jn 4:20). Vertical sin is tied to horizontal sin. In other words, all horizontal sin is ultimately vertical sin. When the Bible stresses this, there are two reasons:

One reason is that God wants us to love others, especially those we regard as the least. God is love and his priority is on our loving others as the biggest way that we show of love for him.

The other equally important reason is that we were created to be in a loving relationship of dependent trust with God. God needs to be our source. This is the point that Nathan is making above. We need to place our trust in God and see our relationship with him as primary, because all of our goodness flows out of our living in and through a right relationship with God, who works in us and shapes us into the image of his Son. The fundamental starting point of salvation is that restored relationship with God--restoring that vertical connection--so that we can live in, with, and through the indwelling Spirit of Christ. It's all about restoring that loving transformative relationship with God. As we are loved by God, that love changes us, and leads us to love others in the same way we were loved. We want to show the same grace to others that God first showed us. So the horizontal flows from the vertical.

Now the question that remains is: how does God mend the broken relationship between him and us in Jesus? For that we turn to Romans which I will deal with in my next post...

Can you be gay and Christian?

noreply@blogger.com (Sharktacos) — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 07:31:00 +0000

In a previous post I suggested that we should have a moratorium of arguing about the rightness/wrongness of homosexuality, and instead focus on communicating God's unconditional love to people. A big part of this has to do with getting past all the rhetoric that goes back and forth, and really listening to the personal stories and experiences people have -- hearing their stories, and actually seeing the people behind the issues. With that in mind I wanted to share this video made by employees at Pixar Animation Studios talking about what its is like growing up gay:

In it they share how they faced rejection and even verbal and physical violence. Others speak of struggling with self-loathing. One person shares how she nearly committed suicide. It's pretty heavy stuff, looking into their eyes as they tell these stories one after another. Really what just hits home is that behind all of this are real people--people who were really hurting, people who almost didn't make it. I hope that stops you in your tracks like it did me.

The whole video is made as a message to people who are struggling with their homosexuality to let them know they are not alone, that people care about them, and that it really does get better. I kept thinking as I watched it that this is what the church really needs to be speaking out and saying. When we "take a stand on morality" that is the kind of stand we should be taking. A stand that sees the people who are hurting and cast out and communicates God's unconditional love to them. A stand that rebukes people who are preaching condemnation. That's the kind of thing that Jesus stood up for all the time. We need to be communicating grace to people, communicating to them that they are loved. So I thought I'd just start by saying it here.

There are people who say that the Bible says homosexuality is a sin, and there are people who say the Bible does not say that. There really is not any clear answer, and a really big part of this has to do with the fact that sexuality is a profoundly complex thing that just cannot be reduced to simple categories of yes/no or good/bad. What is healthy and loving for any of us--gay or strait-- is just way too complex to be handled by a blanket one-size-fits-all statement, and it is simply a mistake to read the Bible like that as a source of general moral "rules" we can apply. What we need instead is to be open to the Spirit in our lives, to let the Spirit lovingly grow us into wholeness, working on areas we need to, mending the broken parts, loving us. In other words, we do not need a list of rules, we need a living and transformative relationship with God where the Spirit can show us personally what we need to grow and be whole in the same way a doctor prescribes the medicine a patient needs and does not give everyone the same pill. It's not about some list of do's and don'ts, it's about opening our hearts to that living relationship with God. That relationship begins with God's unconditional embrace of us. It begins with us having the courage to let God love all of who we are--scars and all.

If you are gay, you really should know that God loves you and there is nothing that you could possibly do to make God love you more, and nothing you can do to make God stop loving you. God does not want you to hide who you are because God loves who you are. Now there may be areas in your life that need healing (there certainly are in mine), but that's up to you and the Spirit to work out together in your relationship with God. It is up to the rest of us to be advocates for that amazing unconditional love of God.

Wrestling with God

noreply@blogger.com (Sharktacos) — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 01:10:00 +0000

"It seemed to me certain, and I still think so today, that one can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of pure regard for the truth. Christ likes us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms."

-Simone Weil, Waiting for God

Why the Cross Matters (Pt 2)

noreply@blogger.com (Sharktacos) — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 01:11:00 +0000

Last time I left off speaking of Paul's exegetical declaration "I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified" (1 Co 2:2). The cross has a profound affect on how we read the Bible, and is key to its proper interpretation. This time I want to focus on how the cross affects how we think and how we live, that is, how it is the key to a Jesus-shaped ethics.

Paul's stance of seeing everything through the lens of "Christ crucified" completely revolutionized how he read Scripture, and it also revolutionized how he lived his life, and his understanding of what it meant to follow God. That is not just pious talk, Paul radically changed his approach to faith, going from a faith which led him to violently persecute the church, to one that led him to endure persecution in Jesus name. He went from legalism to grace, from religiously justified violence to enemy love and nonviolence. At the heart of that change is the cross. Having listed all the things he used to see a central to his faith, Paul writes, "I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ" (Phil 3:8). Now what does it mean to "gain Christ"? He continues, "I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead. (v 10-11). Notice the pattern here of knowing the power of the resurrection by becoming like him in his death.

This echos the pattern Paul has set up in the previous chapter where he tells of how Christ "being in very nature God... made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant" (Phil 2:6-7) and how that act of self-giving and dying to self resulted in "every tongue acknowledging that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father" (v 11). For Paul, saying "Jesus is Lord" means that the crucified one is Lord, and thus that God has proclaimed the way of the cross as both God's way and our way. This is, as Michael Gorman calls it, Paul's "master story" of both the narrative of God's actions in Jesus, and of our model of ethics as we take up our cross and follow. Paul in fact directly connects the example of Christ in the opening hymn of Philippians with how we should act. He introduces it by saying, "In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus" (v 5). Our way of life needs to be the way of the cross, the way of doing "nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others." (v 3-4).

Paul makes an identical point in in Romans when he says we are to live as a "living sacrifice" (Ro 12:1) so that how we think, see, and act is formed by the cross . He continues, "Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind" (v 2). Notice here, as in Philippians, Paul draws a direct connection between Christ's sacrificial death and our ethical response. In fact, more than any "theory" of the atonement, what we see in the NT again and again is a connection made from what Jesus did, and what we should do. The cross leads to ethics. From the perspective of the New Testament, this is not a side point, it is the main point.

Paul goes on in this chapter to outline what that looks like. It involves being "we-focused" rather than "me-focused," caring for those in need, demonstrating humility and compassion... but the crux of it all (if you pardon the pun) is summed up in his concluding statement "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good" (12:21). We see here that Paul's understanding of the Christ crucified, and what it means for us to declare the crucified Jesus "Lord" is deeply tied to what we see Jesus doing throughout the gospels in his teaching and ministry. That is, in order to understand the cross we need to get that all of what Jesus did lead up to the cross. The way of Jesus we see throughout the gospels is the way of the cross. Paul directly makes that connection for us.

Why does the cross matter? Because the atonement is inseparable from ethics, and from exegesis. Understanding the cross properly does not just have an impact on our own personal salvation and relationship with God (as important at that is!), it also changes how we see our world, what we value, and how we treat others.

Why the Cross Matters (Pt 1)

noreply@blogger.com (Sharktacos) — Sun, 21 Nov 2010 22:28:00 +0000

Today is "Christ the King Sunday" and that seemed like an appropriate time to begin a series of posts I wanted to do on why the cross matters. This time I wanted to address how the cross affects how we interpret Scripture. I've said before that we need to read the Old Testament through the eyes of Jesus in order to properly understand it the way the New Testament does. However I want here to make that more specific: we need to take all of what we read and bring it to the cross in order to understand it correctly.

This can be clearly seen in how the cross shapes our understanding of who God's true messiah is. Peter along with the majority of his fellow Jews at the time had expected the messiah to be a warrior king who would lead Israel to conquer the gentiles by the sword, just as Joshua had done for Israel when it entered the promised land. Their hopes of having a just world free from oppression were tied up in this being brought about through violence and bloodshed in the name of God, freedom, and justice. It is an ethos that I'm sure we all recognize as being alive and well today as well, but it was decidedly not the way of Jesus. Jesus did not come to kill the gentiles and sinners, he came to reconcile and save them, and he did not plan on bringing about this "deliverance" by military conquest, but by giving his life on a cross.

This was an idea that was so completely foreign to Peter that when he heard it, he exclaimed to Jesus "never Lord!" Peter says this immediately after he has declared that Jesus is the messiah. The two go hand in hand. Peter's idea of the messiah, based on what he saw in the OT was one of a war lord who redeems through violent force. But Jesus says to him "Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men" (Mt 16:23). I'm sure you've heard many sermons on the first part of that sentence, but I want to highlight the last part: you do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men. Jesus thinks that Peter's understanding of the messiah--an understanding that the majority of biblical scholars would agree is solidly founded on the Old Testament texts--does not represent God's way but man's. So Peter and we need to completely redefine everything the OT says about the messiah in the light of the cross.

We in fact need to do that with everything we read in the Old Testament. We need to take it to the cross and see how it is transformed by it. We need to apply the theologica crucis to all our exegesis. An exegesis of the cross if you will. Take for example the story of David and Goliath. There we have the tale of how the little guy overcomes the giant. But notice that the little guy still overcomes that giant by killing him. What we need to ask is how this story is like the cross, and how it is not. What in this story points us to the cross, and what in this story needs to die. In Jesus we have the story as well of the little "mustard seed" of the kingdom accomplishing big things, and we have the picture of Jesus overcoming and fighting evil, but the enemy is not other people, it is evil and death itself. Jesus does not win the battle by violence and force, but by going to the cross.

It is crucial that we apply the cross to all of what we read in the Bible. This will often necessarily mean deliberately subverting the intended meaning of a passage in the Old Testament--reading it in a way that may appear to be, as Paul says, "a stumbling block" and "foolishness" to some. The theology of the cross carries with it exactly such radical consequences. It means not only our dying, but also the crucifixion of destructive religion itself. This is precisely why the religious leaders of his time wanted Jesus killed. But as Jesus says, if we do not learn how to bring the cross into our exegesis and let it shape how we interpret Scripture, we will likely end up like Peter misreading the Bible and promoting "the way of man not God." This is in fact exactly what Paul did before he met Jesus on the road to Damascus. He had read his Bible and saw in there that the way to defend God was through violent zeal, and he exercised that zeal, that violence in the name of God, in persecuting the church. But after he met the crucified Lord, he read those same Scriptures and saw a completely different narrative. So he proclaims boldly "I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified" (1 Co 2:2).

Basing Theology on Experience Pt 2 - Grace

noreply@blogger.com (Sharktacos) — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 16:47:00 +0000

I recently blogged about Basing Theology on Experience. Shortly after writing that I got an email from a reader asking me what I thought of the charismatic movement. They raised a number of important questions, but it all really boiled down to this one:

"But the core of it all - for me it seems that the charismatic movement from its beginning has lead people to believe in an authoritarian God. A God who comes with force, who overpowers you etc. Where as in Jesus I see a very different approach."

I think this raises a very important point: when speaking about "basing theology on experience" that needs a qualifier. I should say basing theology on the experience of grace. Grace is the central narrative of the New Testament, and it is also the lens though which Jesus and the authors of the NT interpreted the Old Testament. Grace is what characterized the entire ministry of Jesus to the sick and the sinner. Grace is what turned a violent Saul into the Chirst following apostle Paul. Miss grace and you miss everything.

The gospels tell a beautiful story of a "sinful woman" who washes Jesus' feet with her tears and pours a jar of alabaster perfume over them. The Pharasees are shocked at this display. But Jesus says "those who are forgiven little, love little" (Lk 7:4). From that let me make a bold assertion: Those who do not know grace, cannot properly understand the Bible. Those who have experienced grace little, understand the Bible little.

On the other hand, if we have experienced grace - that is, if we have known God's amazing grace in the middle of all of our brokenness, darkness, and hurt, that unearned wonderful love completely changes us. It sends us to our knees, it melts our hearts. Such a lived experience of grace is absolutely essential to proper theology. Truth to be understood, must be lived. We need to come to the text as those who know grace and have been transformed by it. Otherwise we may miss its central point. We see this in the story of Paul who before his encounter with Jesus has in fact completely misread the narrative of Scripture and as a result was opposing the church. When he was encountered by grace, this changed his whole outlook, including how he read the Bible.

This experience of God's grace also needs to be how we judge our own religious experiences and interactions with others. Are these demonstrating grace? Are we encountering people with God's transforming love? Is that the main focus of what we do? When charismatics focus more on the manifestation of gifts than then do on the purpose of a gift which is to show love, then I think they miss grace. I was raised charismatic, and still consider myself to be charismatic, so I know that church (it's good parts and bad parts) quite well. I've been in services that get really hyped up and freaky. I've seen many pastors who are on power trips. I've also seen us evangelicals focus on morals and "right and wrong" in a really unloving combative way when what we should be doing is treating others with the same mercy we so desperately need. In each of these grace gets pushed out of the way when it should be the very center of what we do and who we are.

If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. (1 Cor 13:1-8a)

Getting Historical Jesus Study Wright and Wrong

noreply@blogger.com (Sharktacos) — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 02:55:00 +0000

I recently blogged about why the historical study of Jesus is a waste of time. There I argued against the prevalent mode of historical Jesus studies, which has been to pick which sayings of Jesus are "authentic" and toss out the rest. Apparently, I am not the only one who has problems with this. For example a few months ago Scot McKnight wrote a scathing article in Christianity Today where he made many of the same points I did in my previous blog post here. In his response to McKnight, NT Wright argued that there is a "massive gulf" between the way he (and a few others) do historical Jesus studies, and the kind of historical Jesus studies that McKnight and I are criticizing. What Wright does in contrast is all about understanding the historical context and worldview of the time so that we can then read the canonical text without projecting our own assumptions and worldviews into it. This is something that I could whole-heartedly embrace. So I guess I should re-title that blog post "why the historical study of Jesus was a waste of time until NT Wright came along."

That said, there are some problems that folks have raised with Wright's historical reconstruction of Jesus. I'd like to discuss two of those here and then offer my own thoughts about them. They are (a) the existence of heaven, and (b) the doctrine of justification. So pretty heavy-duty topics. Let me also say at the outset that I offer these critiques with great respect. NT Wright is not only a brilliant scholar, he is also a caring pastor with a real heart for people and for ethics, so I know that the issues I'm raising here are ones he cares about too.

Imagine There's no Heaven. NT Wright has made a point of saying that the NT does not teach that Christians go to heaven when we die. One example of this is an interview he gave in Time magazine called "Christians Wrong About Heaven, Says Bishop." Instead Wright focuses on the larger message that we will all one day rise when Jesus comes back. That of course raises the question: where are my loved ones now? Markus Bockmuehl gave a talk at this years Wheaton Theology Conference (check out the link for video and audio of all the talks) where he demonstrated persuasively from biblical evidence that Wright was wrong about this (or at least that he is only telling half the story). Believers when they die will indeed go to be with Jesus and the community of the saints and be in heaven with God. In the following panel discussion session, Wright does not really disagree with Bockmuehl (although he feels a bit misunderstood), and instead stresses that the reason he focuses so much this non-heaven line is because he wants to get away from the escapist notion of heaven that is so common. Fair enough, but that's like saying God does not exist because people's faith is too escapist (which is of course exactly what the New Atheists do).

So what we have is a matter of emphasis: The NT says that we go to heaven (or if you prefer, we go to "be with Jesus"), and it says that we will all rise in the great resurrection. The focus of the NT is on the later. What then happens is that Wright will be quoted by Time or some other news source which will then simplify this to "Christians Wrong About Heaven" and next thing you know folks are going claiming there is no such thing as heaven (and I've heard seminarians claim exactly that). Wright does not mind this so much because he believes that it is important that we draw our attention away from heaven which he associates with escapism. Here he is making a legitimate ethical point (our concept of heaven should not be escapist), but he is doing so with the wrong means (saying as a historian and scholar that the Bible does not teach that we go to heaven).

This illustrates something that happens all too often with historical Jesus studies: Scholars will use their authority status as historical experts to make ethical points. The very same thing happens when other historical Jesus scholars claim that Jesus did not actually say something which... big surprise... they don't like. Now it is certainly valid for these scholars to make such ethical points, but we need to be very careful here. It is very important to be forthright about the ethical claims that are being made, and not mask these behind the mantle of objective historical research. That would be a misuse of both ethics and historical study, and do a disservice to both disciplines.

What Wright is saying is an ethical point: we should care for this earth. We should be involved in healing our world here. I totally agree with him on that (and highly recommend his closing talk). But that is really an ethical and theological issue, and needs to be discussed openly as such. Frankly, I do not find Jewish apocalyptic helpful at all in working towards this. I find on the contrary that it muddies the waters quite a bit. Maybe that's just me, but I think the focus needs to be on how we can implement the kingdom teaching and actions of Jesus right now in our lives, and not on grasping some foreign concept of eschatology from another worldview. That gets our focus off of what it should be on, which is embodying Christ-like action in our world.

Does Luther get Justification Wrong? Another issue is related to Wright's take on the New Perspective on Paul, which basically says that Paul in Romans is not focused on answering Luther's question of "how can I find a gracious God?" and instead is arguing against issues of food laws and ritual observances. Now I've personally been a proponent of the New Perspective (in particular the version espoused by James Dunn). I find it brings a lot of things to light that had been missed before, like how the gospel deals with issues of religious violence, and exclusiveness. I think it is fair to say that the New Perspective gets Paul right historically in a way that Luther does not.

That said, I think that Luther did manage to see how Paul's message of grace in his own time spoke directly to the issues that Luther was dealing with in his. A first step in biblical interpretation is to understand the original context and meaning, but then we need to go beyond that ask how the text might speak to our own pressing questions. Otherwise it just becomes a letter dealing with issues that were important in the past, which are no longer relevant to us today (food laws, circumcision, etc).

So I think it would be a mistake is to say that the New Perspective is the one right way to read Paul. Wright however does seem to place precisely that kind of priority on his historical reading, and that is what I would want (lovingly I hope) to challenge. The New Perspective definitely has many profound insights that we need to hear, but then so did Luther and the protestant reformation. Why can't we hear and learn from both of them? The other Martin Luther (King Jr.) also read the New Testament and found it speaking to issues of racial justice and equality, applying it in ways that the original authors also had not directly envisioned at the time. Do we need to dismiss that too because it is equally unhistorical? On the contrary, I'd say that what Luther and MLK were doing is exactly what we are supposed to do too. We too need to learn how to read the Bible and see how it message speaks into our lives and world today. That is after all the theological task: not just to correctly read the past, but to construct a vision for how to apply the gospel to our time. That means we will need to deal with things which were not even on their radar back then: world hunger relief, globalization, medical ethics, and on and on. Historical grounding is a great place to start, but it is not where we should stop.

Basing Theology on Experience

noreply@blogger.com (Sharktacos) — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 09:22:00 +0000

What is the source of theology? Some would say it is sola scriptura--Scripture alone. Others cast the net a bit further and say that it is the quadrilateral of Scripture, reason, tradition, and experience. That last one, experience, always comes in last. Lots of people are really wary of experience. It makes them think of uncontrolled emotion, subjective feelings, and stuff out of control. But I'd like to make the somewhat radical proposal that experience should be the central category for how we do theology, and that this is a deeply biblical position to take.

By experience I simply mean actually knowing God in a relationship, so that faith is lived and not merely theoretical. That has very little to too with emotions (although there is nothing wrong with emotion!), and everything to do with living our faith, with actually loving God, ourselves, and others. I imagine everyone is with me so far, but what about the Bible? Isn't that a matter of objective detached study?

That is certainly how you learn to study it in seminary. But nevertheless I insist: No! this is not what understanding the Bible should be based on. I've discussed this in some detail in my article on relational theology so I don't want to rehash that here. In a nutshell I would say (following Stanley Grenz here) that Scripture is primary because it informs experience, shapes reason, and is the source from which tradition develops, as well its constant spur to reformation. At the same time however, Scripture ultimately serves a servant function of leading us into relationship with Christ so we can live out Christ-like relationships. So the goal is experience, namely the experience of meeting God and having that transform all our other experiences.

The unforgivable sin, Jesus says, is blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. Jesus says this in the context of the Pharisees rejecting the work of the Spirit happening among them through the healing ministry of Jesus because it conflicted with their understanding of the law. Here experience of what God was doing in Jesus trumps their tradition, and their reading of Scripture, and their reasoning. There is nothing worse, no greater crime, Jesus says, than missing out one what the Spirit is doing right in front of you. It is, Jesus says, the biggest sin possible. Those are some pretty strong words.

With that in mind think about Paul's conversion: His experience on the Damascus road causes him to re-read Scripture anew in light of that encounter with Christ. Paul's experience of Christ caused him to completely re-think (reason) his whole tradition as a Pharisee, and how he had read Scripture. Experience precedes exegesis.

Likewise, the council of Jerusalem in the book of Acts bases their decision to include gentiles in the gospel (which was a huge decision!) based primarily on the experience of what the Spirit was doing among them as testified to by Paul and Peter. Acknowledging this, James then connects their experience to what was foretold in the Scriptures. Experience again precedes and shapes biblical interpretation.

From that I want to argue that in order to really get the Bible, you need to get grace, and the only way to really get it is to experience it. The woman who washed Jesus feet with her tears understood much more deeply than any of the religious scholars sitting at that table and looking down their noses at her did. We need to know grace like that, so its unconditional love brings us to our knees in gratitude, and makes us want to love that way too. Paul before he knew grace read the Bible and got it all wrong. After he met God in Christ on the Damascus road and was struck blind, it was a disciple who was willing to love his enemy who healed him. Think about how it would effect you to be healed by the people who you had tried to kill. That's grace. After that he suddenly got the Bible. We need to get some of that. So my prayer for you is that you would find grace in your life, that you would know what it means to be unconditionally loved, no matter how broken or messed up you are, and that being loved like that would change how you see everything.

What church do you go to?

noreply@blogger.com (Sharktacos) — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 18:58:00 +0000

Every so often I get an email with someone asking what church I go to. That is, they want to know where they can find a church that teaches the kind of stuff I do on this blog so that they can go there. So I thought I'd try and address that.

I'll start with the quick answer: the denomination that I feel most at home in is the Vineyard since it is charismatic like me, but with a real focus on grace and caring for people. If I had to pick one church that really gets grace more than any other, it would be Jay Baker's Revolution NYC. Jay is kind of a hero to me because he is able to be so open, real, and always focused on grace.

Now let me make two points. First, I don't go to either of these churches. I don't go to Revolution NYC because it is on the other side of the country. I don't go to a Vineyard church either because while there a lot of them, there are none in the city I live in. Second, I really don't know if Jay or the Vineyard teach Christus Victor as opposed to Penal Substitution. I'm not sure that's so important. What they do teach is grace, grace, grace. So what I would recommend to folks looking for a church is not to try and find one that teaches all the "right" stuff (isn't that focus part of the problem?) but rather to find a church that knows about grace. That is, a church where you can be real, where you can ask questions, where you can struggle, where they know we are all messed up and all need God's amazing transforming love.

Right now I'm going to a Presbyterian church. The pastor of that church happens to agree with me on being opposed to penal substitution, (which is kind of surprising since Presbyterians are Calvinist!) but that is not really why I go there. I go there because of the focus on grace. There are folks who believe in penal substitutions who are totally focused on grace (John Wesley and Charles Spurgeon come to mind for me), and then there are folks who instead have a gospel of fear, guilt, and legalism. It's the fruits that matter here, not the doctrinal statements. Or perhaps more accurately, its not what you say so much as it is how you walk that out that matters. So that's my advice for people looking for a chruch: find a church where you can be real and honest that is focused on grace. Don't focus so much on the Sunday sermon (not that it doesn't matter!) as you do on having real relationships with people in that church (small groups are often a good way to do that).

Before I started going to my current church we were going to a Baptist church. The pastor there was this wonderful loving guy, but he died sadly, and they brought in a new guy. This new guy believed all the same things, but he was angry, arrogant, uncompassionate, and preached that message of condemnation every week. It was the classic "God hates you and has a wonderful plan for your life" alter call to a religion of fear. Yuck.

Now, there are a lot of things that I did not agree with in that Baptist church with the loving pastor, and there are a lot I don't agree with in the church I go to now. If you can find a church that "gets it all right" that's great, but I never have. What I try to do instead is find a place that has the fruits of grace. A place that is imperfect (like I am!), but where we can all come and be real and show grace and love to each other as we work to grow closer to Jesus and love others like he loves us.

Now I'm sure I'm oversimplifying things somewhat. After all, if doctrine did not matter I guess I would not spend so much time talking about it on this blog. I also don't want to imply that we should just go to churches that are "nice". That's not what grace is about because that's fake. The point I'm trying to make is you really can't judge a church by their denominational badge, or statement of faith, or compelling web page, or innovative worship service. You need to get to know a community of people who, like a family, will be imperfect, but hopefully, like a family, will also really love each other.

I wish I could give a more straightforward answer. Maybe a couple links to some awesome churches right by where you live. But the reality is that I don't have some super fantastic church over here where the grass is greener. I struggle with this just like you do. I'm pretty sure we all do. It's really pretty simple: love God with all your heart, and love your neighbor like you love yourself. But that's so hard to find. It seems that most churches either are good at being compassionate, but leave out the focus on a close relationship with God (most mainline churches); or they are good at that, but then get too legalistic (most Evangelical churches). Can't we do both?

The good news is I do see a real move towards that. Robert Webber has identified this as the Younger Evangelicals, but it is still very grass roots. You need to look between the lines to find it by really getting to know the people in the pews next to you. But we're out there.

Why the historical study of Jesus is a waste of time

noreply@blogger.com (Sharktacos) — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 19:44:00 +0000

First let me say that understanding the original history and context—that is, the background material—in which the New Testament takes place is without a doubt a very valuable task. We want to understand the original context of the writers of the NT so that we do not simply impose our doctrinal and cultural biases on to the text but actually hear what the NT authors are telling us. So I am not saying we shouldn't study. I've spent a lot of time deeply studying such things and maintain that such education is very important.

My gripe is with the very specific way that the quest for the historical Jesus, rooted in the assumptions of the historical-critical method, presents a view of Jesus that is deliberately opposed to the message of the New Testament. Rather than helping us to get closer to the original church and to the Bible, it denies this and pulls us away from it. Let me explain:

One of the main tasks of historical scholarship consists in determining the so called "authentic saying of Jesus." To do this scholars will distinguish sayings of Jesus that they believe come the Q source as opposed to for example a saying that is unique to Luke's gospel. One major element here is the distinction between Jesus understood in the light of his crucifixion and resurrection on the one hand (which they reject as "inauthentic"), and a pre-resurrection understanding.

Now the gospels are all about a message preached to us that the disciples finally got after its fulfillment—after Jesus was crucified, raised from the dead, and the Spirit was imparted to the church. It was in that light that the disciples finally understood what Jesus was about all along and this is what we read in the four Gospels. All the stuff that Jesus did and said leads up the cross and resurrection. It gives us the context for understanding the cross and what it means, and at the same time it was only after Jesus rose that they could look back and say "ohhhhh, now I get it!" The gospel's stories (Jesus healing and redeeming people, and his radical teaching) go hand in hand with the climax of that story at Easter and Pentecost.

Now the historical search instead ignores the resurrection and wants to reconstruct a hypothetical version of Jesus as if there was no resurrection. In doing this they need to reject the entire point of the gospel writers, and toss out their message, calling it "inauthentic". They thus present a version of Jesus that Peter, Paul and John never believed in. Indeed most of the time in their so-called historical reconstruction Jesus either ends up coincidentally looking like a reflection of these scholars, or a version of Jesus emerges that these scholars themselves can't do anything with and thus reject as "not compatible with the modern worldview." As a result this "historical" study does not help us understand the NT better, it begins by rejecting the very assumptions of the NT: the resurrection.

So why would we want to listen to anything that these "experts" say to us? Why would I want to listen to someone who is pulling be away from the message of the NT? I find life when I read the gospels and the NT because it brings me into the same encounter of God in Christ that the New Testament authors had. That encounter with the God of grace transforms me, fills me with new life, and as a result I want to listen to them. I trust them because it is through them that I found life, and found the risen cruciform Jesus. The message of the gospel brings life. In contrast to this the message of these historians brings doubt, cynicism, and darkness. It causes me to doubt the words of Christ as "inauthentic" and urges me to just toss out big portions the the NT as a result.

So when I read the gospels I am not interested in figuring out what came from the Markan tradition or what came from Q. I am interested in simply reading what the gospels actually say and understanding that as well as I can. Now there are many scholars who I think can help us in doing this. Ernst Käseman, Joachim Jeremias, James Dunn, and NT Wright all spring to mind. But when I hear people speak of determining the "authentic sayings of Jesus" all sorts of alarm bells go off in my head because this signals for me "let's try and go in the wrong direction away from the NT proclamation." Sorry that's not where I'm headed.

EDIT: I've been thinking a bit more about this and wanted add an important point. I don't so much disagree with the historical conclusions of these scholars. I think they get their facts right much of the time. What I disagree with is the prescriptive conclusions they draw. That is, I think it is probably true that Jesus and Paul have a perspective that comes out of Jewish apocalyptic background while Mark, Luke, and John all approach faith more from a Hellenistic gnostic perspective. What I disagree with is that the Jewish perspective is the "right" one, and the Greek is "wrong" because this is obviously not what the early church thought when it included all of these books in the canon of the NT. What we see in the NT are two things:

1) There is a multitude of perspectives. We have some books that come from a Jewish worldview, and others that have a Greek worldview, and of course we can find even more nuance if we look closer. That means that the NT promotes diversity. It embraces the good insights of different cultures. It is not ethnocentric, but open, diverse, and broadminded. What the historical Jesus scholars get wrong is when they think they need to toss out all the Greek influence as "inauthentic" and replace it with the "authentic" or "original" Jewish perspective. This is just as close-minded as it was when an earlier church did the opposite and replaced all Jewish influence with Greek thought.

2) The NT while embracing the good it finds in multiple cultures and worldviews does not blindly accept them. It engages in a culturally critical evaluation of them, taking some parts and rejecting others. In the NT for example the exclusivity of gnosticism was rejected while the idea of immediate experience of the presence of God was embraced. Similarly, while Jesus was Jewish his Judaism (and Paul's) was one that rejected the ethos of violence running through the OT. So along with an embrace of diverse perspectives we also find their critical transformation by the NT authors.

So we find a picture of diversity, that is at the same time culturally critical in the NT. That's pretty cool, and honestly if it were not for historical criticism we wouldn't have noticed that. So I take back what I said in my blog post title here. I don't think that the historical Jesus is "a waste of time". It is valuable because it allows us to appreciate the broad range of perspectives that make up the NT witness. What I maintain however is that when these historians say that one particular cultural perspective is the authentic, real, good one, then at that point they are not only being narrow-minded, they are also going against the New Testament which embraces all cultures in order to lovingly transform them. Their historical analysis is right, but their interpretive prescription is wrong, and the NT has in contrast a hermeneutical prescription that is a lot more insightful and complex in how it engages culture.