billarnold.typepad.com

Patterns of Being Christian

The following quote is from The Daily Bacon:

The Emerging Church is not so much a specific movement, but patterns of being Christian that have emerged as people have explored and applied the teachings of Jesus in their specific situation and circumstances. When this happens, the church is free to spend less time wondering if it is “relevant” and more time going about the business of loving God, loving neighbor.

(ht: subversive influence)

Response to Justin Taylor pt. 5

Justin Taylor's last main concern (in "An Emerging Church Primer") has to do with sexual ethics. He claims that Brian McLaren is "foolish" for not condemning homosexuality because the Bible's teaching on the subject is clear. "It may not be popular," he writes, "but it is not ambiguous."

I disagree with Taylor's assessment of the situation and sympathize with McLaren's plea for caution. There are three main texts that people quote in saying that the Bible condemns homosexuality. The first two, Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, are problematic for the simple fact that they are a part of the Old Testament Law. This was a moral code given to the people of Israel, not to those who are in Christ. The third passage is Romans 1:26-27, which is possibly more applicable than the first two. We should not necessarily assume, however, that Paul's sexual ethics are the inerrant and timeless will of God. In the view of many Christians, Paul's cultural bias shows through in issues such as the role of women in the church. Another example is his opinions about marriage, which he himself said were "in view of the impending crisis." (1 Corinthians 7:26) Can we say the same is true of his view of homosexuality?

Response to Justin Taylor pt. 4

Justin Taylor's third main concern (in "An Emerging Church Primer") has to do with "truth and knowledge."

I do appreciate the fact that emerging writers stress human fallenness on this particular point. During the Enlightenment, many people believed the process of obtaining knowledge was fairly mechanical process, as if humans were computers. Plug in the correct information, and the correct analysis will pop out. EM advocates rightly point out that the process of gaining knowledge is much more complex, and that sinful human biases and perspectives color how we view the world.

This quote gives me the opportunity to clear up what I believe to be a common misconception. I don't believe that our subjective nature is the result of human fallenness. Rather, I believe it is simply a part of who we are. Our sinfulness makes our subjectivity more difficult to deal with, but I do not think it is the cause of our subjectivity. Taylor may even agree with me on this point, but he has reminded me of the way people misunderstand passages like this one:

For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. (1 Corinthians 13:12)

Response to Justin Taylor pt. 3

Justin Taylor's second main concern (in "An Emerging Church Primer") has to do with the doctrine of substitutionary atonement. The theopedia (the Christian theological version of the wikipedia) has an entry on this doctrine that explains what it means, where it came from, and talks about some of the criticisms that have been made. You can read this entry here.

Response to Justin Taylor pt. 2

In an article entitled "An Emerging Church Primer," Justin Taylor identifies four major concerns he has regarding the emerging church (EC). This post will discuss his first concern: "the authority of God's Word."

Taylor says he appreciates that the EC "stress[es] the narrative aspects of Scripture," but he maintains that although "Scripture is more than a set of propositions, it is not less. It's both/and, not either/or." In response, let me first say that I am no expert on this whole debate about propositions. Dictionary.com defines a proposition as "a statement in which something is affirmed or denied, so that it can therefore be significantly characterized as either true or false." If I understand correctly, the narratives of scripture are not directly propositional in nature. Although the author may have purposed to assert something by telling a story, it is nonetheless something more than a list of propositions. Also, it is not the narratives themselves which we try to characterize as true or false. We can do this, but it's not the same thing as characterizing the propositions we seek to extract from the story.

Having said all that, I think the Bible does contain passages that are more basically propositional in their nature. In the case of the Epistles, for example, more direct assertions are made about morality, the character of God, etc. It should be noted, however, that this propositional directness is not to be found in much of the Bible.

Response to Justin Taylor

I'm going to spend a couple of days responding to "An Emerging Church Primer," an article by Justin Taylor. It is one of several articles you can read on a website called IX Marks (ht: emergent village weblog).

Mr. Taylor wants us to "know how to think about things like the emerging church. After all, the 'emerging church' is not here to stay. It's a movement, and this is its season." Hopefully, he's right. 40 years from now, I don't want to be arguing with emerging church (EC) people who have become calcified in their early 21st century beliefs/issues. After all, this is the kind of mentality that the EC is resisting.

Taylor makes a helpful distinction between "Emergent" and "emerging." I suggest you read this part of article if you don't know the difference. It's a not a big deal, but I find it slightly annoying that even outspoken critics tend to mix these two terms (groups) up. He then shares an excerpt from the wikipedia entry on the Emerging Church and lists several of the characteristics given in that article. Here is his analysis:

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!

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)

Ben Franklin and the Dunkers

Scot McKnight has an interesting series going on the emerging church and orthodoxy. Here are links to the posts he has written so far: Emerging and Orthodoxy, Emerging and Orthodoxy 2, Emerging and Orthodoxy 3, Emerging and Orthodoxy 4

Check out this quote from Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography (from the 3rd article in Scot's series):

These embarrassments that the Quakers suffered from having established and published it as one of their principles that no kind of war was lawful, and which, being once published, they could not afterwards, however they might change their minds, easily get rid of, reminds me of what I think a more prudent conduct in another sect among us, that of the Dunkers.

What is a Fundamentalist?

I was discussing my most recent post with someone this morning and this basic question came up: What is a fundamentalist? I'm going to try to briefly answer that question, using the wikipedia entries for Fundamentalism and Fundamentalist Christianity as a guide.

"Fundamentalist" describes a movement to return to what is considered the defining or founding principles of the religion. It has especially come to refer to any religious enclave that intentionally resists identification with the larger religious group in which it originally arose, on the basis that fundamental principles upon which the larger religious group is supposedly founded have become corrupt or displaced by alternative principles hostile to its identity.

This basic definition demonstrates how the adherent of any religion could be labelled a fundamentalist. Having established the broad definition, I would like to focus mainly on the origins and results of Christian fundamentalism.

In 1909, the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (now called Biola University) published a four volume set of books called The Fundamentals. The point of this series of essays was to "affirm specific fundamental doctrines" that, according to the authors, should be held by all Christians. There were 94 essays in the collection, 27 of which objected to higher criticism. A year after the publication of this tome, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church assembled a list of what became known as the "five fundamentals":

1. Inerrancy of the Scriptures
2. The virgin birth and the deity of Jesus
3. The doctrine of substitutionary atonement through God's grace and human faith
4. The bodily resurrection of Jesus
5. The authenticity of Christ's miracles (or, alternatively, his premillennial second coming)