Re-Launch & Introductions

Welcome to Restoring Pangea, the blog that blogs hard.  Do you want to hear about evangelical feminism, political theology, hopefully hopeful things, funny stories about the things follower of Jesus do, the story that's hopefully behind the story, among many other things?  This will be a place to get 'er done.  After blogging for about 7 years on my own, I am now being joined by two good friends, Michael Wiltshire and Josiah Daniels.

Michael Wiltshire is earning his MDiv at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, CA. His main interests are in New Testament studies, exegesis, gender equality, and the relationship between identity and spirituality. Michael has spent five years working in youth ministry. Authors he is currently reading include Henri Nouwen, Rebecca Groothuis, Scot McKnight, Esther Meek, Walter Brueggemann, Roger Olsen, and Richard Rohr.

Josiah Daniels is a 22 year old seminarian attending Northern Seminary near Chicago who has an obsession with theology and politics and how they coalesce. He loves to write, read and put to practice what he has been studying. Josiah comes from a bi-racial household where his parents taught him to embrace cultural diversity and fight for people who feel left out due to the color of their skin. He hopes to eventually pursue a doctorate in some form of public theology. Mr. Daniel's two biggest heroes (besides his parents) are Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

You will not be disappointed so be sure to come back and visit. Michael and Josiah will be hanging out here for a year to process their first year of Seminary and introduce you to their thoughts.  All comments are welcome. See you soon.

Non-Violent Atonement by Michael Hardin: Parts 1 & 2

Leaders And The Names We Call Them

Someone recently let me know that they wouldn't be commenting on my facebook posts anymore that have to do with theology, Christian leaders, etc. because they were frustrated with how I was speaking poorly of Christian brothers, etc. - particularly those in leadership. It got me thinking more about how the followers of Jesus are to approach Christian famous people who have been given the responsibility to lead in churches or ministries.  If that leader has said things or does things that undermines the message of Christ, the Gospel, the church universal, or are just plain mean - what are we to do? We can,

1. Remain quiet and stay out of the fray.

2. Speak up and say something to defend or criticize that leader.

3. Try to redirect our energy towards more constructive activities.

4. Create a better way of doing things and then do them. 

I'm sure there are multiple ways to respond, but one response that usually gets a bad rep is criticism.  Criticizing a leader, or even going further and calling them names that identify what we don't like about their actions, does take center stage a lot.  Sometimes we satirize their actions (Simpsons) in order to playfully but substantively critique them.  Sometimes we outright say what they have done wrong.  There are multiple ways that we do this indirectly or directly, but nonetheless, it happens, and yet doing so usually receives its own criticism - the critique that we shouldn't malign our brother and sisters (especially leaders) publicly, even if the criticism is true. I wonder...

To satirize is a legitimate form of subversive non-violent resistance, and might I say one of the best ways to do so. Non-violent resistance is a virtuous action that people who follow Jesus are called to participate in when necessary. Power, when it is abused, calls for action to restore the abuser to proper stewardship of their power. If they continue to abuse that power and/or influence and ignore the warnings, then they are to be called to account and probably have their power taken from them. 

My tradition (evangelical/baptist) never taught me this. They taught me the opposite - unquestioned loyalty to authority, ordained leaders, men whom "God has placed in leadership," etc. What if these people have abused their power and have little to no desire to change?  We may need to satirize their actions or even go so far as to name call those who are unrelenting in their abuse of power because of their insistence in avoiding the responsibility for wrongs committed.

Name-calling - isn't that juvenile? Yet Jesus's example with name-calling calls out to us. Those who were "hard of heart" were the religious leaders who wouldn't respond when given the chance to correct their actions and they did so on multiple occasions.  On top of that, they portrayed themselves as the ones who were upholding morality and were spokesmen for God himself.  They even went so far as to protect their positional leadership by discussing how they could lie to keep it, an historic good ole boys club.  Sadly, religious leaders today struggle with the exact same dynamics.

Leadership Rule #4 - One has to assume that leaders will and do lie to cover up their mistakes and/or unethical decisions. It is one of the guarantees of stewarding power over other people - we will be tempted to cover up the wrongs we commit due to insecurities, legitimate mistakes, carelessness, selfishness, etc. That temptation is eventual and incessant - as a leader, it will never go away. Here is the syllogism to prove my point:

1. A person who is entrusted with power will be tempted to abuse that power by making either mistakes and/or unethical decisions.

2. Humans make mistakes and unethical decisions

3. Therefore, a person who is entrusted with power will abuse the power by making mistakes and/or unethical decisions.

All forms of leadership are not exempt from this syllogism, including Christians in leadership, but what they do with it is what matters. Leaders need to get over the fact that they are going to screw up or be responsible for someone else's screw up. I have found that in Christian communities, the leadership tends to respond with these three options,

1. Intents vs Actions: As leaders, we tend to appeal to our innocent and initial intents and thoughts regardless of what our actions conveyed.  Too many leaders appeal to this and forget that the road to destructive leadership is paved with our good intentions.  

Solution - stop telling people what our intentions were and deal with the implications of our actions. Posture change - accept that our lack of intention is as much a problem as is ill intent.

2. Benevolence vs. Justice: As leaders, when we are faced with the opportunity to pursue justice, even at our own expense, we are many times tempted to overlook justice and replace it with benevolence.  Benevolence that doubles for justice is actually form of violence.  To ignore the wrong done and then seek repair through benevolence only compounds the painful implications of the injustice and may cause more pain than the initial action.  To ignore injustice is to claim that we cannot see the hurt it causes and thus cannot see the people enduring the hurt - which ultimately means that the part of them that hurts doesn't exist.  When we replace reconciliatory justice with benevolence, we are avoiding either complicit or implicit guilt by sugar-coating that guilt with what looks like a virtuous response - which in the end is no virtue at all. 

Solution - avoid the inclination to be benevolent as a first response to a cry for justice. 

Posture change - seek first the kingdom of God and let benevolence follow as an implication, not a solution.

3. "Soft" truths vs. Honesty:  Many times, a leader makes a bad decision and when the need to fess up arises, the leader's power over other people gives that leader options other than bearing the responsibility themselves.  Passing the buck down to the most vulnerable and least leveraged is a time honored method of maintaining continuity in positional leadership and all leaders are tempted to do so.  We have all seen it happen either to us, to someone else or to the someone(s) that we did it to. It is always tempting to use our positional power to escape the vacuum of complicity once a mistake or unethical decision is made.  At the same time, we don't want to be seen as outrightly negligent, so we take some responsibility, but just enough to maintain our innocence nonetheless. 

Solution - practice the discipline of confession by admitting we are wrong even if at times we are not.  Posture change - look at people in the eye when you are tempted to lie to them or about them.

Back to name calling.  People in power who persistently pursue soft truths, benevolence and good intentions as their path to responsibility don't deserve name-calling, but instead they need name-calling, among other things.  This is to call them back to their responsibility to reconciliation that is honest, just and respectful of their actions, not their intents. Ultimately they are not only showing respect to the people wronged but also to themselves

Jesus seemed to know that hard hearts needed a heavy hand at times and that soft hearts only needed a gentle word at other times. Because we are prone to struggle with doing the opposite of what Jesus did, we need disciplines that will form us otherwise.  In review, here are a few option outlined previously

Solution   - Stop telling people what our intentions were and deal with the implications of our actions. Posture Change -  Accept that our lack of intent can equal ill intent.  

Solution - Avoid the inclination to be benevolent as a first response to a cry for justice. 

Posture Change - Seek first the Kingdom of God and let benevolence follow as an implication, not a solution.  

Solution - Practice the discipline of confession by admitting we are wrong even if at times we are not.  Posture Change - look at people in the eye when you are tempted to lie to them or about them.  

Final Solution - If none of this works, be prepared to be called names and learn to accept the titles.  

Postmodernity is for White People?

In reading a recent critique of a Radical Theology conference, framed as privileged religious discussions, I read some good points.  The ongoing critiques of postmodernity because of ethnic concerns is at point frustrating.  It is true that postmodernity is primarily a "white, western" concern, but at the same time, we can't ignore that postmodernity is primarily a cultural force that is shaped, owned and entered into by white, western cultures - emphasis on primarily.

The reason is that it is a rejection of "modernity" - something that very few cultures outside of the western world had to endure following the Enlightenment. It is fair to critique movements like Radical Theology for being white, male and privileged, but always with a nuance that the modernity/postmodernity shift is primarily a Western issue.

If you haven't been marred and de-humanized by modernity then you don't need to return from it. This does not mean that non-western cultures have not been de-humanized or oppressed by the influence of modernity on the Western world, but that the ability to oppress and de-humanize the other is in direct correlation to the internally destructive forces of modernity that the Western culture then externalized into projection - self-hatred became hatred of the other, self-effacing dehumanization became subjugated de-humanizing of the other. We need the non-western world to heal from this derangement - i.e. Liberation Theology, but we also need internal conversations and reparative therapy - i.e. Radical Theology, Derrida, Rollins, Foucault, Zizek, etc.

In many ways, postmodernity is a return to a kind of situated tribal affiliation posture that allows for dynamics to re-enter the Western world that have never left the Majority world. This is a good thing, but it may require that the Western world work through postmodernity in collusion with non-western ideologies - yet at the same time understand it is distinct and needs its own spaces to do so at times.

Hence the need for a conference like the one being critiqued - as long as we can accept that it is reparative therapy from the influence of modernity and not privileged bourgeois speak.

Complementarian vs. Egalitarian...

It took me awhile to move away from being a classical complementarian when it comes to a woman's role in leadership. I used to argue for it because it made so much sense based on conventional/ a priori arguments. "A Priori" is a Latin term used in formal logic (and philosophy) to mean a fact that is assumed to be true prior to any empirical research - i.e. facts are assumed before any research is done. I began to realize that a lot of the convictions I had were a priori because of my religious folk tradition.

I then moved over a period of about 2-3 years to an egalitarian position in my approach to gender relations. One main reason - a priori reasoning. It seemed conventionally true that women were in leadership in all capacities from economics to politics and education to information technology. Why would they be not permitted to exercise their gifts and abilities in a religious sphere if they were expected to do so in every other sphere? My new conventional thinking took me in the opposite direction and I became an egalitarian, rather I held the position of egalitarianism when it came to issues of gender.

The problem is that I'm married and will have been for 4 years this month. I have discovered that the marriage partnership is unique and exists nowhere else and to top that, it is the most difficult relationship to keep on a partnership status I've ever been in. It seems that human nature dictates that we would rather see people below us or above us. To see a human being in direct contact with us as an equal is truly one the hardest disciplines I've ever engaged in. Our marriage has been an experiment in egalitarianism and we've failed.

Don't get me wrong, we aren't giving up, but the binary categories of complementarian and egalitarian just don't work. There are days when my wife takes leadership in our home and there are days when I do. There are areas where I take the lead and she has to submit to me for our home to work well and there are areas where she takes leadership and I submit to her. Then there are the areas that we have to partner in and neither of us can take leadership - like parenting, like buying a home, etc. Those are the hardest to work on because we truly do have to be partners.

I wonder at times whether we need to be one or the other on the binary scale set up by gender partisanship battles. I'm not sure that I can stomach hyper-patriarchalism or hyper-feminism, but do some homes work better on different points of the spectrum formed between egalitarianism and complementarity? There are so many factors to consider when forming one's convictions. Is it possible to be functionally complementation while convictionally egalitarian or functionally egalitarian while convictionally complementarian?

 

I complement my wife and vice versa and that's what makes our home peaceful and provides an atmosphere of hospitality to our children and our guests. But the areas in our marriage where peace leaves and alienation begins is when we truly attempt to be partners, to be equal. Some may say that that's an a priori indicator that we are not meant to be equal. I don't know. Maybe it's our attempt to truly be partners that will refine us more than anything else and allow our marriage to be amazing. We also know that we can't always "work" on something and so our complementarity allows us some down time, some auto-pilot to get recharged for the difficult yet profitable work of partnership. Maybe in that way, partnership is an a priori conviction. Maybe

Leadership Rant

Leadership Rant: Ever since I was young, I cringed whenever the conventionally quipped leadership lessons were taught or preached. There is something wrong with the Maxwell leadership stuff and I think I'm getting close to why it is so frustrating. Do you remember statements like:


"Character is who you are when no one is watching" - that's dumb. If that's who I really am then I'm a monster.

"The 3 C's of leadership - Character, Competency & Commitment" - The problem with these three C's is that they mean entirely different things to different people - thereby saying nothing really substantive to anyone except for what we want to hear.

So here is my shot at 3 leadership lessons (alliterations included).

#1. Leaders are not supposed to hold a higher standard in order to be models for the rest of us. They are to cultivate a higher standard because human nature dictates that when power over other people is given to a human being, that human being will eventually abuse the power given them unless they have a higher standard stopping them. The moralism perceived in the modeling done by most of us can be done without having actual real character. Being a real role model is at best a by-product of practices designed to keep our dark passenger from administering the power entrusted to us.

#2. The M&M's of Insecurities - We all have insecurities. They are the reason that we as good people do the worst things without any justification to other people, especially when we have power. When you are given the opportunity to lead, insecurities are:

1. Magnified
2. Multiplied
3. and are no longer Manageable.

#3. The 3 C's of Insecurities: Insecurities will emerge and what you do with them when they do, will mark your ability to lead. It's best to look them in the eye early on and even put measures in place that give us:

1. Confession (agreeing with your limits and with what is broken in you regularly)
2. Complementarity (allowing people who are better than you to be better than you)
3. Creative Collaboration (inviting the ability for possibilities that exceed our abilities)

Infantilism At Its Best

Miroslav Volf recently posted a quote - "Mere flatterers they all are: preachers, politicians, business owners, preachers, artists who give people only what people want." --Socrates

Sometimes we as people want to be told off by our preachers only to reinforce the desire to avoid telling it to ourselves. It's easier to return weekly to hear what we should do from an external source than to daily cultivate internal disciplines which provide us with who we should be. Failing to break out of this dynamic causes arrested development and we forfeit our contribution to the world's need for wisdom with meandering obedience - a process that we actually desire in order to avoid growing up.

When it comes to transforming the world into what God had originally desired, it would seem he wants wisdom more than obedience.  Wisdom is not without obedience, but obedience cannot be a final telos for one to arrive at.  Rather it is the ritual practice of pre-embodied wisdom that plays its part in delivering us to wisdom.

Just because a "preacher" draws large crowds of people whom he/she gives direction to, doesn't mean that they are a successful "pastor." Don't give your glory to another, rather let it be manifested for the betterment of the "other" in our pursuit of wisdom.


"My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.

May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one— I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me." John 17: 20-23

Practices that lead to Virtue

Practices that lead to Virtue: Confession & Forbearance --> Patience & Meekness

My old mentor, George Verwer, would apologize even when he knew the wrong done, was not his doing. I would watch in amazement.

What I learned: Confession is a practice that doesn't always require the correct details to be fruitful and healing. Confession sometimes asks us to absorb incommensurate guilt and in rever

se practice forbearance as a rite of passage into the kind of maturity that invites unsuspecting onlookers to learn from. We don't always know who's looking at our library.

What I need to do: Confess as a lifestyle, not just when the details require me to. Confess when I don't always need to. Absorb shame when it's not always fair. Forbear when I deserve justice. Resist when I want restitution. Trust in the cathartic prayers of the imprecatory Psalms and learn to sleep on it. Don't trust immediate pain and don't follow anxiety's treasure map.

God in my box

At the end of the day, I think we've all got God in a box...some of us are just learning to leave the lid open.  

N.T. Wright Interview @ The Gospel Coalition

This is an excerpt from an interview with N.T. Wright by Trevin Wax on his blog, hosted on The Gospel Coalition website.  In the same interview, Wright is asked about Steve Chalke's book, The Lost Message of Jesus.  This is a wonderful introduction to Wright at a time when he was just finishing up some great work and was on the cusp of publishing one of his best known books to date, Surprised By Hope. Enjoy!

Trevin Wax: In your opinion, has scholarly criticism of the New Perspectives in America, such as Carson, Piper, Moo and others, have they been fair? Or have they misunderstood the New Perspective?

N.T. Wright: I think Carson has misunderstood it. The big book, the first volume that he edited, Justification and Variegated Nomism, a collection of fine essays by fine scholars. But I have to say, in the bit at the end, where Carson sums it up, he actually goes way beyond what those essays actually say. And it’s interesting… he takes a few swipes at me there without even footnoting. It’s as though I’m sort of hovering in the background as a big boogeyman who’s going to come and pounce on people and so, he’s got to ward him off.

And I know Don quite well. We were graduate students together, he in Cambridge and I at Oxford in the 1970′s. We’ve been friends on and off for many years. And I just don’t understand why this is eating him the way it is.

Piper is in a different category. He graciously sent me an advance manuscript of his book which is critiquing me and invited my comments on it. I sent him a lengthy set of comments. I’ve only just got on email about two days ago the book in the revised form and I haven’t had a chance to look at it yet. So I cannot say whether he’s being fair or not at this stage.

But I do know that he has done his darndest to be fair and I honor that and I respect that. People have asked me if I’m going to write a response, and the answer is that I don’t know. I’m kind of busy right now. But I maybe should, sooner or later.

Moo is in a different category again. Doug Moo, I would say, is a much greater Pauline scholar than either of the two I just mentioned. One of the things I really respect about Doug Moo is that he is constantly grappling with the text. Where he hears the text saying something which is not what his tradition would have said, he will go with the text. I won’t always agree with his exegesis, but there is a relentless scholarly honesty about him which I really tip my hat off to.

Being Fully Human As Jesus, Not Just Jesus, Is The Answer

"To depend on Jesus too much forfeits our ability to actually become like Jesus. To become like Jesus too much forfeits our ability to really depend on him."

What is the problem then? To truly encounter the living, embodied and relational Christ is to do so as one pursues full humanity.  As humans we are prone to seek out cultural heroes that will replace our responsibility in the world.  We project onto to them qualities, powers and superhuman strength that allows us to forfeit the strength that we as humans actually have for something that doesn't exist in order to avoid the difficult encounters that we as humans are requires to have in our strength.  Our heroes exist as buffer zones between us and the Real.  The Real wants us to realize that which we already have, potential bound up in the human race and to become fully human in order to discover that strength.  The problem is - we don't want that, so we look to super-humans to do if for us.  


In-between our incompetent humanity and super-humanity, there is a place that God calls us to called full humanity.  So why don't we want to be there?


I think the problem is that we don't really want to encounter the "other" more than we encounter ourselves. We truly don't want to have a true encounter, we want the benefits of an encounter, but not all the comes with the encounter.

So the solution is and has been, to be fully human. To be fully human is to not depend on Christ so much that we cannot become like him, but also not be so much like him that we cannot depend upon him. Somehow there's a balance in the midst of that tension that we should be seeking to experience, though the journey there will never allow us to "finally arrive." I think the journey of holding the tension between the desire for transcendence and immanence is like a metronome and our wisdom grows as we cross the center of the metronome more frequently.


Christ's mission wasn't just to save us, but also to release us into what it means to be fully human as he became fully human after the resurrection. That longing to be fully human is the balance between transcendence and immanence. We forfeit that longing when we shortchange ourselves for only (or mostly) attaining the benefits of primarily transcendence or primarily immanence. Conservatives generally focus more on the benefits of transcendence (God's glory is everything) and Progressives tend to focus more on the benefits of immanence (Human Flourishing is everything). Holding a tension between the two for our experience in the world seems to be the best solution rather than prizing one more than the other.


So, the impulse to focus mostly on "God" can actually shortchange our ability to really worship him with all of us (embodied human experience) as Scripture guides us to do. Love of God and love of Neighbor are one and the same in the Greatest commandment

The Canon of the Church is not Closed

Arguments and positions abound regarding the authority of Scripture.  The basic argument for its divine authority is that for a period of time, God authorized the inspiration of human authorship for his divine revelation in written form.  God gave a window of time through which the Bible could be authoritatively authored by human beings on his behalf.

That time closed at a point when the last New Testament book was what theologians call, "canonized" or "canonization."  When you hear people speak about the Canon of Scripture - "Canon" basically means that a fulfilled library of texts are collected, ascertained as to their authoritative nature (by the historic church) and then given a status of being "canonized" thereby closing off other options for what can be authoritative.  When it comes to the Bible, the current belief is that that time of decision making for which books belong and which don't, closed up shop long ago.  It's a done deal.

So what about the Canon of the Church?

Many believe that church tradition is one of the authoritative voices that coincides with Scripture's authority while others believe that the tradition of the church is at least authoritative on some level even if it isn't on par with Scripture.

Whether that is true or not, if we are understanding the authority of the church in a similar paradigm that Scripture itself operates in, then we need to honor the fact that the Canon of the Church (tradition) is not closed.

Church tradition only offers us one side of the coin that Church as an interpretive community has to offer. If we are truly supposed to worship God in the New Creation as every tongue tribe and nation, then the "Church" universal has not completed its maturity into a full worshipping community.

The regnant voice of authority in Church tradition is lop-sided, incomplete, many times inconsiderate and ultimately juvenile.

Kenton Sparks in his new book, Sacred Word, Broken Word: Biblical Authority and the Dark Side of Scripture, appeals to Alasdair MacIntyres argument in Whose Justice? Which Rationality?  which states that healthy traditions are able to interrogate their own boundaries.  Sparks follows MacIntyre arguing that

"...the church needs to be vigilant not only in guarding its tradition (something it has often done well) but also in carefully considering where the tradition might be mistaken (something it has often failed to do)." pg 5.

If the church universal is the Church and the historical and local expressions of that body are adequate, yet radically incomplete shadows of the Church, then any tradition that espouses their own veracity and authority to the elitist exclusion of others both existent and forthcoming, does so with great audacity, insecurity and arrogance.  To mine the depths of a tradition in order to gain a sense of depth, authority and historical accuracy in one's worship and theological interpretation is absolutely necessary.  To assume that this gives one's community authority over others' communities of faith, ignores the Biblical trajectory of what the church, in its full expression, actually is.  

We are not the "Church triumphant", we are the "Church adolescent," still wet behind the ears with the infant baptism of the Church's birth.  For us to claim authority through our traditions, mere historicity, historical interpretive frameworks all the while ignoring the Church who are yet to arrive, to speak into reality and to interpret from their context, is naive.  

The witness of every tribe is needed to fully express our authority as a community.  The certainty of forthcoming contexts of the coming communities of faith only invalidate our high claims to authority in our communities.  

Without the voice of Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe, Australia's First People, Native America, Southern Asia, etc. - there is no voice of final authority in church tradition - the canon of the Church is not closed.  

The question remains - how then do the current local and historical expressions of the church claim authority through their tradition without making the mistake of impatience and regnant audacity discussed above?

Abraham Heschel on Phenomenology

"knowing what you see rather than seeing what you know."  Abraham Heschel

Local Churches = Para-churches

Thought #45 - Local Churches are actually para-church organizations.

Any community of faith that organizes and formalizes is a distinct manifestation or expression of the entirety of what it means to be church - thereby qualifying themselves as an aspect of what it means to be church.

Therefore, they cannot be what the church is in its entirety. This qualifies them as a para-church, not a church. Church then becomes more of a "way of life" that requires a distinct community of faith, but is not only a distinct community of faith.

All ministries, religious non-profits, development agencies, mission agencies...and local churches are actually all para-churches, but together they comprise the church.

God's Greatness vs. God's Goodness

Michael Wiltshire, our guest blogger for this series, will introduce "Get With This or Get With That" with the timeless issue of God's Goodness Vs. God's Greatness.

God: Great vs. Good

God is great, God is good: let us thank him for our food. Amen. As a kid, this little prayer was one of the quickest ways to get “saying grace” out of the way before a meal. I think most Christians have used it at some point to close-in on the time between them and their dinner. The idea of God being both great and good is a familiar one to most Christians as various hymns and prayers are constructed around it throughout church history. But have we missed an important distinction in our theology of God's love and glory?  

In his book, The Mosaic of Christian Belief, theologian Roger Olsen describes the church’s theological consensus on the matter by explaining, “Our God is both glorious beyond our understanding and perfectly good beyond any creaturely goodness.” God’s greatness is often attached to terms like sovereign, transcendent, and self-glorifying, while his goodness is communicated with words like self-sacrificial, compassionate, and loving.  Christians have sought to do justice in focusing on both descriptions of God by letting their theological framework be built in a way which can contain both sides. Their tendency to hastily join them together often ignores a critical distinction which must be made in order to truly understand and experience God’s greatness and goodness for what they really are.

In most cases, by lumping God’s greatness and goodness together, theologians and their followings have unnecessarily overemphasized one side over the other—and then sometimes tend to outright deny the other side altogether. When Luther saw a weakening of God’s greatness from the Catholic Church, he began to preach of a hidden God who is totally free of creation and may damn any man or women without reason. For Karl Barth, God was known as “he who loves in freedom” (Church Dogmatics 2/1) which would summarize his belief that God’s greatness and goodness are not at all in conflict with each other if we abandon all thoughts of projection. Maybe more recent evidence of the church’s failure to see this needed distinction is the evangelical uproar over Love Wins by Rob Bell—a book which in many ways suggests that part of God’s divine greatness eventually may mean that his goodness will win every human soul.

Here is our problematic struggle with making sense of a God both Great and Good: If a person begins and ends their theology with one aspect of God, they easily distort the other—and eventually even the one they began with—leading to a theological caricature of God. If one begins their theology with “God is great” they often envision God’s goodness to only be a manifestation of his greatness and vice versa. An outstanding example of this may be philosophical theism—a system of thought which popular Calvinist theologian Loraine Boettner (among Calvin and others) uses to assert that God purposefully predetermined every single event that would happen—including all acts of sin and evil—and continues to guide those events in order to maintain the fullest extent of his greatness. To many, such a God cannot truly be good whatsoever—and his greatness, in this light, becomes distorted as well.  Panentheism, on the other hand—which sees God in totally interdependent on the world—is another danger if the pendulum swings too far the in the opposite direction.

So how does one keep from overemphasizing one aspect of God? Again, there is a critical distinction to be made. God is equally Great and Good—but we cannot let those terms become fused to the point where they are totally interdependent on each other. In my opinion,we must begin to construct theology which allows both aspects to operate simultaneously and harmoniously.  This then requires letting God’s greatness and goodness remain in their paradoxical framework.  And while such a paradox may seem like sloppy theology to some, it is important to remember that speculation outside of what God has clearly revealed to us often may better lead to mysticism than poorly developed doctrine.  We must also see God as capable of self-limitation, if he chooses to do so. At the end of the day, our monotheism still requires distinction.

You Can Get With This or You Can Get With That

I'm excited to introduce the "This for Thas" series.  For some time, I've been fascinated by how ideas that have real consequences are used without understanding where they come from.

This series then comes out of a frustration with "distinctions" - real distinctions that make a ton of difference if they are heeded.

What the bugger am I talking about. Ideas that are meant to stand alone for very important reasons, many times will get lumped in with another idea and thereby lose their distinction. The problem with this, is well... I'd rather just get to it. To name a few...

Human Error vs. Human Brokenness

Holy vs. Sacred

The Gospel vs. Implications of the Gospel (with a video featuring Mark Driscoll)

Infirmities vs. Sin

Neo-Reformed vs. Neo-Puritanism (more recent)

Election to Salvation vs. Election to Service

Greatness of God vs. Love of God (Special Guest Bloggers on this one)

Simple vs. Simplicity

Tribes vs. Families


The hope for this series is to address the need to distinguish ideas that are usually lumped together.  By lumping these ideas together, we generally begin to define what one idea is (God's wrath) as more important and sometimes more defining than than its companion neighbor idea (God's love) is.  Hopefully the clarity we can achieve from this will help us approach our faith and other people with our faith more honestly and carefully. We can all agree that being careful is becoming more and more necessary in how we talk about God and others' beliefs in the public and private squares of our world.

Jesus ;) Religion - Why We Need All Three Vids (and a few more)

Youtube has lit up with Jeff Bethke's version of why he hates religion but loves Jesus.  His spoken word has stirred emotions, thoughts and not a few controversial convos and blog posts.  I hesitated to comment or even think about his performance but now that it is at over 15 million views within 10 days (uploaded on January 10th, 2012) and has been viewed by people all over the globe, I thought it was time.  I was also asked by a friend from South Africa what I thought - South Africa!  This video is a true example of how viral video works - amazing!  (Btw - I love the way the internet works)

I had hoped it would blow over and he would be an internet sensation which would lead us to the next one.  But this guy has staying power (10 days, I know, too early).  The reason I say that is that within a week and a half, two other prominent religious traditions have come out with their own responses done in a very similar fashion and with competent levels of quality.  I have enjoyed them all to one degree or another.

The First One - Jesus>Religion


I've generally been frustrated by the first film (Jeff Bethke's) that came out and didn't want to pay it too much attention - plus a lot of people liked it and if I said anything to critique it, I think it wouldn't do any good. What he says has so many merits, but it doesn't take into account God's choice of humanity and God's desire to work through human dynamics (i.e. religion) to accomplish his purposes. God doesn't hate religion, he enters more fully into it than we ever do and challenges its decrepitness and affirms its life giving elements thereby changing it into something even better.

Almost the entire O.T. Law and sacrificial system was borrowed from other "religious" structures present in the Ancient Near East cultures that surrounded Israel. If God hates religion, then he wouldn't embody it in order to redeem us. Does he hate religion void of intentionality, sincerity, and a heart for God - absolutely - but he doesn't hate religion de facto.

Isaiah 66 talks about how he detests their religious observances - the same religious observances that he gave for them to do and commanded them to do. Why did he reject them - because of the status of their hearts (which was evident in the deplorable actions that they displayed outside of the temple).

What this brother is hopefully trying to say is that religious observance as hypocrisy sucks, but it would be a mistake to say that religious observance itself sucks. I love religious observances and even when they take the place of my heart because I'm in a bad place or just rejecting my open invitations to encounter God, they keep me and for that I'm thankful.

Because as I continue to do them, that rhythm is usually the one thing that leads me back to a place of accepting the invitation of a real encounter with God. Religion will never be the problem - it is just a solution created by man that God accommodates and actually affirms but that doesn't always work. In the end, it is not meant to "work" - it is meant to keep us connected to life of God which is found in embodied and communal practices (=religion) as well as personal and sincere pursuances of the Divine Encounter (=Jesus).


The Second One - Jesus<3Religion


The second vid by Fr. Pontifex (Fr. Claude [Dusty] Burns) was surprising because Catholics are usually not that cool in their media distribution and yet PhatMass and Spirit Juice Studios are.  I agree a lot with what Pontifex presents in his explanation, but as a soft postmodern Christian with a profound trust in the goodness and sovereignty of God, I actually think we need all three vids in order to understand what God is saying and then a few more (which I'm sure are already forthcoming).


The Third One - Jesus>Religion: The Muslim Version

When it comes to the Muslim brother, the point about worshipping Jesus that he mentions more than once is actually true.

Richard Rohr, a catholic priest, says the same thing. There is so much about how he (the video dude) presents his ideas through this that is so well done and through provoking. At the same time, he's missing some obvious philosophical categories that could help his argument a lot. It was actually North African Muslim Intellectuals who helped us re-discover the great thinkers of Greece and the Ancient world. Christianity owes a lot to these Muslim thinkers. There was a time when they incorporated ancient philosophical thinkers into their understanding of the world and religion, but it seems they have stopped that. The Christian tradition picked it up from there and re-incorporated philosophy's categories back into our faith tradition which has allowed us to understand better the concepts like Trinity, sacrifice, etc...

God is not scared or bothered by any of these videos and I'm sure he enjoys the Spoken Word format. They are all required to encounter and understand who the Trinity really is, even the one from our Muslim brother. I don't follow Islam and can't agree with their conclusions about Christ, but I can still learn so much from watching his video that I need - though my filter will still be Scripture, the Church and its history, the narrative of God in my life and the extremely important life and words of Christ.


But yeah, in the end, I need all three of these vids and a few more.

When Paul Calls You a Saint?

He's referencing the Priestly class in the OT as now applying to the entire church rather than just to a clan of Israel. This may have been a shocker to hear in his letters as most of the people listening (Jew or Gentile) would understand that priests are a "special" class of people and not a title you hand out liberally. This could have made Paul's ongoing statement quite scandalous. My first thought is that it is somewhat of a rhetorical device, to call members of the church saints, to shock people out of their comfortable paradigms. That's just the rhetorical approach, but now some other considerations.


The first thing that comes to mind is that the priestly function was to, in a way, sacralize the world around them (make common things sacred). In the OT, there are three different classifications usually assigned to the "things" in the word - Holy, Common & Profane. 


The Holy was to be separated from the Common and protected from the Profane. 


The Common was to be kept from the Profane. Just because something was common or profane or holy didn't mean that its intrinsic value was in question or that it was necessarily intrinsically bad or good. It was a classification system that allowed the OT priests to uphold the Law. The priest's vocation was to uphold these categories and enforce them in the life of the Israelite community to maintain their fidelity and direction of worship towards Yahweh.

I can imagine that that role has been transferred to us in the NT church under the New Covenant because part of our role is to make everything "spiritual" and to be holy as he is holy. Now our being holy is not something that we depend upon another human being to do for us, other than Christ (our High Priest), but at the same time we are called into Christ's priestly role by co-priesting with him as we are also called to co-reign with him. Our priestly function is deep and complex in this world and takes a lifetime to discover and unpack as well as practice.

Making everything spiritual seems to be the function of "re-mythologizing" the world. C.S. Lewis did much of that in his works - to re-enchant the world with the enchantment that God meant for it to have. 


Sin has "dis-enchanted" the world from its original and potential beauty and potential towards flourishing. Our role as priests is re-sacralize the world and to give order to what has no order - to sacralize that which has been de-sacralized - to re-enchant a dis-enchanted world. This comes in forms of healing, renewal of all sorts, proper ordering of relationships, economics, social orders, systems, personal lives and communities, etc. 


When we talk about salvation and sanctification - we aren't just talking about getting saved and becoming a more moral person - we are talking about being re-ordered back into a way of being that we were meant for along with the rest of Creation and the Cosmos. It's all integrated. 


Romans 8 - creation groans in eager expectation for the revealing of the sons of God so that it can experience its redemption - because we are all connected - for good and bad. Once that process is begun in our lives, we are then called into a deeper participation in the life of God's re-ordering of the world as we are being re-ordered into the "image" we already bear.

Ordering the world to re-sacralize it is a macro-activity of the historic priestly role in the OT to order the world for the Israelites based upon the Law. Now the job is extended to the whole world through the NT church with the presence of the Holy Spirit and the power, authority and commission given to us by Christ in Matthew 28. 


So, what are we called to sacralize in the world around us and how should we attempt to do so carefully and respectfully?

Peter Rollins at the Brehm Center

Peter Rollins lecture at Fuller Seminary & the Brehm Center from Brehm Center on Vimeo.

Culture Redefined Away From A "Head" Start to an Embodied Start