Where Everybody's Crazy

I'm with some friends in Hokkaido, and I just got passed a copy of Rob Bell's Velvet Elvis. I pretty much sat down and read it in one sitting - at least, as much as I could with two young kids crawling over me. There's some great stuff about the provisional nature of Biblical interpretation and the fluid nature of doctrine. I was going to pull out a bunch of quotes and post them here.

Then I thought, well, why bother? I was in my friends' mission headquarters the other day and glanced over at a copy of Evangelicals Now, and saw that there was an article in there straw-manning the hell out of these dangerous people who are trying to abolish doctrine!

So I just thought, stuff it. There's no quote I can pull out of that book that is going to convince anyone who doesn't already agree with it, and the book isn't trying to convince anyone anyway. It's all just, to use a spectacularly inappropriate metaphor, preaching to the choir. Hey, that's not a bad thing, because sometimes the choir needs a bit of preaching to as well.

But the good stuff in the book isn't about doctrine or interpretation. If you're reading the book you already know all that. It's the challenge, the parts about finding joy in your walk with God, the stuff about killing off your inner super-pastor, the reminder that the work of a pastor is not just work but privilege.

That's the good stuff. But I'm not going to pull out quotes. Just go read it. If you like this blog, you'll agree with what it says, but I hope it challenges you as well.

Never at any point do the Gospels or Paul say Jesus has been raised, therefore we are we are all going to heaven. They all say, Jesus is raised, therefore the new creation has begun, and we have a job to do.

That'd be Tom Wright, in Time magazine. Nothing unusual to anyone who's read anything of Tom Wright's stuff, but the whole interview is superb stuff. And certainly makes a lot more sense of the New Testament texts than the whole clouds-and-angels approach.

I'm reading through Bosch again with my pastor, and oh, it's good. There are times when you just have to stop and think through each and every sentence because there's so much density of thought in there. Here's a gem we turned up yesterday.

In much of the "electronic church", materialism is baptized. The Jesus of revivalism appears to have more in common with the Chamber of Commerce and the entertainment world than with a simple cave in Bethlehem or a rugged cross on a barren hill. Preachers steer clear of controversial social issues and concentrate on those personal sins of which most of their enthusiastic listeners are not guilty. However, what criterion determines that racism and structural injustice are social issues but pornography and abortion personal? Why is politics shunned and declared to fall outside the competence of the evangelist, except when it favors the position of the privileged in society? How is it that preachers who appear to have an interest only in the otherworldly destiny of their listeners can be so thoroughly worldly in their ethos and methods?

What he said.

I'm currently preparing the Christmas Sunday message for my church, and the theme is on the poverty of Jesus. Far from baptizing commerce and materialism, our God came into the world with nothing, as the bastard child of a carpenter whose own family, in his own home town, couldn't find him somewhere to stay. The saviour God was welcomed into the world not by the great and the good of his own people, but only by foreigners and the pastoral underclass.

As well as having nowhere to be born, he went through life with "nowhere to lay his head." Actually, he had nothing; he borrowed everything. When he needed a boat to preach from, he had to borrow one from a friend; when he died, alone and rejected by his friends, he was laid in a borrowed grave.

Nowhere to be born and nowhere to die, depending meekly on the kindness of others. That's the kind of God we serve. Then as now, Jesus resists our attempts to make him impressive, for he knows that it is through weakness and poverty, not through riches and strength, that God works in the world.

It's a bit of a shameful admission, but after five years of Japanese degree and then six years of private study, I've finally read my first book in Japanese from cover to cover unassisted.

I may be in danger of becoming a complete Mitsuo Fukuda fanboy here, but it was his "Mentoring Like Barnabas", and it was very very good - and in lots of ways, very humbling. It made me think about what right or experience I have to be talking to others about leadership, which is a good question to ask, whatever the answer.

And it contained a lot of good stuff about coaching, mentoring, counselling, church management and general Christian life. One of the bits that really hit me was something that everyone who is working as a pastor in Japan should know:

In the words of the pastor and counsellor Nobuo Tanaka, many Japanese come to church in search of a father figure. This is a part of a conversation with a consellor: "In my thirty years of counselling, not one person has honestly come to be honestly for a consultation. It may take the form of a consultation, but actually they are looking for a substitute father in me. So proposing any kind of solution is a waste of time. A consultation is the name they put on it, but it is merely an excuse to see me; they come not to seek a solution to their pain, but to find love." Many people coming to church choose the pastor or pastor's wife as a substitute parent, subconsciously seeking the acceptance that they did not receive from their natural parents. If this is true, then what the church needs to provide in order to face their situation is not teaching but relationship.

I posted this is a comment on the Church Planting Institute blog, but they deleted my comment without notice. Which is very nice of them. Way to build community, guys! (OK, I've been guilty of doing that in the past too - my house, my rules - but I'm not really trying to build community here too much. Just providing an outlet for other ranters and ravers... :)

Their article quotes a book on leadership:

Leadership competency may be the tools of effective leadership; but biblically informed character has always been the power of effective leadership. When a leader does not continually address character formation and transformation in their personal lives and operate solely from a competency base, then competency will ultimately fail to produce the kind of results God intended through the life of that leader. And remember, lasting transformational change begins with the heart. Our central beliefs establish our cores values, our values inform our worldview, our worldview conditions our primary motives, and our motives energize our behavior. Our behavior merely reflects the condition of our hearts (Proverbs 4:23). The lesson: pay attention to the heart from God’s point of view (1 Samuel 16:7), and God-honoring behavior will follow.

I can't remember my comment verbatim, but it was something like the following:

It's a shame that people feel forced to use management-speak to talk about leadership, particularly when one of the important qualities of a leader is clear communication. See if this is easier to read:

Leadership isn't just about what you can do, it's also about who you are. If you're just focused on what you can do and don't develop who you are, you're not going to succeed. Who you are starts with what you believe, and that determines why you do what you do. If you want to improve your leadership, start by improving yourself.

A refreshing counterpoint to the constant bulletins about the Sexual Orientation Regulations that threaten to take over our communal noticeboards:

How could preachers preach such vehement messages towards gays when it was clear that the Bible was unclear at best, and silent at worse, on the issue? Why recklessly condemn a group of individuals? Why fixate on them when your congregation is knee deep in divorce (Jesus had some pretty clear words on that issue)? And as for gluttony, how could preachers lecture gays on restraint when churches host pot luck dinner after pot luck dinner and not be deemed hypocritical?

It was this hypocrisy that caused me to open my eyes. Those on the Christian right, for whatever reasons, have become fixated on homosexuality. They are obsessed by it and perverse form of vengeance appears to be fueling their inquisition. I may be wrong, but I think actions are speaking much louder than words here.

The whole gay issue is no longer about the quest for the Truth; it is about fear and loathing. It is about shame and sorrow. It is anything but Christian.

- Joe Murray, Former American Family Association columnist

The conservative wing of the Anglican church, which I guess is my ecclesiastical home, is currently involved in claiming that it is fighting for the sanctity of marriage; unfortunately the way it upholds the value of marriage seems to be by means of a spectacularly public divorce.

It really isn't worth it.

The book of Isaiah presents idolatry as a dimension of the sin of pride. To believe in the absoluteness of our interpretations is like worshiping our own creations; it is like thinking one reads with the eyes of God.

- Kevin Vanhoozer, Is there a meaning in this text?

Another of the shiny fun things in my Accordance toolbox. It's a good read, and is doing a lot to restore my faith in the possibility of honest Biblical interpretation. I would love to have a look at Chris Wright's new book on missional hermeneutics as well, but maybe another time...

Look, I realise this might be seen as trying to provoke a reaction. I'm not. I've just had three thoughts hit me at once, and found a common strand in them.

I've always been struck by the thought from Leslie Newbigin (in "The Open Secret") that

the working concept of God for most ordinary Christians is - if one may venture a bold guess - shaped more by the combination of Greek philosophy and Islamic theology that was powerfully injected into the thought of Christendom at the beginning of the High Middle Ages than by the thought of the fathers of the first four centuries.

Now I'll admit up front I'm not enough of a historian to judge how that happened and what effect it actually had; I have no idea, so I'm going to trust Newbigin on that one and assume that it is true, that Islamic theology has affected Christian thought in a profound way. (Let's be fair, it would be very strange if it hadn't!) There were three areas I recently came up against where I detected perhaps a hint - perhaps not - of this influence.

Trinity

This was Newbigin's original point. We don't, on the whole, think of God as Trinity. Well, at least I don't, so I'm a representative sample of what he was talking about. Although I'm (fervently) trinitarian, my day-to-day experiential view of God is dominated by God the Father, with Jesus and the Holy Spirit as useful adjuncts to perform His work for Him. I don't think of God as three persons; I don't pray to God as three persons; it's a less natural concept to get your head around.

And if it's less natural, then it's harder to preach. Much easiest to start with the concepts of God that people have already, and "tweak" them a bit! But if God is fundamentally three-in-one, then that ought to be what we preach, ought it not?

The Bible

I've been discussing with Custardy about the role given to the Bible in evangelicalism, the concept of "the Word of God" and charges of bibliolatry - worshipping the book. There's a cruel but somewhat understandable joke about a local church that it is trinitarian, but its Trinity is the Father, the Son and the Holy Scripture. But as Custard points out, the supreme revelation of God is not the Bible, but Jesus the Messiah.

It was that phrase that God me thinking about the Islamic concept of the supreme revelation of God, which is of course the written scripture. Did Islamic thinking on relevation - "at the beginning of the High Middle Ages" - affect our own? My personal view is that, of course, the exaltation of Scripture was the result of a need brought about by the lack of a magisterium post-Reformation, but as usual it is difficult to separate all the elements. But however it came about, the tendency to make the Bible (a static thing) "the Word of God" (which is generally a dynamic thing when used in the Bible itself) and to declare it infallible, inerrant, and all the other in-s - and thereby to reduce it to pure revelation, to decontextualize it and to dismiss the questions raised by its human transmission - is most certainly Quranic.

Is that an influence we should be swallowing wholesale?

Sin

OK, I don't have my thoughts fully worked out on this one, but a recent discussion with H reminded me of the fabulous EMQ article "The Gospel For Shame Cultures" which pointed out the abhorrence in which Muslim theology holds the Christian incarnation, the idea that God participated in and identified himself this world. How can God do this? He is pure and holy, and hates sin. Now I have to affirm that. God is pure and holy, and He does hate sin.

But at the same time He does not shy away from it. The common idea that God "abandoned" Jesus on the cross because He could not bear to look upon the sin is utterly heretical. It is heretical because it repudiates the Trinity; just like my (equally heretical!) common workaday concept of God, it regards Jesus as a separate entity dispatched by God to do His work, rather than as God incarnate. If God could not bear to look upon Jesus' sin, how could Jesus, who is God, bear it himself? How could Jesus, who is God, take upon himself such sin?

It is also heretical because it repudiates the Incarnation. Jesus, who is God, entered this world. He lived among us, dealing with the sin of our society. He enjoyed hanging around with prostitutes and drunkards; they were his people. He spent very little time rebuking them for their sin, even though he had plenty of opportunity. Instead of talking about it, he did something about it. (In fact, thinking about it, he fairly clearly told us not to rebuke others' sin, because we're always worse ourselves.)

But this, after all, the whole darned point of Christianity: that God did not leave us to fight our sin on our own in some holy arrogance, keeping Himself pure and unsullied, but He got His hands dirty - very dirty - and joined us in that fight. He who had no sin became sin for us. It's a paradox but there it is: God hates sin so much he filled himself with it.

Should we try to avoid sin? Of course. Did God avoid sin? Of course not. God abhors sin, but at the same time, He embraces it, and through embracing it, overpowers it. This is obviously not something we should emulate! His goodness is enough to conquer sin, but ours is not! But it is, at any rate, something we should not deny.

And here's where I haven't got it all worked out. I want to affirm the idea that God is pure and holy and hates sin. But I do not want to fall into saying that sin is utterly abhorrent to him, and to overemphasise His hatred and separation from sin, because I think I know where that idea comes from. God did most certainly not separate himself from sin, and that is what is so offensive to Muslims about Christianity! And I see their point. It's a complete scandal. Why aren't we offended by it? God became sin! It would be blasphemous if it wasn't what the Bible teaches... Maybe our overfamiliarity with the story has blinded us to how scandalous it really is.

I don't know. I haven't got it worked out. Both are true. Perhaps what God actually hates is not the sin itself, but the knowledge of what that sin has done to His beloved people.

Grace makes beauty out of ugly things.
Grace finds beauty in everything.
Grace finds goodness in everything.

U2, Grace

Can't really get much more profound than that.

Well, of last year, really. But it's something that I keep getting drawn back to. Martin and Hazel are doing great stuff in Argentina, and thinking hard too. This is a part of one of their blog posts that really spoke to me:

And I'm also reminded of a Martin Joseph song from the 1980's called "Treasure the question". As a new young Christian student in the late 1980's the one thing that our teaching definitely did not encourage us to do was to "treasure the question". As good modernist evangelicals, questions were to be used as launching pads into pre-prepared answers, and in spiritual whist, the pre-prepared answer was deemed to trump the question and end the game. Suggestions that the pre-prepared answer might not be entirely adequate in the face of real life, often resulted in the questioner being treated as an embarrassment, and subjected to "ministry", or being isolated altogether for fear of contamination. I think that one of the most positive things that the postmodern era can bring is about being able to "treasure the question" and enjoy the adventure of not knowing, with honesty and authenticity.

Apart from the obvious show of good taste in Christian music, this post says something important about postmodern theology as well. I think there's something in the ability to "treasure the question" that's good for our integrity, too - the ability to say that we don't have all the answers, only God does. It keeps us humble.

A mate asked me a couple of days ago what I thought about postmodernism. He'd been reading some books that said it was a really bad thing from a Christian perspective, but he felt that the books were so negative that they showed a lack of love. At that point I know that something has already gone wrong. I was reminded of Brian Maclaren in "The Church on the Other Side" who said something like: the church can resist postmodernism, but it's like resisting change in the English language. You can do it if you want, but you'll just end up sounding irrelevant.

See, the really, really ironic thing is that the postmodern ethos can trace its roots right back to the Reformation. Those naughty, naughty ideas of rejecting a centralised authority figure and allowing every man to determine his own interpretation of the truth, those are the outcomes of the Reformation that we Evangelicals particularly pride ourselves on after breaking away from the Catholic church. If we then reject postmodernism, we're saying that it's OK for us to do but it's not OK if the world does it, and that's not good.

There's a lovely site called Christian Agnostic, and I go there for inspiration from time to time. Because that's me: a Christian agnostic. I don't have all the answers. There's an amazing amount I don't know. I know not why God's wonderous grace to me has been made known. This is anathema to the modernist cause, which must be able to draw a straight line from the question to the answer. I know not how this saving faith to me He did impart. This is anathema to soteriology, which needs to develop and baptise a certain interpretation of the cross. I know not how the Spirit moves convicting men of sin. I get out there and witness to him, but I know that I cannot persuade people, and I know that if it is the Spirit's job then I am not the one to ram grace down their throats. I know not what good or ill may be reserved for me.

But I know whom I have believed, and I'm persuaded that he is able to keep that which I've committed unto Him until that day.

And until that day, I'll treasure the questions. I hope you will too.