she

I have gotten a few comments on Facebook for posting the free preview to Rob Bell's new nooma, she. I encourage you to watch it here - it is only up for another 24 hours. The comments I have received have been words of caution to me slipping away from Biblical orthodoxy. So here is a version of one response i wrote.

Despite others' thoughts and concerns I do not feel as though I have slipped outside of orthodoxy. I still believe in the authority of scripture and in the 2 foundational Creeds of our faith (the Apostles and Nicaean). My orthodoxy is perhaps a bit more generous and open than others but I am still a Bible believing orthodox follower of Jesus - the way the truth and the life.

As for the concern that Rob Bell is declaring God not to be Father, he does not say that God is not Father. Bell says, "God is not male or female rather Spirit" - quoting Jesus in John 4:24. god being Spirit is as orthodox as you get. this is an historic and orthodox theological statement. Also Rob's emphasis on God's motherly characteristics are take right from scripture, "Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you! (Isa.(49:15) And in fact he says that these references are metaphor and cannot be taken literally. So Rob is therefore NOT saying God is female. He is saying that God is beyond male and female - again, that God is Spirit.

If you someone who thinks God is male that is not orthodox!!!!! Yes the primary image given to us in scripture is Father and ought not be discarded for the sake of political correctness or personal discomfort with the metaphor. I call God Father regularly and believe it to be true. But I cannot deny the motherly images in scripture that enhance, deepen and further enlighten my understanding of who God is as understood through scripture. It is a mysterious both/and, an orthoparadoxy. I want to allow the dual images of God to stand in tension with one another and not disregard one or the other just b/c it seems "liberal" or on the other hand "conservative" or makes me uncomfortable. It drives me to worship, honor and serve God all the more.

Now a caution to all of us who tend to critique the theology of others with whom we disagree . It is one thing to disagree with someone's theology it is another thing to slander a person whom you do not know personally- which the Bible clearly says is a sin. Many people's assessment of Rob is uninformed and not at all accurate. Particularly the claim that he has disregarded the Bible and it's authority. I have sat under Rob's teaching virtually and personally and in my assessment Rob bases everything he does on the Bible. He may not interpret it the same way some would but he is searching the scripture nonetheless. We must be careful not to make broad sweeping assumptions about people and their theology. Many believe that Rob has a moral influence theory of the work and ministry of Christ yet his entire tour "the gods aren't angry" was a presentation in defense of justification through faith and not works. I saw it heard it with my own ears. Yes there was new stuff but still within orthodoxy! The God's aren't angry because Jesus has taken the punishment we deserve.

In our enthusiasm for the truth we must speak it in LOVE; be careful to not alienate and dis-unify the body of Christ which is the primary way that the world will know God (John 17). May we be filled with grace in our fervor to preserve the integrity of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

some thoughts on resurection

Once again this Easter I wrestled with what to say on Easter.

What does the fact that Jesus rose from the dead mean?
Is it the quintessential proof that Jesus was indeed God? YES!
Is it that God shows his ultimate power in defeating death, evil and sin in the world? YES!

But what meaning, importance and reality does that historic and once in a life time occurrence of a dead man coming to life have to do with you and me in and our lives in the world today?

How do I experience and live in the resurrection?

Then John Creasy said to me in our Midrash conversation at the Quiet Storm on Tuesday: “you have to be around death to experience resurrection.”

That is what I preached on this morning. Here are some other thoughts on experiencing the resurrection:

The Resurrection narratives are not a picture of survival after death; they record how a totally new mode of being has arisen in the Universe... A new mode of being has arisen. That is the Story. What are we going to make of it? - CS Lewis

“I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead. (Philippians 3:10-11)

The Early Disciples had little ritual but a mighty realization. They went out not remembering Christ, but experiencing him. He was not a mere fair and beautiful story to remember with gratitude – he was a living redemptive, actual presence then and there. They went out with the joyous and grateful cry. “Christ lives in me!” - E. Stanley Jones

I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his people, 19 and his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is the same as the mighty strength 20 he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, 21 far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that can be invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come. (Ephesians 1:18-21)

The crowning evidence that Jesus was alive was not a vacant grave, but a spirit-filled fellowship. Not a rolled away stone, but a carried away church. - Clarence Jordan

...if the Spirit of God who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in you (Romans 8:11)

Is this [resurrection] mere figure of speech, wishful thinking, a piece of pious rhetoric? No, this truth is the most real fact about our life; it is our life. The Jesus who walked the roads of Judea and Galilee is the One who stands beside us. - Brennan Manning

Christ has Risen Indeed!!!

The gods aren’t angry

Saturday night I heard Rob Bell speak in Pittsburgh. It was ok, I like Rob a lot, I think he is a dynamic communicator and handles his success with great humility. His presentation has left many thoughts and questions have been ruminating in my mind since then. Rob painted a picture of the God of Israel being a God who reverses and operates outside of the system of sacrificial appeasement and control like the Sumerian and most other ancient religious systems. Yahweh demonstrates his reversal of this by providing a sacrificial substitute for Abraham’s son Isaac and he provides a peace meal within the elaborate sacrificial system of Leviticus. This all culminates in Jesus’ rebuking the sacrificial system and claiming himself to be the temple and ultimate sacrifice so that all humanity will not have to live any longer under the stress, anxiety and fear of not knowing whether or not they have appeased the gods and God. Jesus was killed by the sacrificial system itself. He did not resist or fight back he willingly submitted to the corrupt sacrificial system of the Jews and the Romans and died. The once and for all sacrificial system ending sacrifice of Jesus gives humanity and all creation freedom from this perpetual ambiguity and fear of not knowing if we are at peace with the God. This is a grossly over-simplified summary of Rob’s brilliant presentation, but...

...there are questions that are maybe intentionally unanswered are about the nature of God’s involvement in the death of Jesus, that seems to me to be a part of the same kind of sacrificial appeasement system. At one point Rob asked a question that went something like this: what kind of god do you serve that needs to be appeased by the shedding of blood? Didn’t Jesus need to die in order to appease God’s anger? Aren’t those the reformed doctrines of propitiation and atonement? Did Jesus have to die on the cross in order for the reversal of the system of sacrificial appeasement and control to be overturned once and for all? And in reversing that system isn’t God implicitly involved in participating in that system and therefore complicit in the sacrifice of his own son? Let me state it explicitly. Did God need the blood of his own son to be shed (like the Jewish and other sacrificial systems)? If so how does that differentiate God from the whole system of sacrificial appeasement and control?

I certainly believe that in and through the death of Jesus and even more so his resurrection we are free from sin and its power but I must confess that the I have been thinking about the necessity of what has been called penal substitution, where the punishment for sin must involve the shedding of blood. As Rob explained, in the Hebrew Scriptures, this was the ritual sacrifice of animals; in the NT it involves the sacrifice of Jesus. God in this atonement theory seems unwilling or incapable of forgiving sin in any other way then through the shedding of blood.

I realize that these are large, very large and potentially threatening questions to what some would call the reformed and evengelical faith but I just thought I would pose them since they seemed unanswered by Rob and were ringing in my head throughout this week. I am interested in your thoughts.

advent after Christmas

I am almost finished with Kester Brewin's book, The Complex Christ, Signs of emergence in the urban church. It just came out in the US under the title, Signs of Emergence. Kester is from the UK and writing in and from the UK experience but reflecting upon trends he sees as crucial for churches emerging in a post-Christendom and postmodern culture. (Not Emergent churches that have been typecast but churches that are emerging out of this unique cultural shit and time.) He uses James Fowlers stages of development to talk about how the church needs to develop or evolve past its enlightenment, rationalism of naive simplicity (Stage 3), characterized by Fowler as "loyalists with deep convictions, yet critically unexamined". Many Christians and churches never move beyond this stage of development. He is calling the church to move into Stage 4 where we realize that faith and truth is more complex than previously understood. This stage often leads to "dark night of the soul" kind of experiences where doubt and uncertainty reign. Many churches since they themselves have not moved through this stage, often cannot handle others within their community who are going through it. Brewin sees the church as a whole moving into Stage 4, due to the cultural shift from modern to postmodern and the shift from a centralized Christendom church status to a mariginalized post-Christendom status. Our place in the world is not what it has been and were are experiencing dislocation. The hope is obviously that one 9and the church) moves through Stage 4 to Stage 5. This according to Brewin and Fowler this is a place of deep simplicity, a place where one realizes the richness, ambiguity and multidimensionality of truth and faith. This conjunctive stage (5) allows one to hold opposites together in a single frame, it is what some call a dialectical tension. Though we cannot force people or churches to move from one phase to another we must create space for that movement and allow for diverse developmental stages within our churches. If we allow for this it will necessarily change the organization of our churches which Brewin sees to be essential for our missional context of postmodernism and post-Christendom.

And here is the beauty that drew me into this book. The first chapter is about a hopeful waiting - Advent. It is incredibly rich. He calls the church to wait. I love this because it as an activist doer it challenges me to my core!! Listen:

"We will be required to wait. To be acted upon gently and gracefully and peacefully. Shaped, not crushed; guided not dragged... The task is urgent but if our response is to be anything more than another flash in the pan or botched attempt to become culturally aware then we must avoid haste... Genuine change cannot be about haste, or about playing for time. It must involve the depth of us, and must have something of us in it... In other words, for our own health, we need change to occur not at revolutionary speeds demanded by power-wielding dictators or company board rooms, but at the evolutionary speeds of the empowered human body... If we are to transform the whole [church] and truly alter the very nature of things for good, then the mode of change can not be revolution, but evolution. A gradual development over a long period of time... The perception of the new step will come to those brave enough to stop dancing the old... We fear that if we stopped for a week, a month, a service, a moment we might appear forgotten, or lose our momentum... We must be brave enough to stop if we are to see change... In other words our structures must serve us not us serve our structures... We must bear fruit, Christ tells us. But outside our genetically modified globalized supermarkets, fruit trees only bear fruit once a year and then their branches are stripped of leaves in the cold winter of advent... The Church is destined to live in a perpetual advent as we wait for Christ's return... No matter how impatient we get as a society, with processing speeds rising and our whole cultural velocity increasing ever faster, we cannot speed up pregnancy... We must have the courage to stop. To prepare the ground for the new and wait."

What a breathe of fresh air!!!!!

What is hard about the waiting of this advent?
What are you seeing and hearing in this period of waiting?

Why I am Presbyterian/Reformed

Recently I had to write a statement of what it means to be Presbyterian. So here is what I said.

To me, to be Presbyterian means to be connected with the Reformed tradition which holds a high view of the authority of scripture, the sovereignty of God over all of life, a belief in the priesthood of all believers, justification by faith in Christ alone, practices a representative form of church government and its theology is continually reforming. I agree with both the historical development of these beliefs and practices as well as their Biblical soundness.

The Heart of Presbyterianism and the Reformed tradition is its perspective on the theology of the church, that is, ecclesia reformata semper reformanda secundum verbum Dei - the church reformed, always being reformed, according to the word of God. The spirit that birthed the Presbyterian and Reformed tradition (though largely lost now) is that he church must always be being reformed by the Word and the Holy Spirit. This belief allows local churches to evolve and emerge in a variety of changing cultural contexts. This is so important in the life of the local church because every local congregation must answer the question, what is God calling us to do in our missional context?” This may require the shape and form of the church to change and morph into something new and different. It may even require a shift in theology in order to incarnate the Gospel in that unique missional context. The idea that the church is always reforming is essential in every age but I think it to be particularly important as we shift form a modern to postmodern culture.

Finally Presbyterianism holds to a representative form of church polity, which I believe to be the most Biblical model of church government. It guards against a pure democracy where the pastor is at the mercy of any tangential disagreement in the congregation as well as the abuse of authoritarianism in a hierarchical model of church government. It places appropriative power and authority in the congregation through its elected elders and the pastor gives leadership and oversight to them while still being only one voice among the other elders.

What do you think?

Are we really missional and to whom?

This blog post http://www.aidanslegacy.blogspot.com/ entitle, UK vs. USA Battle Royale, by my friend Rob Lewin compares the US and UK emerging church movement and it kicks butt. It challenges the emerging church in the U.S. to be missional first and allow the emergent structures to come out of authentic engagement with our culture. Or to site Frost and Hirsch let our missiology determine our eclesiology mot using these same structures but dressed up with candles and icons. It has great analysis and posts a stinging challenge to those of us who think we are being innovative and really just spinning our putting lipstick on the same old pig.

I often feel this tension like all I want to do is get as much silverware off the sinking ship before it goes under. And then somedays I see a glimmer of hope that maybe just maybe the ship is not completely beyond repair. Our community for the time being is called to work within the old wineskin, modeling and incarnating a new wineskin along side. It creates deep confusion and a split-personality at times but the people within the mainline churches are just as valuable in the eyes of God as the pagan postmodern culture. Are we not called to care for these people in the dessert? As Alan Roxburgh said, God is often found in the most God forsaken places and one of those places is the institutional church. I believe our particular call as the Open Door is to be a prophetic voice to both the denominational church and the culture. Pray for us as we live and breathe between the missional and the institutional, the new wineskin and the old wineskin and death of the old and birth the new. Check it out but it is not for the light at heart.

http://www.aidanslegacy.blogspot.com/
UK vs. USA Battle Royale!!! - 4th post down