When I began this series of reflections months ago, I was after the notion that gospel was a particular way of naming the church's engagement with the world. What is it that defines the church's relationship with the surrounding world? News. Good news. And this is a different kind of engagement than words like truth, mystery, law, etc. The question then is, how does the church stay in the mode of news?
A few weeks ago I suggested that because the gospel is related to the kingdom of God, a future reality that is breaking into the present, surprise is always a category of the gospel. The church stays in the mode of news by attending to surprises, particularly those related to hope.
But not all surprises are good surprises. Not all of them are connected to the in-breaking of God's future. This requires a certain judgment related to a particular way of seeing. Paul calls this way of seeing "the word of the cross." This "word of the cross," he says, "is foolishness to those who are perishing, but for those being saved it is the power of God" (1 Cor 1:18). This word is not obvious to all. It is a scandal to both Jews and Greeks--not a way of seeing at all. But for those who are being saved, it is the wisdom of God.
But what is this "word of the cross?" For Paul, it seems to be the capacity or ability to see the patterns of death and resurrection at work in life. "I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live..." "I want to know Christ and the power of his rising, share in his sufferings, conform to his death..." "We carry in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our mortal bodies..." The death and resurrection are not for Paul simply a formula whereby we experience forgiveness of sins and a home in heaven. Death and resurrection is a script for our lives whereby the powers of sin and death are overcome. Death and resurrection is a way of life, a way of participating in the life of God which is coming for our salvation. It is a being saved, a way of living and seeing that has transformative power.
And this way of living and seeing produces a specific wisdom, a wisdom not of this age or of the rulers of this age, but a wisdom of the age that is continuously coming. It is a way of seeing through the things that belong to the future--faith, hope, and love. By attending to the world through faith, hope, and love, the hidden rule of God becomes manifest both in God's movement in the world and in our lives. We learn both to recognize and enact pictures of God's coming future.
To the extent that this discernment (discrimination, judgment) produces a unique wisdom, the church remains in the mode of news. The gospel is not another way of saying what already is the case. It is not simply a particular way of naming general human experience. The death and resurrection of Jesus, and all that surrounds the eventfulness of this way of God's being with and for us, is new. It is a resistance to the powers that be, a refusal of the status quo, and the embrace of hope, the possibility of a new, coming world, ordered by different powers.
This does not mean that other wisdoms based in other criteria of judgment are pointless or powerless or even evil. The news of God's way of being with us in death and resurrection is not an obliteration of all other categories, but a conversion within them. The strategy of the new age is not to overcome other perspectives through force or power. Rather, the power of the new age always comes through leaven and mustard seed, God's victory hidden in death, in the unsuspecting, and through passionate identification with what is passing away. The new comes not through obliteration, but through passionate, suffering engagement. The way of death and resurrection is not a way to avoid the world until heaven arrives, but a way of entering the world more completely with different eyes, serving different powers. God's desire, after all, is not to forsake creation, but to fill it, to be all in all, to transfigure it. Those who live through the resources of the new age, the word of the cross, learn to recognize the signs of God's coming and announce it as newsworthy.
Showing posts with label World. Show all posts
Showing posts with label World. Show all posts
Friday, October 2, 2009
Friday, August 14, 2009
A Violent Wind
It was one of those moments. I was yelling at the TV. Not so much in anger as frustration. It was the second Bush-Kerry debate and the question to each concerned the role of faith in their life as a political leader. Dubya went first and talked about his faith as a deeply internal thing. It's what gave him peace in the midst of the trials of being president. It's what I expected.
Kerry went next and talked about his life-long relationship with the Catholic church. And in very similar ways, he talked about his faith as a private, inner thing, something that gave him inner strength and conviction.
I wanted a very different answer from each of them.
Not that I should be surprised. For most of us faith is primarily an internal thing, something that gives us inner strength. In my dissertation research, I am conducting interviews with members from various congregations. One of the interview questions is "As you understand it, how is the Holy Spirit related to salvation?" Every single answer to this point--every single one of them--has something to do with inner peace or strength. Salvation and the Holy Spirit, it appears is my own private possession.
Again, this is not surprising. When you read a book like Charles Taylor's, Sources of the Self, you get sense of just how much Western society has been dominated by notions of a buffered self--or the person as a completely self-contained entity. The personal is the primary horizon of interpretation for most Westerners. We are hard wired philosophically to think of reality as consisting of subjects and objects with self-defining essences and characteristics. A world of subjects and objects becomes also a world of fact/value or public/private splits. And on those splits, faith gets placed on the values and private side of the ledgers. Bush and Kerry were well within the mainstream of Western/American spirituality.
But this is not the only way it has to be. Nancy and I are dwelling in Acts 2 these days. I was struck the other day by the NRSV's translation of the coming of the Spirit as a "violent wind." When the Spirit comes, representing a new age in which the rich will be brought low and the poor raised up, the wind isn't just soothing and peaceful. It is also violent, disruptive, disturbing, commotion causing.
I wanted Bush or Kerry, one of them, to say faith is what keeps me up at night. It's what won't give me rest, keeps me stirred up. It's not my safe-haven from the world, it's what keeps driving me into the world. It's what won't let me rest with my wealth in a world of hunger. It's what is causing me to want me to see the world new each day. It's a violent wind.
I often have people tell me that they know a personal decision they have made is a "God-thing" because they have such peace about it. That might be right. But in a world where we have made such peace with the way things are, it might be a sign of just the opposite. God is just as likely to be in the option that gives no peace.
Kerry went next and talked about his life-long relationship with the Catholic church. And in very similar ways, he talked about his faith as a private, inner thing, something that gave him inner strength and conviction.
I wanted a very different answer from each of them.
Not that I should be surprised. For most of us faith is primarily an internal thing, something that gives us inner strength. In my dissertation research, I am conducting interviews with members from various congregations. One of the interview questions is "As you understand it, how is the Holy Spirit related to salvation?" Every single answer to this point--every single one of them--has something to do with inner peace or strength. Salvation and the Holy Spirit, it appears is my own private possession.
Again, this is not surprising. When you read a book like Charles Taylor's, Sources of the Self, you get sense of just how much Western society has been dominated by notions of a buffered self--or the person as a completely self-contained entity. The personal is the primary horizon of interpretation for most Westerners. We are hard wired philosophically to think of reality as consisting of subjects and objects with self-defining essences and characteristics. A world of subjects and objects becomes also a world of fact/value or public/private splits. And on those splits, faith gets placed on the values and private side of the ledgers. Bush and Kerry were well within the mainstream of Western/American spirituality.
But this is not the only way it has to be. Nancy and I are dwelling in Acts 2 these days. I was struck the other day by the NRSV's translation of the coming of the Spirit as a "violent wind." When the Spirit comes, representing a new age in which the rich will be brought low and the poor raised up, the wind isn't just soothing and peaceful. It is also violent, disruptive, disturbing, commotion causing.
I wanted Bush or Kerry, one of them, to say faith is what keeps me up at night. It's what won't give me rest, keeps me stirred up. It's not my safe-haven from the world, it's what keeps driving me into the world. It's what won't let me rest with my wealth in a world of hunger. It's what is causing me to want me to see the world new each day. It's a violent wind.
I often have people tell me that they know a personal decision they have made is a "God-thing" because they have such peace about it. That might be right. But in a world where we have made such peace with the way things are, it might be a sign of just the opposite. God is just as likely to be in the option that gives no peace.
Thursday, March 5, 2009
God, World, Church
This story is becoming increasingly familiar to me. A church spends a lot of time focusing on its identity. It does this primarily in relation to certain beliefs or ideas. These get shaped into a mission or vision statement, perhaps even a strategic plan if the church is really aggressive. The idea is that if identity can be established before hand, then action will follow. Great theory. It seldom works.
It seldom works for a lot of reasons. The biggest of these reasons, and perhaps the source of all the rest, is that identity discovery is a complex matter requiring more than just self-reflection. We don't know who we are fully before we act. And we don't know who we are fully apart from our life with others.
When we think of identity as something we settle before mission, then the world ends up being only the place where we deliver the things that have already been decided. The world becomes an extension of our project, a target of our good intentions, a passive recipient of a benevolent patron. Often, we define our identities over/against the world, and when we offer them our already determined lives we find them less than impressed. We are often irrelevant to their lives.
The great thing about the missional church movement from my perspective is that is insists that the church only understands its life as a church in mission, as a church in relation to others. Some who write about the missional church still want to define the church's identity before engagement with the world. They talk about the church's essence as something that comes before mission. The church is and then the church does.
But if our identity is truly an identity in God's mission, then we cannot know who we are, not completely, apart from a real life engagement with God's world. We discover who we are in relation to others.
This view of mission makes more sense in relation to a particular view of God. If God is just a set of enduring characteristics, an essence, or enduring substance that is unchangeable or unaddressable, then there is no need to consider the other in terms of our identity or mission. This, however, is not the biblical view of God.
In our last post, we noted that the Cappadocians (you remember them, Basil, his brother Gregory of Nyssa and his other brother Gregory Nanzianzus, well only the first was his actual brother) held together the three persons of the Trinity as one by defining personhood in relation to otherness. We find our personhood only in relation, in this case God as Father, Son, and Spirit. The Cappadocians, however, still wanted to protect the Father from the otherness of the world. God is known primarily only in the inner relations of Father, Son, and Spirit, and the world participates in God only through the Son. The otherness of the world tells us nothing of who God is as a person.
Recent theologians, however, have taken the Cappadocians view of personhood and tied it to the biblical narrative in a way that brings the world back into view. We don't know who God is as Father, Son, and Spirit, apart from a fallen, suffering world. God's identity as Father, Son, and Spirit is only fully revealed in the concrete circumstances of the world, and in particular in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. We know God as Father, Son, and Spirit only through God's suffering participation in, with, and for the world. Our identity, as well as God's, cannot be defined in essential categories, but only in suffering participation with the world.
It seldom works for a lot of reasons. The biggest of these reasons, and perhaps the source of all the rest, is that identity discovery is a complex matter requiring more than just self-reflection. We don't know who we are fully before we act. And we don't know who we are fully apart from our life with others.
When we think of identity as something we settle before mission, then the world ends up being only the place where we deliver the things that have already been decided. The world becomes an extension of our project, a target of our good intentions, a passive recipient of a benevolent patron. Often, we define our identities over/against the world, and when we offer them our already determined lives we find them less than impressed. We are often irrelevant to their lives.
The great thing about the missional church movement from my perspective is that is insists that the church only understands its life as a church in mission, as a church in relation to others. Some who write about the missional church still want to define the church's identity before engagement with the world. They talk about the church's essence as something that comes before mission. The church is and then the church does.
But if our identity is truly an identity in God's mission, then we cannot know who we are, not completely, apart from a real life engagement with God's world. We discover who we are in relation to others.
This view of mission makes more sense in relation to a particular view of God. If God is just a set of enduring characteristics, an essence, or enduring substance that is unchangeable or unaddressable, then there is no need to consider the other in terms of our identity or mission. This, however, is not the biblical view of God.
In our last post, we noted that the Cappadocians (you remember them, Basil, his brother Gregory of Nyssa and his other brother Gregory Nanzianzus, well only the first was his actual brother) held together the three persons of the Trinity as one by defining personhood in relation to otherness. We find our personhood only in relation, in this case God as Father, Son, and Spirit. The Cappadocians, however, still wanted to protect the Father from the otherness of the world. God is known primarily only in the inner relations of Father, Son, and Spirit, and the world participates in God only through the Son. The otherness of the world tells us nothing of who God is as a person.
Recent theologians, however, have taken the Cappadocians view of personhood and tied it to the biblical narrative in a way that brings the world back into view. We don't know who God is as Father, Son, and Spirit, apart from a fallen, suffering world. God's identity as Father, Son, and Spirit is only fully revealed in the concrete circumstances of the world, and in particular in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. We know God as Father, Son, and Spirit only through God's suffering participation in, with, and for the world. Our identity, as well as God's, cannot be defined in essential categories, but only in suffering participation with the world.
Monday, February 2, 2009
God, World, Church, 2
All of us have an imagination related to God, church, and world. That is, we have imagined a world that accounts for the relationships between these three realities and this imagination authorizes any number of practices. Paul Ricouer (a moment of genuine respect at the mention of his name) sees the imagination as a productive human capacity that mediates the relationship between beliefs and practices. And people like Graham Ward and Charles Taylor argue that this imagination is a social thing. It is something that communities share, a repertory of sorts, that makes us competent in a common life.
The question then is what elements are being tied together in our shared imagination. And here's the thing, the most powerful things in a shared imagination are the things we can take for granted, the things we can assume. For instance, I assumed that all the cars on the road today had a basic respect for red and green lights. It allows us all to function together. We simply assume it. Can you imagine how terrifying it would be to drive to work if you couldn't assume that shared repertory? And these assumed things tend to be the last things that we question.
So, as a theologian (I'm a certain kind of theologian), I'm interested in how our beliefs and practices are tied together in congregational imagination.
One of the beliefs I'm interested in is our functional understanding of God. A congregation's shared imagination is different from what its individual members might believe. There might be a 1,000 different understandings of God in a congregation, but there is a shared life that assumes a common understanding., or at least a range of understanding. So, the real theological question is what view of God best accounts for the practices of a congregation.
Much of a congregation's imagination is not deliberately cultivated, but inherited, and from many sources. It takes something of an archaeology, what cultural anthropologists call a thick description, to uncover the various layers of a congregational imagination. That's what I'm trying to do with regard to our understandings of God, world, and church. Here's the thing: once it rises into view, it can be addressed.
All that to say...
Our practices in mission are embedded in certain understandings of God, and those understandings have to do in part with how we view the relationship of Father, Son, and Spirit. And even if we have an allergy to the word Trinity in our congregations or rarely talk about it in our congregations, we have functional understandings that have been in the water of Western Christianity since Augustine.
Last time I mentioned that Western views of Trinity tended to emphasize God's oneness (the shared being between the three), while Eastern views tended to emphasize the three persons. Both emphases are susceptible to distortions. The Western view can turn into modalism where Father, Son, and Spirit are thought of as just different modes of the same single acting subject. The Eastern can so emphasize each person that you end up with three gods.
These are more than just ideas to fight about. These differences have practical implications and tend to form a different kind of imagination about things like mission. Western views of God tended to focus on the mode of sending. How do you describe the relationship between Father, Son, and Spirit? Mainly in relation to the activity of sending. The Father sends the Son, the Father and Son send the Spirit.
The Eastern views of God tended to focus on the relatedness of the three persons. They are one through an interpenetrating communion, what is referred to as perichoresis. God is less a series of movements, and more a model of social life.
At the risk of a massive oversimplification (which is what I do best), we can at least begin by observing that these traditions produced very different notions of salvation and mission. The history of mission in the West often falls under the word, "expansion." It's how we think about things. The church is on the side of God in a series of sending. We're conquering, expanding the borders of the Kingdom. Eastern mission was thought of more as getting people to church, to experience the mystery of communion.
I want to come back to both views in more detail, especially as the Eastern impulse has been further developed in more recent Trinitarian thought. But for now, I want to point out that in both views the view of the world is problematic. In Western mission, the world is just a target. It's simply on the receiving end of a series of sendings. It has little impact on God's relational identity and plays no positive role in the story of redemption. The church here is both enlarged and reduced. The church is on the side of God and the things of God in the sequence of sendings. It has all the goods. But the church is also reduced to an instrument of God, a way for God to get things done.
It is interesting in light of this to think about Protestant missions in the 19th and 20th centuries (well, maybe intersting is too strong of a word). Mission was thought of almost exclusively in terms of sending to preach to individual souls. The question of establishing congregations was clearly secondary. We've experienced this with crusade evangelism (think Billy Graham or Louis Palau). It's always been a problem to think about how these individuals who have welcomed Jesus into their hearts belong to a community of God's people. And for most mission endeavors in this period, mission was not done by congregations, but by mission societies. Mission was a mode of the church's existence that could actually be done better outside of the congregation by a mission society. Mission is not the church's relational identity to God and world. (Yeah, interesting is really too ambitious for this paragraph).
In Eastern Christianity, everything that counts happens within the mystery of communion and communion happens only within the church. The world can only observe. The gulf between God and world is so wide and massive, that God can only commune with the world in Jesus, and by extension through baptism, the eucharist, and the bishop.
What both of these views of God hold in common is a certain understanding of being itself, an ontology, that has a stake in keeping God safe from the imperfections of the world. This hasn't always been the case in Christian theology, and more recent explorations of Trinity have proceeded from different understandings of God and being. But that's for another day.
The question then is what elements are being tied together in our shared imagination. And here's the thing, the most powerful things in a shared imagination are the things we can take for granted, the things we can assume. For instance, I assumed that all the cars on the road today had a basic respect for red and green lights. It allows us all to function together. We simply assume it. Can you imagine how terrifying it would be to drive to work if you couldn't assume that shared repertory? And these assumed things tend to be the last things that we question.
So, as a theologian (I'm a certain kind of theologian), I'm interested in how our beliefs and practices are tied together in congregational imagination.
One of the beliefs I'm interested in is our functional understanding of God. A congregation's shared imagination is different from what its individual members might believe. There might be a 1,000 different understandings of God in a congregation, but there is a shared life that assumes a common understanding., or at least a range of understanding. So, the real theological question is what view of God best accounts for the practices of a congregation.
Much of a congregation's imagination is not deliberately cultivated, but inherited, and from many sources. It takes something of an archaeology, what cultural anthropologists call a thick description, to uncover the various layers of a congregational imagination. That's what I'm trying to do with regard to our understandings of God, world, and church. Here's the thing: once it rises into view, it can be addressed.
All that to say...
Our practices in mission are embedded in certain understandings of God, and those understandings have to do in part with how we view the relationship of Father, Son, and Spirit. And even if we have an allergy to the word Trinity in our congregations or rarely talk about it in our congregations, we have functional understandings that have been in the water of Western Christianity since Augustine.
Last time I mentioned that Western views of Trinity tended to emphasize God's oneness (the shared being between the three), while Eastern views tended to emphasize the three persons. Both emphases are susceptible to distortions. The Western view can turn into modalism where Father, Son, and Spirit are thought of as just different modes of the same single acting subject. The Eastern can so emphasize each person that you end up with three gods.
These are more than just ideas to fight about. These differences have practical implications and tend to form a different kind of imagination about things like mission. Western views of God tended to focus on the mode of sending. How do you describe the relationship between Father, Son, and Spirit? Mainly in relation to the activity of sending. The Father sends the Son, the Father and Son send the Spirit.
The Eastern views of God tended to focus on the relatedness of the three persons. They are one through an interpenetrating communion, what is referred to as perichoresis. God is less a series of movements, and more a model of social life.
At the risk of a massive oversimplification (which is what I do best), we can at least begin by observing that these traditions produced very different notions of salvation and mission. The history of mission in the West often falls under the word, "expansion." It's how we think about things. The church is on the side of God in a series of sending. We're conquering, expanding the borders of the Kingdom. Eastern mission was thought of more as getting people to church, to experience the mystery of communion.
I want to come back to both views in more detail, especially as the Eastern impulse has been further developed in more recent Trinitarian thought. But for now, I want to point out that in both views the view of the world is problematic. In Western mission, the world is just a target. It's simply on the receiving end of a series of sendings. It has little impact on God's relational identity and plays no positive role in the story of redemption. The church here is both enlarged and reduced. The church is on the side of God and the things of God in the sequence of sendings. It has all the goods. But the church is also reduced to an instrument of God, a way for God to get things done.
It is interesting in light of this to think about Protestant missions in the 19th and 20th centuries (well, maybe intersting is too strong of a word). Mission was thought of almost exclusively in terms of sending to preach to individual souls. The question of establishing congregations was clearly secondary. We've experienced this with crusade evangelism (think Billy Graham or Louis Palau). It's always been a problem to think about how these individuals who have welcomed Jesus into their hearts belong to a community of God's people. And for most mission endeavors in this period, mission was not done by congregations, but by mission societies. Mission was a mode of the church's existence that could actually be done better outside of the congregation by a mission society. Mission is not the church's relational identity to God and world. (Yeah, interesting is really too ambitious for this paragraph).
In Eastern Christianity, everything that counts happens within the mystery of communion and communion happens only within the church. The world can only observe. The gulf between God and world is so wide and massive, that God can only commune with the world in Jesus, and by extension through baptism, the eucharist, and the bishop.
What both of these views of God hold in common is a certain understanding of being itself, an ontology, that has a stake in keeping God safe from the imperfections of the world. This hasn't always been the case in Christian theology, and more recent explorations of Trinity have proceeded from different understandings of God and being. But that's for another day.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
To Perform the World Beyond the Reach of Pharaoh
On of the benefits of sojourning at a seminary is that you get to hear the guys who write the books. Today, my favorite author on matters pertaining to Scripture (particularly the Old Testament) is on campus. Walter Brueggemann just spoke on Exodus at a conference on Engaging Scripture for the Sake of the World. WB never disappoints, and so I have a little theology geek buzz going.
I'll just mention one point that WB made today that presses some on what I've been blogging about of late. WB sees the decalogue (10 commandments) as counter commandments, standing in contrast to Pharaoh's commandments about production, bricks, and straw in Exodus 5. Against the insatiable culture of slave production under Pharaoh's control, the way of YHWH provides a coventantal neighborliness that allows acts of kindness toward others.
In the middle of this wonderful exposition of Scripture, Brueggemann made comments about God and the world. He was taught in seminary, he told us, that if you begin theology with God's initiative you're likely doing good theology (I was taught the same thing). Problem is, he said, the biblical writers weren't clued in to this little theological key. Brueggemann refers to the middle part of Exodus as the narrative of departure and noted today that it is human initiative that pushes the story along. Pharaoah produces a cry through oppression, Israel cries out againts Pharaoh's reach, and God responds to the cry of Israel.
The initiative of the Exodus is located in the cry of the slaves that move beyond Pharaoh's reach. The cry is the refusal of a dehumanizing way of life built around insatiable production. The one who is other than Pharaoh (the holy one of Israel), hears Israel's cry and calls them into the performance of a counter story.
I simply want to point out here that creation is active in the drama of redepmtion. The story of God-world is not just a story of God's initiative. God is moved by human initiative. This is not to say that humans can provide their own deliverance, or that God is not an initiator. It is to say that God's relationship with creation is ust that--a relationship. The world is not simply a passive recipient of God's irresistable plan. The world is a real participant in the drama of redemption.
This dynamic view of God suffers with the negotiations made by early Christian apologists with a Greek thinking world. Stan Grenz, and others, refer to the theology that emerges in this period as onto-theology. That is, thinking about God that is rooted in a certain notion of being, namely a substantialist perspective that divides the world into subjects and objects. And in this world, God only works if God is impassable, that is not affected by the world. God is a persisting subject--omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent. In Trinitarian thought, great pains were made to shield the Father from the suffering of the Son.
We still live with much of this today. With regard to mission, we have used passages like Matthew 28 and the biblical language of sending to support a substantialist notion of God. God sends the Son, sends the Spirit (a point of contention between East and West), sends the church. The world is simply an object. The church simply an obedient instrument of God, on the side of God in a series of sendings. The result is a strategic view of mission rooted in a paternalism, often resulting in a heavy-handed imperialism or ethnocentrism parading as the kingdom of God.
The biblical story is not one of an impassable God, a persisting Subject, but of a God who is revealed in relation to human cries, whether of the cries of slaves in Egypt, or of the Son in the Garden of Gethsemane.
WB always raises the spectre of an unmanagable God who if faithful, consistent, precisely in response to human suffering. This, I believe, is the necessary starting place for "Engaging Scripture for the Sake of the World."
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