Dylan on a Sunday

There are two new books out on Dylan and I'm trying to create the space and money to read them both. I don't read everything on Dylan. I've been given books on Dylan on the mistaken assumption that I am as obsessed as the person who gave the book to me, and I haven't read them. But I'm anxious to read these books. The reason is a great interview with both of the authors that I found last week.


Greil Marcus, Bob Dylan, is a critic who has followed Dylan closely and written a lot about him through the years. Sean Wilentz is a historian who has written something of a cultural history, Bob Dylan in America. Wilentz claims to have become a writer because he became a fan of Dylan's. "I was never interested in figuring out what the songs meant. I was interested in figuring out my response to them, and other people's responses. I wanted to get closer to the music than I could by listening to it—I wanted to get inside of it, behind it, and writing about it, through it, inside of it, behind it, was my way of doing that."


I love the interview because both talk about things that in which I am interested in my other life--the way words and performances create worlds, and the way an artistic imagination works and is funded. For both, the song is the medium that allows Dylan to capture multiple, stray worlds in a single place. They know his world, the literary references, the folk history, Dylan's own notions of historical consciousness. They hear the echoes, recognize the allusions, and know just how large the imaginative landscape is from which Dylan performs. And I'm interested in that. So, over time, I will buy and read these books.


But the interview is great as well. Here are a few of my favorite excerpts:


SW: One of the marks of Dylan's genius is the ability to shuffle time and space like a deck of cards. He can make the past sound like the present and the present sound like the past. In doing this, he is a great, great historian, like Greil says. But Dylan also does something that historians can't do, which is to actually commingle the past and the present in ways that are astonishing.


GM: So it's that sense that there are so many worlds behind and within the songs to discover and live in, but also this sense of empathy for the people who appear in his songs. Dylan once said, maybe sarcastically, that all of his songs really ended with "Good luck." But that may be what he says to the people in his songs.


SW: In the liner notes to World Gone Wrong, he talks about how virtual reality has taken over, or is taking over—he calls it "hegemony"—and people are just not able to write songs like the ones that he is singing for the dead and out of the dead; they can't write those kinds of songs any more. He makes it pretty clear that, in some ways, all he can do to battle this hegemony, as he calls it, is to sing those songs, and to continue to write his own songs out of that tradition, out of those traditions, the many traditions, not just one. It's not exactly the attitude of a big rock star who thinks he's all powerful; this is a guy who feels like he and the world are up against forces that are so complex and so overpowering that singing these songs is all that he can do.


SW: You're up against a lot in this world, and you may be up against more now than you were in 1961. But as he says, he finds his lexicon in the songs, and in the songs he can find a measure of hope to battle against it. But that means more than just protesting; it's not about protesting. Well, maybe it is always about protesting—all of his songs are protest songs. But it's really about exploring realms of human imagination that he finds being flattened out in this virtual reality in which we live.


I hope my work is in some measure is recognizable in light of that last sentence.

Preaching Imagination, Acts 2

Here are today's reflections. This is the theological heart of the sermon, the next move. These are impressions, not yet sermon words, though many of these impressions will make the final cut. I'm interested in what they inspire in you, where they send you, what images and impressions they evoke.

God raised Israel's messiah from the dead. This that you see and hear is the work of God, the result of raising this Jesus from the dead, seating him at the right hand of God in glory and handing over to him the kingdom. God has made Israel's messiah, Lord of all, giving him the authority to pour out the Spirit, the effective power of the Kingdom of God.

This that you see and hear is God's keeping his promise to Abraham, that through Abraham all the nations of the earth will be blessed. It's what Mary and Zechariah sang about under the influence of the Holy Spirit,

he has shown mercy promised to our ancestors, and has remembered his holy covenant, the oath he swore to our ancestor Abraham.

This is God guaranteeing the world's future through Israel's messiah. Through Jesus, who pours the Spirit out on the 12, on Peter and James and John--and Mathhias, the freshly minted apostle, completer of the 12, the newest representative of the new Israel.

Jesus, pouring out the Spirit in Jerusalem, the city of David, Zion, God's holy mountain--not in Rome or Alexandria or Abilene or Searcy. Jerusalem. (more here)

And this has happened in the presence of devout Jews--devout Jews from every nation under heaven. Parthians, Medes, Elamites, oh my! God has placed devout Jews, people like Simeon and Anna in every corner of the globe, so that through Israel and the announcement of Israel's messiah, every nation on earth will be blessed.

This is God keeping this improbable story alive. This is God keeping faithfulness, breathing life in a story left for dead, raising it up, bringing it back to life, time and time again.

And here in a decisive way, in a way that leaves no doubt. In Israel's worst moment, putting to death God's annointed, the one attested by God through signs, deeds, wonders, in this lowest moment, God's greatest affirmation. He raised Israel's messiah from the dead and enthroned him forever, securing once and for all Israel's central role in the promise of God for all the world. Once and for all consoling Israel, redeeming Jerusalem, and through this, saving all nations.

This is the day that Simeon and Anna longed for, a line drawn by the Holy Spirit directly from their hearts to Pentecost. This is God's emphatic "yes" to all human longing for more, for fuller, for poured out, for extravagant mercy, for life without the threat of death, for the great and glorious day of the Lord.

The Preaching Imagination, Acts 2...

I've had the assignment on preaching from Acts 2, May 7, for about six months now. It's been hard to resist some sermon momentum. The first reading of the text introduced a set of images that immediately suggested a sermon. I've learned to admit these initial impressions, not suppress them. But I've also learned to question where they come from. These particular images centered on the relationship that Churches of Christ have had with Acts 2 through the years. It's a strong set of images and this still might be the way the sermon goes.

But it was obvious. And it was generated by a relationship outside the text, not so much from a dwelling in the text itself. So, I've been looking for other compelling images, other ways in.

This is important in relation to Acts 2 precisely because this text is familiar. There's not a person in Churches of Christ who can't quote Acts 2:38. And while this verse is huge in the scope of Peter's sermon, the larger setting is and rich and full and thinly interpreted in my opinion. I need something to jar listeners into a new reading.

So, I've been scrubbing the text to see what might fall loose. And I've been reading others who have read deeply as well. And today a new way in appeared.

It came while reading the quotation from Joel in Peter's sermon--a text I've read hundreds of times. But the question the apostles ask Jesus at the beginning of Acts has been framing my overall reading of this text in increasing measure. "Is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?" I am increasingly convinced that this is a crucial question in the narrative flow of Acts.

So, when I got to "your sons and daughters shall prophecy," two things hit me at once. Simeon and Anna are prophets, male and female. And they were looking for the "consolation of Israel" and the "redemption of Jerusalem" respectively. They are people of the Holy Spirit, living faithfully in expectation of the fulfillment of the promises made by God to Israel. They prefigure the Pentecost event. The same Spirit inspiring a specific hope in them is poured out by the risen Jesus on Pentecost.

Now, I know this might not sound like a lot. But suddenly my imagination started popping in two directions. First, it began to emerge like a golden thread from other familiar texts in Luke-Acts. Second, the significance of Simeon and Anna in light of Acts 2 for the self-understanding of the church today was immediately relevant and specific. I could identify Simeon and Annas. And I could tie them to the allusion that the twelve standing before the crowd were Galileans.

This may prove to be nothing but background to my sermon. But it might very well be a new way in. A surprise that brings the meaning of the event into different focus. This may prove to be only feeding that part of me that likes to be unique. But we'll see. I have time to play with it. Let's see where it goes.

Preaching, the Thick and Thin of It, 2

This past Sunday I had the opportunity to preach at a local congregation. They are in the middle of a series tracing the broad strokes of the biblical narrative. They've asked me to do a few of the sermons in the series, and Sunday I had Genesis 12 as my sermon text.

In previous posts, I've talked about the preaching imagination, and particularly the need to render both the world of the text and our world with thick description. Also, I think a lot about what is performing in the text, and how can I get it to perform in the sermon. So, what would I do with Genesis 12 along these lines.

This is an important text, a game changer in many ways. What is surprising in light of that is the scarcity of detail. There is no prelude or back story. No build up this moment. We have precious little detail about Abram and have no indication that Abram knows anything about this God who is calling him. We have an astounding promise stated directly and without conditions. And given the scarcity of information about Abram, his decision to "do as the Lord said" is pretty stunning. So, what is performing here? Lack of detail. The lack of detail we have makes the details we do have more impacting.

What's performing on the listener's side of the ledger? Familiarity. They know the story and they automatically hear other stories along with this one. This sermon has a lot of potential for echo and allusion. Also, the world of stories we live in revels in the motivations of characters. The drama is played out in the psyche of the characters before it is in real action. Inner landscapes are as important as outer ones. The biblical stories typically resist that kind of psychologizing, which serves to put the emphasis in the story on the initiative and action of God. I want to bring these worlds into conversation.

So, here are some snippets from the sermon:

"Now the Lord said to Abram..." Just like that. Abram's minding his own business, just hanging out in the middle of a genealogy with his fathers and his barren wife, and the Lord speaks to him.

This can happen, evidently. You can be minding your own business, mending your nets by the Sea of Galilee, or checking your email, or watching Wheel of Fortune, and the Lord can just interrupt you. "Abram!" Just like that, "the Lord said to Abram..."

"...Leave your country and your kindred and your father's house and go the land that I will show you."

Which is asking a lot, isn't it? Country, kindred, father's house. Leave what you know. Leave the things that give you identity, your sources of security, the life that has been handed down to you. Leave it for the land that I will show you.

It would be one thing to say, leave country, kindred and father's house and go to California, or Dallas, or Miami. At least then you would know how to pack. Nancy and I are going to Uganda in a few days. We're not prepared for Africa. We need shots and lighter clothes and different foot wear. It helps to know where you're going. But Abram gets none of this. None of it. No destination. Only a land that he will be shown, which puts all the stress on the one doing the leading. Which I don't think is really a very popular notion. If you were a travel agent and this was your business, I think you'd go broke.

I think that because a few years ago I wrote a book with Randy Harris and Doug Foster called, "Seeking a Lasting City." But that wasn't our first title. The title we wanted was "Leaving the Land We Know," but our editors nixed it. "It will scare people. They don't want to leave what they know. They'll think you're asking them to leave Churches of Christ." Not much of a market for this leaving country and kindred and father's house, evidently.

But Abram got more than an invitation. He got a promise as well. And what a promise. "I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and the one who curses you, I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth will be blessed."

That's an astounding promise. Really. One that you could only believe if you suspended belief, hoped against hope.

And its made to Abram. And we know precious little about him. We don't know if he's a person of faith. We have nothing of his exploits. Know nothing about his character. All we know...all we know...all we know about him is that his wife is barren.

If we were vetting likely candidates for this story, the one thing we know about Abram would disqualify him. Great nation. Blessing. Great name. It screams family, offspring, fertility. And Sarai, Abram's wife is barren.

Which makes you wonder about the promise maker. Who makes wild promises like this? This isn't business as usual--it's not like a "your money back, no questions asked" kind of promise. This is an all in promise. This is life out of barrenness, creation out of nothing. The Lord is all in. He's put his reputation on the line in the form of a wild promise.

But here's the kicker. "In you all the families of the earth will be blessed." I mean why not. Promise a family to someone incapable of having a family and then promise them all the families of the earth will be blessed through this impossible family. Why not?

"So Abram went as the Lord told him."

(pause)

Seriously. Just like that. "Abram went as the Lord told him."

(pause)

Now, I'm not one to criticize biblical writers, much. But I'm thinking that most story tellers worth their salt make a bit more of this moment. Give us some sense of the inner turmoil within Abram. He's tortured. Country, kin, and father's house verses this fantastic, unsecured promise. He's torn. And in his inner conflict lie the seeds of success or failure. This story depends on how he will work out his inner demons. Cue the music. Which way will he go. Close-up on his eyes, the worry lines on his forehead. Follow him back into Sarai's tent. We hear her say, "Might as well go. Stupid hope is better than no hope. There's a fine line between trust and desperation and we're walking it Abe."

Now that's a story.

But we have none of that here. The story refuses to look at anything other than the promise.

God--a preposterous promise--trust. That's all we have.

God--a promise--and trust.

Which it turns out, is really all you need to tell a story about God.

It's not that our story lacks drama. The human characters are always trying to hijack it, change the plot just a bit, make the outcomes a little less risky. Make it less a comedy or tragedy and more a fairly tale.

Abraham would rather trust his ability to pawn Sara off as his sister than trust the promise-maker.

Sarah tires of waiting for a son, so she sends the concubine into Abraham's tent. Let's kick start this thing a bit, take it into our own hands.

God's not even above injecting a little drama, asking Abraham to sacrifice Isaac.

But all of these serve to highlight the basic elements of the story here in chapter 12. God-promise-trust.

Next post, the rest of the sermon.

Dylan on a Sunday

I've been thinking a lot about rhetoric and imagination, or maybe better forms or figures of speech and imagination. And I'm making a distinction between forms designed to foreclose and those designed to disclose. A theory, for instance, is designed to foreclose. It's primary function is to explain without remainder. A theory attempts to be a complete account of things. It's design is to orient us and settle things.

Metaphor is different. It is a way of speaking about something in new terms. It is pictoral and as such is trying to push us beyond the limits of straightforward speech. It is designed to disclose, widen and enlarge our landscape of interpretation. It is not designed to explain everything, but to leave open the possibility that there might be more to be said.

For what its worth here, the NT typically avoids the theoretical. There are, for instances, no complete theories of the atonement found anywhere in Scripture. There are, in contrast, several metaphors.

OK, Dylan. Dylan is known for his live takes in the studio. He's not interested in the perfect song. In a recent interview he talks about McCartney and others who in the studio can produce the perfect song. The problem with the perfect song, for Dylan, is that it leaves you with nowhere to go. The trick in performing the perfect song is to reproduce it in exacting detail. It is a closed structure.

Dylan sees his songs as living, breathing things. The album is a performance, a starting place. No perfect songs here. It is an open structure and further performances are variations on a theme. When I heard Dylan live, songs like "Lay, Lady, Lay," "Senor," "Ballad of a Thin Man," were very different from the original recording. The same song, undeniably. But not the same song. There's no reason to bootleg a McCartney concert, but Dylan bootlegs are revelations.

George Harrison invited Dylan to perform with him at the benefit, Concert for Bangledesh. Dylan was concerned about playing an arena and Harrison didn't know if Dylan would show up the night of the concert. Worse, Harrison didn't know that the songs they rehearsed would be played the same way they were rehearsed. And sure enough, when Dylan appeared, he played the same song they had rehearsed in a completely different time signature. Open structure. Not foreclosure, but disclosure.

Life requires both. But Ricouer and others have demonstrated that metaphor is fundamental to our making sense of things. I admit, I'm much more interested in pushing beyond the boundaries then I am drawing them.

The Preaching Imagination, 2

In the movie, "A Knight's Tale," knights joust to the strains of contemporary rock and roll. Characters in medieval garb function as odd contemporaries, competing to the strains of "We will Rock You" and "Taking Care of Business." The movie does not depict an ancient setting, but neither is it contemporary. The genre of movie has created an imaginative setting in which a temporal warp allows the viewer to stand in various worlds simultaneously. Good preaching does the same thing. The genre of gospel, a dramatic turning of the ages, allows the preacher to stand in a new world, neither ancient nor of this age, but a world of the gospel's own imagination. The sermon is an intertextual web that brings into creative interplay the echoes and allusions of Scripture, the contexts of contemporary communities, and the instincts of the death and resurrection of Jesus. Under the influence of the gospel, the sermon insists on speaking, even if somewhat anachronistically, in the present tense.

I wrote these words at the conclusion of an essay on preaching for ACU Press book, Preaching Romans, 2002. It's my take on the whole issue of relevance, and it begins with an assumption about the gospel. The gospel is fundamentally the announcement of a dramatic turn of the ages. As Paul says, Christians are those "upon whom the end of the ages has fallen" (1 Cor 10). Richard Hays suggests that "Paul believes himself, along with his churches, to stand in a privileged moment in which the clutter of past texts and experiences assumes a configuration of eschatological significance" (Echoes of Scripture in Paul, 161). Paul assumes a "nearness" in Scripture, an immediacy given the inauguration of a new age initiated by the death and resurrection of Jesus.

One way to say this is that Paul doesn't read Scripture as addressed to a historically distant "them," but to an eschatologically privileged "us." Again, 1 Cor 10, "These things happened to them to serve as an example, and they were written down for us, on whom the end of the ages has fallen." I try to think of the sermon in the same way. In the sermon, by virtue of the gospel, Romans is not a word primarily for a distant "them" that we overhear, but a word to us. My job, in other words, is to assume relevance, not to make the text relevant.

This would again make my former professors of preaching faint. We were taught to think of the sermon as a bridge that connected what the word meant to the original audience to what the word means to contemporary hearers. I understand this impulse. It keeps the text in a position of primacy before we let our current notions slip into the potion of the sermon. And I certainly value the work of historical critics who have illumined the setting of so much of Scripture. I don't want to do away with this sensibility. I want to temper it, put it within a larger theological context.

There are several deficits built into a bridge theory of the sermon. Again, the bridge assumes that the biggest thing to overcome in the sermon is a historical chasm between the world that produced the text and ours. The way to overcome this is to isolate the original intention of the author through exegetical method, distill the text into some universal point or principle, and walk the point across the bridge by way of analogy and make the point contemporary through illustration and application. I will mention just two weaknesses of this approach here (if I can restrain myself).

First, the historical gap is not the only one that stands between the reader and the text, and it may not be the most significant. Ancient preachers and theologians knew well the historical spread between them and the text, but felt that this gap paled in comparison to the spiritual one that exists between text and proclaimer. The historical-critical method when applied to preaching tends to bracket these matters or hold them only to the final, secondary matters of sermon preparation. It was never suggested to me that I approach the text with any other question than "what did this mean to the original audience." (Forget for a minute the hermeneutical nightmare associated with that question). No one ever suggested to me that lectio-divina or other readings strategies might address far more significant gaps than the historical one.

Second, the text gets left behind in the sermon. The text too often is treated in the sermon as a historical artifact to be explained. The preacher and the listeners stand at a far distance from the text and observe it as visitors. Like zoo patrons, we plug a quarter into the machine and listen to an explanation of the text's original habitat at a safe distance. The text is trapped in the past tense. I have had students track when they feel most engaged with a sermon. It nearly always relates to direct address, present tense speech. The bridge theory of the sermon keeps the text in sepia tones, while the contemporary illustrations and stories are in vivid color. This is a crying shame given the dynamic range of much of Scripture. We're trading inspired writ for football illustrations.

OK, so I'm trying to move past a bridge theory of the sermon, and this is a theological move for me (more on this later), but for now a few implications for the sermon.

I assume relevance. This text has something to say, even in all of its strangeness (perhaps because of it), to all of us upon whom the end of the ages has fallen.

I preach as much as possible in the present tense. I prefer "Paul says..." to "Paul said to the Corinthians..." This is an instinct, not a law.

I frame the sermon with the language and images of the text, and I nearly always begin with the text. I can't tell you how many sermons I hear these days that begin with something other than the text. And because sermons, good ones at least, seek a certain symmetry, they tend to end where they begin. The illustrations dominate the imagination of the sermon.

I blend worlds as often as possible. One of my favorite comments about my preaching came from a friend who observed that there's a certain seamlessness between text and occasion. The sermon doesn't jerk you back and forth from one world to another. Narrate the text with a contemporary allusion. Talk about our world in the language and cadences of the text. Because of this instinct, I prefer echoes and allusions to full-blown stories and illustrations. I'm trying to open the imaginative landscape of the sermon, not close it down with one or two dominating images.

I know this post has likely raised as many issues as settled them. Which is the great thing about a blog. More to come.

Dylan on a Sunday

I'm interested in inspiration and performance and how they go together. I have some ideas about it based on my own experience. For instance, I believe that a creative imagination can be cultivated, it can be funded through practices and habits and disciplines. But that doesn't mean it can be routinized or mechanized or reduced to a failsafe process. Inspiration requires raw materials but it cannot be manufactured. Inspiration shows up, it isn't often summoned. There is a structure to a creative life, but no guarantees.

Along these lines, I read with great interest the interview Bill Flanagan (MTV) did with Dylan after his latest album came out. The interview is expansive, Dylan holding forth on Obama, Sam Houston, Ulysses Grant and Hitler, among other things. But there's a lot about songwriting and creativity as well.

I love Dylan's interviews. He's both candid and coy. He challenges the assumptions of many questions, avoids any cliches, and refuses the easy labels. And he will admit to no processes. When asked, "You wrote a lot of songs with Robert Hunter. How does that process work?" Dylan responds, "There isn't any process to speak of, you just do it." When asked if he would more likely paint (Dylan is getting attention now for his painting) or pick up his guitar if he saw a little girl walking down the train tracks pulling a wagon with a statue of Buddha in it with a three-legged dog following behind (I kid you not, that's the question), he says "Is it a cloudless blue-gray sky, or is it about to rain?...The three legged dog, what type? A spaniel, a bulldog, a retriever?" When asked (this is my favorite) if he could write a song about George Bush, he replies "Well, sure. George's name would be easy to rhyme."

He describes his songs in certain tensions, if not contradictions. He downplays any deep significance to his songs. A hammer is a hammer, not some clue to a deeper riddle. His songs have characters, but Bob insists he is always the singer. But while he claims a realism to his lyrics, he doesn't deny being a mystic and moving in the world at different layers and levels. And while he denies deeper significance, he talks about knowing classic archetypes that an artist must know to say something meaningful. Inspiration, he insists, is hard to come by, but acknowledges that he's been fairly prolific.

Dylan wants, it seems, to be an innocent among his songs. He offers them with a shrug to keep the rest of us from taking our interpretations too seriously, while simultaneously making his work look effortless, possessed by a simple genius. And this may be the truth of it all.

But the interview also reveals a man whose palate is full of colors. He reads widely in history. He knows art. He knows architecture. He knows his musical roots. He has habits of life that fund his imagination. And he knows that his music has a certain structure. He's not inventing something new every time. He has some familiar loops, or structures, if not formulas. A song has rules, and Dylan tries to "stick to the rules. Sometimes I might shift paradigms within the same song, but then that structure has its own rules... Some formulas are too complex and I don't want anything to do with them." He writes in the thick mix of what has been given to him.

I think I recognize this creative map. I certainly nodded at places, smiled at many, and laughed out loud at a few. And I smiled at the end of the interview when Flanagan asks, "A lot of performers give God credit for their music. How do you suppose God feels about that?"

"I'm not the one to ask, " replies Dylan. "It sounds like people giving credit where credit is due."

Missional Think Tank, an Observation

I mentioned in my last post that I participated in think tank concerning missional church that involved a very diverse group of about 70. I learned a lot from the conversation.

The two day conversation was built around small group conversations and big group reporting. I noticed an interesting in the big group reporting. Some of us valued the messiness associated with the word missional, that it couldn't be easily defined or categorized. Others of us felt acutely the need to find more precision in the use of the term. What does the word actually mean? And to what does it point?

This tension kept rearing its head through our discussions which led me to another observation. Those who valued the messiness were by and large academics. Those who valued clearer definition were typically people working in congregations. I have a theory about that.

One of the impulses of the missional conversation as it relates to the seminary is a critique of the hard and fast silos that have defined our work for a long time now. Even though a seminary's faculty are all about the training of ministers, they have prior commitments related to their specific fields of study--New Testament, Church History, Systematic Theology, Homiletics, etc. In that context, missional functions a little like a hand grenade blowing up silos, blurring the lines between disciplines.

This is in part because those interested in the missional conversation are typically missiologists or ministry professors who have been relegated the back end of a theory-praxis divide. In other words, biblical scholars, historians and systematicians are those who say what, and ministry folk are those who say how. I will admit to this feeling a bit like the sound end of a horse as it jumps over the fence. We like a little silo busting to create a little more room at the the theory end of the table. Missional has to remain a little disorienting to sustain its viablity.

Church leaders, on the other hand, experience congregational life these days as chaotic and disorienting. They see missional as a way to organize the chaos into something a bit more orienting and purposeful. They are typically frustrated by academicians who tell them that missional is something, but to tell you exactly what it is defeats the very premise of missional--that it looks different in every context.

My mentor, Pat Keifert, following his mentor, Paul Ricouer, invites us into these kinds of tensions less as a problem to be solved and more as a polarity to be managed. Both impulses are necessary for the health of any social imagination. Both impulses have to be understood in relation to the other. And both have to be strengthened over time. This is hard work, but meaningful, and should be at the heart of any notions of missional leadership.

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.

Believe the Good News, 2

I went to hear the great Shawn Colvin last night. It made me want to be a better guitar player. It made me want to play a better guitar as well (her Martin had such an amazing tone. Don't get me wrong, I love my Breedlove, but it has to be so great to play a high end guitar from one the great brands--Martin, Taylor, Breedlove, Gibson).

The evening also brought several opportunities to think about the gospel. Shawn Colvin's songs are up to their neck in the messines of the world. Her own life story is marked by drug use, mental illness, and homelessness. Her songs stick to the ribs of the world. They mean something. And none of them are about guilt.

For Colvin, the human condition revolves around the issue of emptiness. Her songs are about the difficulty of finding and maintaining identity. One of my favorite Colvin songs is "If I Were Brave." Two of the verses use the word "saved" in relation to emptiness.

"But I have this funny ache and it's burning in my chest
And it spreads just like a fire inside my body
Is it something God left out in my spirit or my flesh
Would I be saved if I were brave and had a baby

And what the hell is this? Who made this bloody mess?
And someone always answers like a martyr
Is it something you should know, did you never do your best
Would you be saved if you were brave and just tried harder"

Penal substitutionary atonement isn't exactly on point when it comes to the actual details of Colvin's life. And my experience is that most people don't have guilt as their presenting life issue. We might wish that were different, especially since that tends to be the only human problem our version of the gospel answers. Fortunately, however, the gospel addresses a far broader set of human concerns.

My last observation from last night has to do with the venue. We saw her in the The Dakota, an intimate jazz club in downtown Minneapolis. The audience sits at tables and can order food and drinks before, during, and after the concert. Nancy and I sat at a table for four and found ourselves with a couple about our age who had lived in Minnesota for a long time. We admitted that we were newcomers and even temporary residents of the area. They were curious about the temporary part and I let on how I had gone back to school. At that point, I left the table to find a restroom.

When I got back, my identity as a seminary student had been revealed and the woman at the table was confessing her agnostic/Buddhist perspectives. Great. Now we're in for an awkward evening.

It turned out, however, to be a great conversation. He was a lapsed Catholic, she a former Lutheran. They asked me about my program and were parituclarly curious about the research I would be doing with congregations. I would cautiously tell them what I was doing, and they would want more detail. Finally, I let it out of the bag, I wanted to address the relationship between views of salvation and congregational practice by way of imagination. Deal breaker, right.

No, the conversation went deeper. They wanted to know how I was going to address soteriological imagination. Seriously, they were interested. I explained to them my read on penal substitutionary atonement. They recognized the theory, though with a little fuzziness, and were puzzled by the notion that Christian salvation could be conceived of in different ways. This was simply the only way they had encountered it. They were shocked that this theory was of a recent vintage. This was clearly a part of Christianity that bothered them and they were definitely interested that the Christian story could be understood differently.

So, I kid you not, we had an energizing conversation about eschatology, the Kingdom of God, and the end of scapegoating. I kept thinking each new subject would lead to the end of the conversation, but it kept deepening and their enthusiasm kept growing. Who knew?

The night was rich with possibilities for the gospel, but poor with regards to the relevance of penal substitutionary atonement. It was a great night.