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Some Things Are Just Stupid

The following is from an editorial review of Be Intolerant: Because Some Things Are Just Stupid by Ryan Dobson:

"Whatever" is now the password into civilized youth culture. Alarming numbers of Christians eighteen to twenty-five years old believe that there is no such thing as absolute truth. Yet, Ryan Dobson proclaims, we can't even function if we believe that everything is relative. In his first book, the impassioned youth speaker explains God's establishment of absolutes, using relevant examples to awaken Christians to the world's desperate hunger for absolute truth -- and the church's duty to proclaim it.

Ryan, questioning absolute truth does not make everything relative! This is the kind of false dichotomy that is misleading a lot of Christians today. It seems to me that both absolutism and relativism are false. We have to be careful about completely accepting any human-made philosophical view, whether it's modernism, postmodernism, or antidisestablishmentarianism. (Click here for a fun list of other "isms.") I think we need to learn what we can from philosophy and combine that with faith and praxis.

As for the title of Mr. Dobson's book, this is the kind of thing that make Christians look bad...and for no good reason. The Bible tells us that the gospel will offend people.^† That doesn't mean we are called to a mission of offensiveness, which is what he and others seem to believe. Dictionary.com defines "tolerance" as "a fair, objective, and permissive attitude toward those whose opinions, practices, race, religion, nationality, etc., differ from one's own." It seems to me that there are views we should not permit. Nonetheless, I think that tolerance is a good policy to follow, generally speaking. We should "err on the side of grace" as they say. We should also do everything we can to try to understand another person's point of view.

I freely admit that I have not read Ryan's book so go ahead and correct me if you know more about it. In the meantime, I'll enjoy being able to tag my post with the word "antidisestablishmentarianism!"

^† For example, see 1 Cor. 1:23.

Preaching Re-Imagined Review

I thought I would link to this review of Preaching Re-Imagined because the concepts Doug Pagitt talks about are so important. I wish more pastors would read this book and think hard about the ideas in it. Here's a quote from the review:

Pagitt wants to reconceive the purpose of the church and the way it accomplishes spiritual formation as a fundamental reorientation that moves people from being passive listeners to active learners. In Preaching Re-Imagined he extends this concern to what he sees as the last "unfunded mandate" of the Reformation—the final implementation of the priesthood of all believers as it affects preaching.

I sure wish I could attend a church where this was the goal! You can read my review of the book here.

Heresy is the New Orthodoxy

In A Heretic's Guide to Eternity, Spencer Burke and Barry Taylor say that heretics are "people who will push past and beyond the accepted wisdom of the dominant group and pull us across sacred fences that hold us back and keep us tied to perceived orthodoxies." (xxv) One of the examples they give is Copernicus, who believed that the earth was not the center of the universe:

Not surprisingly, Copernicus had many detractors. Although he was not personally committed to God and saw his work as a way of glorifying God, the powers that be were quick to tell him he was threatening the faith. Tolosani, a Dominican monk, wrote that Copernicus "seems to be unfamiliar with the Holy Scriptures since he contradicts some of its principles, not without risk to himself and to the readers of his book of straying from the faith. (18)

The first chapter of the book is called "Jesus Beyond Christianity." The question is asked: "Is it possible to encounter God's loving goodness outside the confines of religious patterns and practices?" (6) The main thesis of the book is that we need to move beyond religion on a worldwide level.

Doxorthy

This will be my last post in a series based on How (Not) To Speak of God by Peter Rollins. The book has made a tremendous impact on me and I would recommend it to anyone who is willing to think about the way we speak of God.

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. God's love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us. (1 John 4:7-12)

Commenting on this passage, Rollins says that "those who exhibit a genuine love know God, regardless of their religious system, while those who do not love cannot know God, again regardless of their religious system." (57) One of the most often quoted Bible verses is John 14:6, where Jesus says, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." Jesus is not saying that he is a collection of beliefs about God. He is saying that to be in a relationship with him is to experience truth. To "know" Jesus is to be transformed him. To "know" truth is to be transformed by Jesus (the truth). I put the word "know" in quotes because I am using it in a qualified way. I am not simply referring to "knowing of" or "knowing about." We can make an analogy to the way that Adam "knew" Eve, according to Genesis 4:1. The Hebrew word there is yada and its equivalent in Greek is ginosko, which is the word used in 1 John 4:7 above. Both of those words are euphemisms for sex, which helps paint a picture of the kind of "knowing" we're talking about here. It is a knowing that involves a relationship!

The Search for God

Dictionary.com defines the word "religion" as:

a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, esp. when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs.

In How (Not) to Speak of God, Peter Rollins writes about the problems with religion as "resolute commitment to a system." (45) He relates this subject to a comparison of "law" and "justice." The purpose of a law is to define justice, if you will. The example he gives is that "those who destroy private property ought to be punished." (45) Most people will agree to this, but what about "people who have destroyed private property (such as military equipment about to be used to bomb cities) in the name of justice?" (45) We can add to our laws to make room for this kind of exception, but here's the problem:

In this way the law is never complete but is always open to change in light of new situations. This means that the law, as a system that attempts to embody justice, always falls short of justice. (45)

Answers & Questions

This is part 6 in a series reflecting on How (Not) to Speak Of God by Peter Rollins. I would like to build off of the last quote from my last post:

In a world where people believe they are not hungry, we must not offer food but rather an aroma that helps them desire the food that we cannot provide. (37)

The typical view of evangelism is that we give people all of the answers they need. These answers provide a key that opens the door to "heaven." Rollins says, on the contrary, that the "job of the Church is...to help encourage the religious question to arise." (40-41) He thinks that we should be "celebrating complexity." (41)

Powerless Discourse

One of the important aspects of recent, Modern theology has been apologetics. In How (Not) to Speak of God, Peter Rollins calls apologetics "power discourses." (35)

These power discourses...attempt to present faith in such a way that rejection, if not impossible, is utterly irrational. In this way, the acceptance or rejection of the system is based, not upon a love for the system or a feeling of overwhelming seduction by it, but rather upon the accumulation of evidence that stands secure, regardless of the motive or desires of the individual. (35)

Do we accept Christ because we love Christ? Or do we accept him out of fear? Or do we accept him because we want the blessings he promises?

21st Century Pharisees?

In How (Not) to Speak of God, Peter Rollins observes the following about the Pharisees:

...they held so closely to their interpretation of the Messiah that when the Messiah finally appeared in a form that was different to what they expected, they rejected the Messiah in order to retain the integrity of their interpretation. (21)

This is an interesting observation because, just like the Pharisees of old, it seems to me that a great many Christians today think we have this whole theology thing figured out. Rollins argues against our attempts to objectify God using the illustration of a World War II concentration camp:

While some guards may have held more objective data about an individual than that individual's own family, the family would still possess a knowledge of the individual which the soldiers could never gain, a knowledge that is only opened up in love. (22)

The point is that we can know a lot of facts about someone and yet not "know" them. Could this be true of God as well? Rollins warns us that God should not be objectified. He points out that the "term 'knowing' in the Hebrew tradition (in contrast to the Greek tradition) is about engaging in an intimate encounter rather than describing some objective fact..." (22-23) God makes himself knowable in one sense and yet he is somehow beyond our ability to "know." Rollins argues that God is immanent, but that his very immanence blinds us "the same way that the sun blinds the one who looks directly at its light." (24) He invents the term "hypernymity" to describe God's transcendent immanence:

While anonymity offers too little information for our understanding to grasp... hypernymity gives us far too much information. Instead of being limited by the poverty of absence we are short-circuited by the excess of presence. (24)

Defining God

In How (Not) to Speak to God, Peter Rollins compares God's revelation to a painting, the message of which is "not simple, singular or able to be mastered." (16) Our perspective affects our interpretation of a work of art. The same is true of revelation, which "is not reducible to some clear, singular, scientific formula but rather gives rise to a multitude of commentaries." (16-17) Rollins points out that instead of looking at revelation this way, many Christians treat "the Bible as raw material to be translated into a single understandable meaning rather than experienced as infinitely rich treasures that can speak to us in a plurality of ways." (17)

I understand where Rollins is coming from but wonder about the original intent of a piece of art or scriptural narrative. I suppose some artists merely create without thinking much about the purpose or meaning behind their work. Nevertheless, should we assume that an infinite number of interpretations can be made?

Conceptual Idolatry

Dictionary.com defines “ideology” as “the body of ideas reflecting the social needs and aspirations of an individual, group, class, or culture.” In How Not to Speak of God, Peter Rollins, helps us to understand how our ideologies can become idolatrous. He argues that “our understanding is always an interpretation of the information before us…and thus is always affected by what we bring to the table.” (9) If we are honest about the subjective limits of our understanding, we will admit that we can never be truly objective about anything. Rollins is not advocating relativism, which he says is “inherently self-contradictory and devours itself.” (11) He is not suggesting that we are unable to speak meaningfully about the world around us. He is simply pointing out that “we can never see [the real world] in an unadulterated manner.” (11)