The Hijacking of the Evangelical Manifesto

This is an interesting interview with one of the signees of the manifesto, Frank Wright.  Although in many circles the manifesto was understood to be further evidence of the movement within evangelicalism to untangle or change the nature of the movement’s engagement with politics, Wright claims that it has devolved into Christians throwing stones at each other, and this occurred primarily due to the document being “hijacked” by some of the more “liberal signers.” 

Greg Boyd on Barth & Augustine’s View of Evil and Sin

In his book Satan and the Problem of Evil, Greg Boyd points to what he views as a deficiency in Augustine’s conception of sin.  In discussing Barth’s conception of das Nichtige, he argues it is inadequate b/c it lacks the actual reality of a free morally responsible agent.  He writes that

Only when ‘the nothingness’ is chosen and incarnated in an agent as real does it become real evil.  Now it is no longer a mere ‘absence.’  It becomes a concrete embodied presence.

It is this basic conviction that we must speak of the actuality of evil over the potentiality of evil that leads Boyd to make this passing comment on Augustine’s view of sin:

I would submit that this is the missing element in the traditional Augustinian definition of evil as ‘the absence of good.’  The definition describes the potentiality of evil but not the actuality of evil.  Evil becomes actualized when it is chosen by an actual agent.  This is also why I argue that evil can never be properly discussed in the abstract.  We must always have concrete instances of evil before us if our discussion is truly to be about evil and not just the potential for evil.

I think that Boyd’s thoughts here are worth some reflection.  While i’m not an expert on Barth, from what i know of him i have a hard time thinking that Boyd is giving him a fair reading here.  Folks who are deeply engaged in Barth’s work, your thoughts are requested here. 

However, when it comes to Boyd’s thesis on Augustine, his argument seems compelling to me, since it requires that theological thinking about evil happen in the concrete reality of evil, rather than in mere speculation about a deficiency.  There seems to be a resistance to the common modern dualism between faith and practice.  

Thoughts? 

 

 

Vatican: Excommunication for Female Priests

This is an interesting story, although not really surprising.  It appears that the Vatican wants to squash any movement that seeks to ordain women before it gets too far off the ground.  Many of the usual reasons are given, but here is one fun quote:

Monsignor Angelo Amato of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said the Vatican wanted to provide bishops with a clear response on the issue.

A clear response, indeed.

Five (Initial) Theses on Theology and Culture

Next week my 6 week summer course “Theology of Culture” starts.  i thought that i might post a brief sketch of my initial thoughts on this subject:

1. Theology (understanding of God) that is interpreted solely through our experience (like the special interest groups), inevitably falls prey to the minimalizing God, making an idol in our own image.   Christians must resist merely capitulating to the culture around them.
2. That said, there is no theology that can completely avoid this “contextualization of God.”  The gift (or curse if you prefer) of postmodern theory, and the emerging church, is the insight that we are born, eat, sleep, breathe, and live within a multitude of complexs (world, country, state, town, son, daughter, dad, country club, denomination, etc), all of which to varying degrees influence us to the point that they help shape all of our views of reality, for better or worse.  None of us, regardless of our exegetical skill, can stand outside ourselves and know everything 100% accurately.   All our theologies are partially our own little buffet lines, where we tend emphasis or downplay sections of the faith to our tastes. 
3. That said, our environment does not determine us to the point where we can’t change.  I can’t follow the pomos that far.  The fact that they were able to realize pt #2 above proves that we can partially step outside our interpretative lens.  From a Chrstian persepctive, there is a second solution, a better one; Someone can intervene, step into our world, and refashion our interpretative grid for us. 
4. This brings me to what i think the thesis of my professor will be: Jesus Christ, is our best launching pad for understanding both God, ourselves, and our world as speaks about it.  This is b/c he was (and is still) fully God and fully man, and thus is authoritative in all respects.    
5. One further point of clarification.  What i’m saying doesn’t amount to a return to simply appealing to ”just be biblical.”  I think that point 2 above is accurate.  When i speak of Jesus Christ as the center, i’m not referring to just a person that is contained solely within a set of texts, a mere abstraction.  I’m thinking that our theology must be relationally grounded in the Christ who lived the life proclaimed in Scripture but also is risen, alive, and who may have some words for us today. How we can have a relational center, moving away from modernity’s preoccupation with “timeless principles,” and still live God-honoring lives (eg engage culture) is the task that i suspect will continue to engage biblical scholars and theologians for quite awhile, maybe even after i’m dead. 

I’m hopeful that this class will help me sort through these issues more deeply. 

Is the Holy Spirit a Divine Moped?

While there are many theological issues that seem to provoke initial discomfort, only to subside with the passing of time, others act like constant pinpricks to my theological sensibilities.  This quote from Ray Anderson, which i read yesterday, is representative of one such consistent agitation:

The Holy Spirit is the revelation to us of the inner being of God as constituted by the eternal and ongoing relation between Father and Son [source].

The reason why this statement, and many others similar to it, cause my eye to twitch is that it seems to really downplay the Deity of the Holy Spirit.  Sure people give lip service to the deity of the Holy Spirit, and even assert that the Holy Spirit is active in the world, but it seems that many theologians are reluctant to assert that the Holy Spirit has genuine personhood, or to explicate how the term can be consistently be applied to all three members of the Trinity.  While there is little doubt that defining such a term when seeking to discuss the nature of God is a tricky task to say the least, without it most seem to underemphasize the personal nature of the Spirit.   

What we get instead is the quote above, which relegates the Holy Spirit to being merely a divine moped of sorts, the vehicle through which the Father and Son commune, the vehicle we ride into that communion, and the one whose job it is to reveal to us the “true” inner being  of God, found in the relationship between the Son and the Spirit.  When the inner being of God is constituted by the relationship of the Father and Son, which the Holy Spirit merely reveals to us, it seems hard to deny that one member of the Triune God is left outside looking in. 

It seems that in the drive to be thoroughly Christocentric in theology, an equally rigorous doctrine of the Spirit is lost, swallowed up by Christology.  As a side note, this is why i often find the more “social” understandings of the Trinity compelling, b/c a lot of what passes for Trinitarian theology is really binitarian to me.  The understanding of the Trinity in the tradition of the Torrances seem to be, at least. 

All that said, I’m very open to having someone show me how the Trinitarian conceptions of Anderson and the Torrance’s have a high view of the Spirit, or how they ascribe genuine personhood to all three members of the Trinity.  Some one help me, this splinter is killing me!

Anderson on Creeds

I realize that the creeds were a confession of faith–credo (I believe).  But the creeds confess that one believes and what one believes.  Is it not the case, all too often, I fear, that one can recite the creed without ever answering the question, ‘Who do you say that I am?’

Anderson, Ray in An Emergent Theology for Emerging Churches (IVP, 2006), 43-44.

Brian D. McLaren: A New Kind of Christian

Brian D. McLaren, A New Kind of Christian: A Tale of Two Friends on a Spiritual Journey (Jossey-Bass, 2001), 210 pp.

In this work, Brian McLaren uses the medium of story to lay out his basic views regarding the postmodern culture, and how the church should respond.  However, as another review has pointed out, these stories aren’t pure fiction, they also retell McLaren’s own journey from modernity and into the postmodern mindset.  However, as McLaren points out, the line between reality and fantasy is blurry, and because of this he implores the reader not to be overly concerned with his ability to craft a good story (while a lot of the dialogue is engaging, the flow is rather choppy and pieced todgether), or to try to figure out which character represents him. 

There are two main characters in this book.  Dan Poole, the main character, is a pastor who is struggling and is considering leaving the pastorate.  Dan is thoroughly entrenched in the modern worldview and its understanding of Christianity.  The other major character is Neil Edward Oliver, Neo for short, who is a high school science teacher and someone who has began to fully embrace a postmodern model of the faith.  Neo seems to act as a foil to Dan’s views yet is also a catalyst for new thinking and hope for a better way of understanding his life.  In the midst of this tension, which rises and falls according to the issue under discussion (some cows are more sacred to Dan than others), a friendship is born as the similarities between the two become apparent (ex: Neo used to think and feel just like Dan, but unlike Dan he left the pastorate) and as Neo’s way of understanding the faith is progressively embraced by Dan.  Most chapters center on one main issue, and rather than discuss each one in details, instead a more general understanding of McLaren’s views and goals for the book will be sketched out.

One point that undergirds McLaren’s whole work is that Christianity as many know it today has been  thoroughly permeated with the modern mindset.  So much so in fact, that many cannot even see it.  To this end Neo, McLaren’s postmodern foil to Dan, never tires of pointing out the problems modernity has brought to Christianity.  According to Neo, the modern world has placed theory over practice, reduced salvation to an individualistic, consumeristic enterprise, and produced an overly abstract and simplistic view of sin.  In McLaren’s work, modernity is by and large viewed as having left a dark legacy to the church, one that is characterized by abstraction, over-simplification, and a proclivity towards polarization.

To a large extent, it seems that McLaren’s goal is to help us find a way past the polarizing debates American evangelicalism has been engrossed in for the past few decades.  Frequently, Neo points out to Dan that liberals and conservatives aren’t really that different.  They both approach issues from a modern perspective, and disagree merely because of each group has a different starting point in their investigation of issues.  That said, for McLaren it seems that at times there are ideas or practices that are so thoroughly modernized that they must simply be discarded.  Neo is constantly pushing Dan to see that once he lets go of his modernist assumptions he can see these debates from a higher vantage point, one that sees a fuller (yet still only partial) picture, where both group’s concerns can be valued. 

This higher vantage point seems to be found in Jesus’ teaching of the Kingdom of God.  In this regard, McLaren admits being influenced by Dallas Willard’s understanding of the Kingdom of God.  For McLaren, the Kingdom of God is God’s reign, in all its power, restoring all the cosmos to its original goal of harmony with God.  It is this vision of cosmic restoration that creates the higher vantage point over which to see all the issues the church struggles with, and provides a way to start thinking holistically about them.  For example, regarding soteriology, Neo is a big fan of Isaiah, which points out that God’s redemptive will extends to all the earth, not just for individualized American evangelical souls.  Thus, for McLaren, often both liberals and conservatives have a piece of the truth, and the goal is to view them not as competing for control within the church, but as partial expressions of God’s restorative will to bring everything under God’s reign which need to be integrated or held in tension with each other.  In this book McLaren is asking the church to find bigger glasses.  The irony in this is that McLaren does this while still maintaining that no grid we can conceive of can do this in its entirety.  No set of glasses can be “big” enough.  Nonetheless, we do the best we can. 

While McLaren offers some suggestions for how the church might move forward in this book, he readily admits at the outset that this isn’t a finalized treaty on what God is doing in the Emerging Church movement, but that this book is merely “a beginning.”  McLaren’s goal here isn’t to answer every question we might have, but to merely take the discussion further.  In this work we see glimpses of McLaren’s vision of what the future of Christianity should look like and what it should believe, to become much more pronounced in his later writings.  For example, his work on the Kingdom of God, The Secret Message of Jesus, is, i’m told, “Willard for Dummies,” and fleshes out some of his thoughts more fully. 

This is a great book for someone to read who desires to become conversant with the Emerging Church movement, and is a 210 page parable designed to show where we’ve been and where we might be headed.  It is at its best when it is critiquing the failures of modernity, but is somewhat reluctant to try to answer really tough questions from its own lens.  While i believe that McLaren asks many of the right questions, i’m unsure whether he can provide answers with theological substance.  Only as i read more of his work can i honestly decide for myself whether he does.   

 

 

Book Review Etiquette

So i am about to finish reading Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christian for my summer course devoted to thinking theologically about culture.  I was thinking of doing a short book review, but since the book is over seven years old, i’m not sure if i should devote my time to it.  So i’m calling for fellow theo-bloggers to offer their opinions on when (or if?) a book is too old to review.  Any other additional thoughts on how to do book reviews in a proper, near nose-in-the-air manner is appreciated.   

Vatican: “Believing in Aliens is Cool”

This just in: the Roman Catholic Church is okay with aliens!  If you click here, you’ll read a full story of the Vatican’s reasons for their acceptance of the possibility of Alien life.  Probably my favorite quote was this gem:

Just as we consider earthly creatures as ‘a brother,’ and ’sister,’ why should we not talk about an ‘extraterrestrial brother’? It would still be part of creation.

Not that he is 100% wrong, but it is just so funny to here a scholar say something like that.  Although, if you compare these two pics with an unbiased mind, i might have to agree with him:

                             

To all Catholics who grace this blog site, please take all this in jest.

 

 

I’m Back

Those of you who read this blog have probably noticed that the posts have stopped coming.  I just finished wrapping up my last class of the semester today (i enjoyed an all night type-a-thon to get everything in), and have a few weeks before my summer course work starts.  Hopefully i can get back in the groove.  Many of my posts this summer will probably deal with developing a theology of culture and a theology of the family, since these are the classes i’m signed up for this summer.  Should be fun. 

So as to not leave you without anything of substance, if you go to my sideblog, there will be a paper i recently wrote entitled “Recovering the Kingdom of God in Worship.”  It is a little rough around the edges, but if you are willing please read it and give me some feedback in the comments here.   

More on Evangelicals and Politics

I found this recent development interesting, given how my most recent post talked about the possible shift in evangelical’s view of faith and politics.  This would appear to be more evidence of at least serious discussion, if not an outright shift in thought.  Enjoy!

An Interesting Discussion

Check this audio discussion.  Here is the synopsis:

A passionate discussion is unfolding in public and in private among Evangelical leaders and communities. Should Christians be involved in politics and if so, how? What has gone wrong, and what has been learned from the Moral Majority up until now. In this live public conversation, Krista probes these ideas with three formative Evangelicals.

In case you nned to be tempted a little more to listen to it, the three evangelicals are Chuck Colson, Greg Boyd, and Shane Claiborne.