Martin Luther and Wendell Berry: To Separate, Serve, or Both? That is the Question.

***“What would I not give to get away from a cantankerous congregation and look into the friendly eyes of animals?” Thus Martin Luther facetiously dismissed Andreas Carlstadt’s increasing distaste for town life and aversion to scholarship and burdensome pastoral duties; all three resisted as distractions from quite times in which to cultivate the inner life. Luther viewed Carlstadt’s new radicalism about as favorably as he did the old monasticism. What Carlstadt meant as devotion to God and the pursuit of personal holiness Luther viewed as abandonment of responsibility and the dumbing down of the ministry of the Word.

“Be ye separate” and “Go ye into all the world” are not new commands, and neither is the church’s struggle to satisfy both. Wendell Berry’s spiritual retreat to Henry County Kentucky after his stint at Stanford has entered its fifth decade. I don’t expect him to give up the blue skies and the manure anytime soon. But must we view Berry’s half-century in the sticks as self-serving retreat from responsibility? Amazon rankings suggest the poet/farmer is providing a valued service to more than a few somebodys.

But surely retreat, especially as a lifestyle, can become a spiritual temptation. Perhaps one indicator of legitimate spiritual retreat is precisely its desire to “go ye” with renewed zeal at its conclusion. Dietrich Bonhoeffer labored mightily for the recovery of a rich regime of spiritual retreat in community and by oneself in prayer, Bible study, meditation and worship. But (good Lutheran that he was) Bonhoeffer recognized two unmistakable duties owed by the Christian and the Church to the world Christ died to save―witness and service. Retreat for the sake of pursuing or nurturing some navel-gazing personal holiness given the alien righteousness of Christ and a world in need of the gospel and love delegitimizes the whole sorry business. “Plunge into the tempest of living!” That was Bonhoeffer’s clarion call.

Can we read Paul’s litany of hardship, weakness, and opposition in 2 Corinthians without blushing at fanciful justifications for retreatest, escapest construals of the holy life? The Franciscans are to be commended for resistance to this kind of thing. From time to time our Savior separated himself from the clamoring crowds needing and demanding his help, and perhaps we must as well. Certainly Jesus needed the strength only time alone with the Father provided―for the cross!

Differentiating Witness and Works

***As a Swiss reformed theologian, Karl Barth imbibed a measure of that aversion toward Christian art typical of the Zwinglian/Calvinist stream of the Reformation and its wariness regarding images. Nevertheless, as he wrote his magisterial Church Dogmatics, Barth kept before him Matthias Grünewald’s (c.1475-1528) famous painting, The Crucifixion. Grünewald depicts Jesus nailed to the cross as the two Marys and John the Apostle look on. And John the Baptist makes a postmortem appearance as well, standing erect, holding out an elongated prophetically bony finger toward the crucified Jesus with one hand while holding in the other a New Testament opened to display a few of his own most famous words―“He must increase, but I must decrease.”

Barth saw in this painting an apt depiction of a fundamental dimension of the Church’s mission on earth―to point away from itself to the Savior and Lord of the world. The emerging movement’s quest for right living, rich relational Body life, and service within and without the church may be a prophetic breath of fresh air. But caution ought to temper enthusiasm for the finger turned in on itself that proclaims, “Look at us, watch how we live, don’t you want to know our savior?” Beware irrational exuberance. If there is a perceptible gap between our Savior and what he deserves to see in our lives, confession and repentance is called for because such an inconsistency undermines our witness to Jesus and his gospel. But alas! Until we see him as he is because we are like him, a gap there shall be. Yet the responsibility to bear witness to him remains. What to do? It behooves us to beg those who need him, when they detect distance between us and him, “Do not blame him!” No, life is not witness. Witness is witness. And witness requires pointing away from ourselves to the only One who can save.

Emerging Church: Whose Meaning is it Anyway?

***Some emerging communities in Britain make as much or more use of secular music as they do sacred—and they construct meanings of their own choosing. Such sacralizing of secular texts represents one example of Gibbs and Bolger’s second core pattern of emerging churches covered in a chapter entitled “Transforming Secular Space.” Would-be secular “texts” (whether in the form of music, motion pictures or literature) are taken captive, sanctified, if you will, for the glory of God and the edification of believers and unbelievers alike.

My mouth fell open when I learned of this. Despite being born in 1960, four years prior to end of the post-war Baby Boom, I made similar use of secular music. In the years following my Damascus road-like rescue from intravenous drug use and conversion to evangelical faith in Jesus Christ, I very naturally enjoyed Black Sabbaths’ Master of Reality as a most edifying encouragement to my faith. I recall realizing that my use of the music might not match or might even contradict the intentions of its authors (we are talking Tony Iommi and Ozzy Osborne et. al.!) But this did not matter much to me.

But allow similar elasticity of received meaning from a pharmaceutical prescription for my child or my wife’s wedding vows or from Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, and dangers lurk. Do you follow? And I fear that some of the proclivities of a certain slice of the emerging movement in a swoon over the recovery of biblical narrative (which can be a very good thing) sit similarly loose vis-à-vis the meaning of biblical texts and author intent.

Case in point: does not the foisting of a too thoroughgoing and uncritical imitatio Christi meaning upon Jesus in the synoptic gospels open all sorts of possibilities for “entering the story” not only never imagined by but positively contrary to the original intentions of Matthew, Mark, and Luke? Only author intent to present Jesus as modeling the Christian life and evangelistic method could legitimize such use of those narratives.

Emerging Christians secure something precious to their yearnings by reading the gospels largely as blueprints for Christian living: they collapse witness into morality and community and so avoid what Rick Warren has rightly lamented—the widespread perception of evangelicals as a Big Mouth (without loving, service-giving hands and feet) telling people they are bad and on their way to hell. Where is the welcoming of the stranger, where is the place for social justice and service to the community!? Yes, Yes! We must recover these and throughout church history the need to do so spikes in certain sectors of the Christian family and usually on its heels is the pitting of the ostensibly more ethically interested synoptic gospels against everything else, especially Paul.

In many ways the history of the church reads like a history of overreaction. In fact, the gospels are pregnant with theology and the epistles are laced with ethics and any notion of playing one set of scriptures off against another or supposing that we can stand above the Bible and sift wheat from chaff leads inevitably (whether purposefully or not) to what Barth said it would―Feuerbachian projection which is just idolatry, the making of a God of our choosing. That God is a mirage. He does not exist.

Jesus does teach us much about the values of the Kingdom that has come with his appearance in the synoptic gospels. But he is not mainly modeling the Christian life, he is headed to the cross and resurrection. It was from the standpoint of the resurrection that these gospels were written. And the apostles mainly don’t get it, but they will eventually, and when they do, as Jesus told them, they will shout from the housetops what he whispered to them and told them to keep secret.

Witness and personal testimony and telling our stories and living in community according to kingdom values while serving each other and the world are all good and necessary. But they cannot be collapse into each other, and witness, especially, should not be conflated with doing good or anything else. It is precisely the offensive message of the cross (including especially the exclusive claims of the gospel) that, despite the church’s service to the world, and embodiment of kingdom values, nevertheless brings the suffering of persecution that identifies believers with their crucified Lord. No. Living is not witness. Witness is witness. It means to bear testimony to what one knows, in this case, about the one who lived and died and rose again and will come again to judge. And no amount of narrative hermeneutical back flips can undo this.

I haven't quite ramped up to a bad conscience about the “postmodern” construction of meaning I foisted upon Black Sabbath. But similar creative reading of the Biblical texts just will not do. Author intent must govern—you know, like with the child’s pharmaceutical prescription and the spouse’s wedding vows and Paul’s Letter to the Galatians. It is amazing how resistant folks can be (even postmodern folks) to the attempted imposition of meandering meanings upon their own “texts.” When our God speaks to us in his word, shouldn't we at least strive to keep our meaning constructers turned off as a "do unto others" matter of courtesy?

C.S. Lewis: Knowing We Are Not Alone

***Yes! Yes! That’s exactly it! He’s captured it! My experience exactly! We read to know we are not alone, Lewis taught us. Very often I pause when reading Lewis and let the book drop to my lap or I turn from the open book to gaze out the window to savor what has just happened. Lewis has captured in words some personal experience I have known and has nailed it so exactly that to simply read past it would be unseemly, ungrateful. I do not think I am alone in this. And then it dawns upon us that Lewis has probably come close to the apprehension of a common or even universal human experience; and so, we are not alone. Here is an example from a 1931 letter to Arthur Greeves:

"I, like you, am worried by the fact that the spontaneous appeal of the Christian story is so much less to me than that of Paganism . . . I think the thrill of the pagan stories and of romance may be due to the fact that they are mere beginnings―the first, faint whisper of the wind from beyond the world―while Christianity is the thing itself: and no thing, when you have really started on it, can have for you then and there just the same thrill as the first hint. For example, the experience of being married and bringing up a family, cannot have the old bittersweet for first falling in love. But it is futile (and, I think wicked) to go on trying to get the old thrill again: you must go forward and not backward. . . . Delight is a bell that rings as you set your foot on the first step of a new flight of stairs leading upwards. Once you have started climbing you will notice only the hard work: it is when you have reached the landing and catch sight of the new stair that you may expect the bell again."

A remarkable passage to appear in a letter to a friend, don’t you think? Lewis wrote this fresh from his conversion to Christianity. He was almost 33 years of age. Much that accounts for Lewis’ prolific writing and sustained appeal manifests itself here: careful perception of common human experience and emotion together with power to capture it all with language. Lewis goes further though. He is not content to describe. He presses on to instruction. But, make no mistake, the convincing and penetrating description is crucial to Lewis’ freedom to instruct. Accurate description of our deepest often most elusive experiences weakens our defenses against instruction and leaves us docile. And the next thing you know, we not only allow but thank someone for using the word “wicked,” even if we are the offender.

Emerging Movement: Learning From Gibbs and Bolger

*** Scot McKnight points to Emerging Churches: Creating Christian Community in Postmodern Cultures by Eddie Gibbs and Ryan K. Bolger as the best place to begin if one wants to understand the emerging movement. I see immediately why McKnight prizes this volume so highly. Gibbs and Bolger commit themselves to primary source research and inductive reasoning to support their conclusions. They admit that they are sympathetic to their subject matter and, indeed, the volume reads like an apology for the movement. But, the content is heavily laced with direct quotes from 49 current leaders of emerging communities from Britain and the U.S. and one launcher of a website (theooze.com). An appendix allows these 50 significant persons to tell their “stories,” their pilgrimages into the emerging movement. Clearly Gibbs and Bolger have provided an indispensable resource for the comprehension of the emerging movement.

The first cold water to hit my face was the contention that Mars Hill Church, pastored by Mark Driscoll, does not meet the criteria for authentic emerging communities (Gibbs/Bolger identify 3 core patterns and 6 optional patterns). Gibbs and Bolger identify Mars Hill as a Gen-X church, aimed at a cultural and demographic slice of a given community. Gen-X churches such as Mars Hill, say GB, like their “conservative Baptist, seeker, new-paradigm, purpose-driven predecessors; only the surface techniques changed(p. 30)”-- they remain essentially modern. I have been navigating the taxonomy terrain according to Ed Stetzer's identification of 3 streams within the movement according to which Mars Hill qualifies. But now I am accepting Bolger and Gibb's criteria so as to comprehend their fine work and see where it leads. Certain questions come to mind:

If Mars Hill in Seattle, Redeemer Presbyterian in NYC, and The Journey in St. Louis are being found relevant by hundreds and thousands of urban twenty-somethings today; that’s Generation Y and younger, nicht wahr? What does this say about the BG-defined emerging assessment of what is and will likely be found relevant by coming generations and what is not and will not be?

Like Rudolf Bultmann and especially Paul Tillich, once you set yourself up as the prophetic perceivers of current and future felt-relevance, then the numbers matter, right? Bultmann said the bodily resurrection was irrelevant to increasing numbers of his contemporaries and Tillich said, among other things, that the word "God" should be displaced by "the Ground of our Being." Folks mainly responded by finding comfort in the hope of the resurection, finding the word "God" meaningful and watching the denominations that found Bultmann and Tillich particularly meaningful shrink.

So, what is wrong with these Gen-Y’s who, we are told (unlike the Gen-Xers) are thoroughly postmodern? Why can’t they see that Mars Hill, Redeemer, and The Journey are irrelevant to them?! Frustrating. The point here is not to question whether Mars Hill is emerging or not (we are granting GB's exclusion of them) but whether failing to be emerging according to GB's criteria tells us anything about how relevant a community might be found by young postmodern urban dwellers. Perhaps at a deeper level, Mars Hill's exclusion raises doubts about the accuracy of GB's understanding of what is modern, what is postmodern and thus what is being or will be found meaningful. GB's description of the phenomenon they call "emerging" may be accurate without telling us much about what will be found most relevant by coming generations.

Jacob’s Well in Kansas City Missouri is pastored by Tim Keel who serves on the board of the Emergent website, which should put his emerging credentials beyond question. But does Jacob’s Well meet the Gibbs/Bolger criteria? Jacob's Well looks real generational to me. Has Jacob’s Well become, perhaps unwittingly, both a modern generational community by GBs criteria and surprisingly felt-relevant (hundreds attend ) by doing so?