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Narrative Theology and Preaching: Wobbly Willimons All?

2007-01-10T11:25:00.000-05:00

***Several years ago William Willimon spoke in chapel here at Midwestern Seminary. Willimon was then Dean of the Chapel at Duke University and was already the most brilliant popularizer of Narrative Preaching. I find Willimon’s preaching style and particular brand of sarcasm-laced humor seducing, probably because it seems to derive organically from the Piedmont of the Carolinas from which we both hail. Willimon’s preaching disarms me. Stories abound, the humor simultaneously shocks and illuminates. Tears and laughter alternate and mingle among the listeners. But Willimon said something to this effect; “I do not know if the resurrection was a historical event. I do not know if it was a physical occurrence. And I cannot know. I may never know. It really does not matter though, because we have the story itself and its power to heal and create community, transform lives and inspire faith does not depend upon the historicity of the resurrection.”

After Willimon finished and sat down, the president of the seminary addressed the assembly and made if clear that we could not follow Willimon on this matter; “we, he said, agree with the apostle Paul:

“Now if Christ raised from the dead is what has been preached, how can some of you be saying that there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is not resurrection of the dead, Christ Himself cannot have been raised, and if Christ has not been raised then our preaching is useless and your believing it is useless; indeed, we are shown up as witnesses who have committed perjury before God, because we swore in evidence before God that he had raised Christ to life. For if the dead are not raised, Christ has not been raised, and if Christ has not been raised, you are still in your sins. And what is more serious, all who have died in Christ have perished. If our hope in Christ is for this life only, we are the most unfortunate people” (1 Corinthians 15:12-19).

So is this the fruit of Narrative Theology? To snatch the resurrection from us and try to make us like it? Do all narrative thinkers and preachers go so wobbly on matters as essential as the resurrection of Jesus?

Joel Osteen: Three Big Thumbs Down from Land, Wallis, and Hopkins

2007-01-02T17:54:00.000-05:00

***When Richard Land (Southern Baptist), Jim Wallis (Sojourners), and Dwight Hopkins (University of Chicago) speak with a single voice, it’s news. All three gave a big thumbs down to the health and wealth positive thinking message of Joel Osteen over the holidays on CNN. Osteen's messages would leave me buoyant and energized if he would just stay on message. The hitch in the stream of good feeling comes with Osteen's 18 second attempt to jam Christianity down the throat of an otherwise consistent quasi-evangelicalized Norman Vincent Peale spiel. The ham-handed effort to christianize the love of filthy lucre and all its promises tends to jolt Bible readers from Osteen's spell, reminding us that the apostles received a rude welcome from the world and that Jesus (once the healing and feeding miracles ground to halt for a few days) was crucified. Osteen’s appeal is good ole' stuff―it just ain't Christianity.

Will Return January 2 or 3

2006-12-25T20:10:00.000-05:00

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Karl Barth's Last Advent on Earth

2006-12-24T18:03:00.000-05:00

***Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth's biographer and live-in secretary recorded his last memory of the great theologian, just two nights before his death. It was Advent, 1968:

In his last year he was not so busy and I think very ill. There were some times in the spring and summer when it seemed he would die. But he survived. In the Netherlands that summer, the radio already announced that Karl Barth had died because he was so ill. But I remember the last weeks. It was the high point of the time I lived with him. After his death, my wife said to me, "He was a little bit like an angel in his last weeks." I could also say he was like a child. He really returned a bit to his youth and very often he sang simple songs he learned in Sunday School.

The last evening, two days before he died, I was with my wife in his house. And I think in the last times he feared the night. Therefore he didn't want us to leave his house. At one o'clock we said we'd like to go home because we had a one-hour walk. So Barth said to go when we wanted to but that he would go to his bed and that we should come and sing songs. It was 1:16 A.M. and his windows were open facing onto the street. I said, "We'll have to close the windows because other people will be awakened by our song." Barth said, "Oh, it doesn't matter, it will be a good song." And first he began with his children's songs, then he said to take a church hymnbook and we would sing an Advent song that spoke of the great comfort that Christ is coming with joy. And that was the last time I saw Karl Barth.

C.S. Lewis: The Nooks and Crannies of Sin

2006-12-23T10:34:00.000-05:00

*** “I felt sure that the creature was what we call ‘good,’ but I wasn’t sure whether I liked ‘goodness’ so much as I had supposed. This is a very terrible experience. As long as what you are afraid of is something evil, you may still hope that the good may come to your rescue. But suppose you struggle through to the good and find that it also is dreadful? How if food itself turns out to be the very thing you can’t eat, and home the very place you can’t live, and your very comforter the person who makes you uncomfortable? Then, indeed, there is no rescue possible; the last card has been played” (Perelandra).

Lewis combined a love of goodness and virtue without the typical concomitant pretense to having achieved much of it himself. Lewis was not politically correct. He believed in depravity all the more as his vision of God grew. Lewis loved truth more than his own honor. By his own account Lewis suffered more from selfishness (the desire to have one’s way) than from self-centeredness (fixation upon and fascination with oneself and how one is viewed by others). This comparative division of weakness freed Lewis to “let God be true and every man a liar,” more clearly and boldly than is usual.

Karl Barth and Friedrich Schleiermacher: Theological Fair Play

2006-12-22T12:03:00.000-05:00

*** Barth on Schleiermacher:

“We have to do with a hero, the like of which is but seldom bestowed upon theology. Anyone who has never noticed anything of the splendor this figure radiated and still does―I am almost tempted to say, who has never succumbed to it―may honorably pass on to other and possibly better ways, but let him never raise so much as a finger against Schleiermacher. Anyone who has never loved here, and is not in a position to love again and again may not hate here either.”

No more profound, no more thoroughgoing, no more devastating critique of the theology of Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher compares to the one Barth would bring. Barth traced most of what he found objectionable in modern theology from around 1825 until his death in 1968 to the influence of Schleiermacher. When it comes to theological persnicketiness and the leveling of withering critiques against rival theological approaches, Barth takes a back seat to no one.

But Barth evidenced acceptance of two convictions held and propagated by my doctoral supervisor: (1) We cannot critique what we have not understood and (2) we usually do not understand what we have not first engaged sympathetically. Barth’s tip of the hat to Schleiermacher was prompted in part by the appearance of a scathing rejection of Schleiermacher published by Emil Brunner in 1924. By not taking seriously the two pre-conditions for understanding and critique, Barth believed Brunner not only “got Schleiermacher wrong,” but fell into the trap Schleiermacher set for theology in the 19th and 20th centuries; namely, the abandonment of theology for anthropology.

Be that as it my, the two convictions certainly help define a “do unto others” context for theological dispute.

Taking a Break from Luther

2006-12-21T11:40:00.000-05:00

***“Calvin is a cataract, a primeval forest, a demonic power, something directly down from Himalaya, absolutely Chinese, strange, mythological; I lack completely the means, the suction cups, even to assimilate this phenomenon, not to speak of presenting it adequately. What I receive is only a thin little stream and what I can then give out again is only a yet thinner extract of this little stream. I could gladly and profitably set myself down and spend all the rest of my life just with Calvin” (Letter to Eduard Thurneysen, June 8, 1922).

The musings of the 36 year old Karl Barth upon acceptance of the Chair in Reformed Theology at Göttingen after his own “bombshell dropped into the playground of the theologians,” his peculiar commentary “The Epistle to the Romans,” made him a star in the theological world.

Do not imagine that acquaintance with Calvin’s disciples or Calvin’s interpreters approaches acquaintance with the man himself. He did not get to be Calvin by spoiling otherwise happy gatherings with fierce debates about predestination and an angry God. Read him for yourself. Start with the Institutes (1559) in the Battles/McNeill edition. You will meet more of yourself there than you expected and you will begin to understand how Barth could become so alternately awestruck and smitten.

C.S. Lewis and Karl Barth: Happy Dogmatism Meets Tenacious Tolerance

2006-12-19T11:24:00.000-05:00

***I suppose I first learned of the inevitable idolatrous tendency of protestant liberalism (and apologetic approaches to theology generally) from Karl Barth. He convinced me that unless we allow the God borne witness to in Holy Scripture to speak for Himself, we find ourselves speaking in His place, and so, wittingly or not, we make a “god.”

Now that I am writing on C.S. Lewis, I find in him something of that distinctive, hard-nosed dogmatism I found in Barth. Note this passage from Mere Christianity: “Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive. . . . And half of you already want me to ask me, ‘I wonder how you’d feel about forgiving the Gestapo if you were a Pole or a Jew?’ So do I. I wonder very much. . . .I am not trying to tell you in this book what I could do―I can do precious little—I am telling you what Christianity is. I did not invent it.”

Those words could as easily have been written by Karl Barth. Dogmatism is justly associated with the darker dimensions of human nature and behavior; the furrowed brow, the protruded neck vein, the angrily pointed finger. But in Lewis and Barth, dogmatism puts on a happy face. Lewis found a way to let Christianity be itself while pursuing Christian unity. He shied away from internecine Christian squabbles. He found it unseemly. Barth loved a good debate, but also enjoyed good faith ecumenical dialogue and insisted that theology, above all else, is a “happy science,” because it deals, first and last, with Good News.

Evangelicals, Liberals, and the Poor

2006-12-17T20:29:00.000-05:00

***Check out the article in the November 27 Wall Street Journal by Arthur C. Brooks, "A Charitable Explanation." Everybody knows that France cares more and does more for the poor than other nations. And everybody knows that liberals in America care more and do more for the poor than conservatives. NOT! on both counts.

Americans give, per capita (gross as well, by a long shot, but the per capita is the real kicker) more in the month of December than most countries give all year. France turns out to be one of the stingiest, laziest, and least couragous countries on the planet when it comes to giving to charity or lifting a finger to help the poor.

Conservatives in America are not only four times more likely to attend church, they outpace liberals by a long shot on giving to charity, volunteering for charitable causes and offering hands-on help to the poor. Conservatives even out-pace liberals and secularists with money and time contributed to non-church-related social organizations.

But wait! Conservative evangelicals are fixated on making money, stopping abortion, and yelling at homosexuals, right? Well, liberals are carrying home barrels full of money too, and now we know they are choosing to keep much more of it for themselves than conservatives do. Go figure. And apparantly, conservatives have energy left over to actually help the poor even after expending themselves in making money (so they can give more than the liberals I guess), defending the unborn, and speaking biblical truth to power regarding God's loving warning against homosexual behavior.

And conservatives do all this in the face of patronizing ridicule from everybody from the Mainstream Media to the cultural secularists to Oprah and especially their own liberal and progressive Christian brothers and sisters who scold them for not caring more about the poor!

I just know Jim Wallis and Tony Campolo must be tickled about these numbers. A next book title suggestion for either author: Learning to Love the Poor From Conservative Evangelicals--And Getting our Own House in Order.

Message from conservative evangelicals to liberals looking for ways to help the poor: "Jump on in. The water is fine."

Emerging Church and Evangelicals Inevitable Enemies?

2006-12-15T16:13:00.000-05:00

***Must evangelicalism and emerging churches be enemies?

Thomas Oden views modernity as the dying intellectual and cultural framework beyond which postmodern believers may move for the recovery of ancient, orthodox and yes, evangelical Christianity. He defines modernity according to the following four substantive or ideological commitments: (1) autonomous individualism (Sartre, Nietzsche, Hemingway) or in the East, (2) autonomous collectivism/utopianism (Marx); (3) narcissistic hedonic assertiveness (Rousseau, Shelly, D.H. Lawrence, Madonna), (4) reductive naturalism/historicism (Bultmann/Freud, Skinner); (4) absolute moral relativism (Dewey, Bultmann, Feuerbach) and one methodological principle, modern chauvinism according to which old ideas are viewed as necessarily inferior to new ideas.

Oden has this to say of two interpreters of postmodernism preferred by some emerging church (EC) leaders: “Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty have led us into a cult of subjectivism and sentiment that reduces truth to subjective preferences.” Oden views evangelicalism (as a whole and as a distinguishable historical movement) as a refuge of sanity and faithful Christian memory where ancient, orthodox, Biblical Christianity has been comparatively preserved and where the dying and retrograde convictions of modernity have had to contend with Biblical truth and the Spirit of God.

Could it be that the strong protest-element against evangelicalism driving the thinking of some EC leaders is based largely upon idiosyncratic, historically and geographically misinformed and so distortive comprehension of evangelical Christianity? Could such distortive conceptual lenses pre-dispose some to an unnoticed and undesired drift into what Oden recognizes as ultramodernity?

Prospects for reconciliation within mainline denominations between increasingly dissatisfied and disgruntled evangelicals and increasingly discredited, dysfunctional and de-funded liberals will be reduced, says Oden, to the extent that bureaucratic ecumenism remains emotively fixated on (a) ultrafeminist rhetoric, (b) the romantic idealization of secularity, (c) an accommodation to syncretism in world religions that disavow witness to Jesus Christ, and (d) fantasies of rational redistribution of wealth by political planning elites who always plan their own interest first in any plan, as we have learned the hard way.

Will EC leaders settle increasingly into predictably politically correct convictions on one issue after another? For example, will renewed zeal for social justice coincide with liberal democratic recipes for improvement? Will EC exegesis exhibit increased confidence in extracting storied meanings from Biblical narratives that appear oddly novel against the backdrop of two millennia of orthodox exegesis while experiencing intractable befuddlement and ambiguity regarding say, teaching on homosexual behavior that has enjoyed remarkable consensus across those same millennia? Will interest and protectiveness wane with regard to the exclusive claims of Christ, or the distinction between witness as message that draws persecution and good works and service within and without the believing community, the substituionary dimension of Christ’ atoning work?

However things develop, Thomas Oden’s voice will help to sharpen our understanding of the issues involved.

C.S. Lewis: Mythologically Speaking

2006-12-14T12:10:00.000-05:00

***Lewis modeled the retention of myth and story as fit instruments for Christian expression, entertainment, inquiry, and instruction. He did so against the backdrop of the deadening, spirit-evacuating tendencies of the higher critical approaches to history and the Bible so dominant at the time. Lewis did so earlier, more impressively, and with more faithfulness to orthodox Christianity than some of those influenced by the Yale-based Narrative School shaped by Hans Frei and George Lindbeck more than three decades after Out of the Silent Planet appeared.

For example, where some students of the Narrative School sit loose with regard to the historicity of the resurrection and its necessity for orthodox Christian confession, Lewis could not. Partly because, as Lewis himself put it in Surprised by Joy, “ I was by now too experienced in literary criticism to regard the Gospels as myths.” Appreciation for the uniqueness, power, and beauty of story as an indispensable vehicle for Christian expression, instruction, and worship need not and ought not to require either the neglect or the despising of doctrine. Retention, acknowledgement, and enjoyment of propositional truth and the recovery of Biblical narrative are not mutually exclusive quests. Just ask C.S. Lewis.

Geminids Meteor Shower Tonight!

2006-12-13T15:39:00.000-05:00

***Do not miss the Geminids Meteor Shower tonight. They are better than the Perseids that show up every August. Yes it will be cold. But we are talking between 60 and 120 meteors per hour and they move slower than the Perseids, resulting in a thicker tail and longer viewing time. So, if it is clear where you live, bundle up, get some distance from city lights, lie on your back and brace yourself for astral stimulation. P.S. Don't forget to apply lip balm.

C.S. Lewis: Aversion to Conversion?

2006-12-13T14:46:00.000-05:00

***Well not exactly, but, like Augustine of Hippo (354-430) and many others across the centuries, Lewis’ subsequent reflection upon his own conversion included punctiliar, durative and progressive dimensions. He may have been Surprised By Joy in 1931 but, as George Sayer has put it, Lewis “began to believe in a nebulous power outside himself” in 1926. Warren viewed his brother’s conversion “as no sudden plunge into a new life but rather a slow steady convalescence from a deep-seated spiritual illness of long standing.”

Some leaders of the emerging church movement advocate a “belonging before believing” approach to spiritual seekers and non-believers alike, partly as an acknowledgement that God’s dealings with those he draws to himself involve discernible divine activity often over very long periods of time. Reduction of divinely wrought conversion to the narrow confines of a Damascus Road like event may fail to do justice to the full scope of God’s providential redeeming activity.

But surely openness to more durative conceptions of conversion fails to justify the “belonging before believing” mantra of some. Merely being human and/or curious does not a Christian make. Until Lewis gave a clear, credible confession of his faith in Jesus Christ, he had not yet legitimized his reception into full communion with a body of believers called Christian.

Recognition that God’s converting activity takes place over time, even over many years, need not weaken confessional standards for church membership, but it should free us to speak differently about conversion and ease the pressure applied in some quarters to nail down ones conversion to time and place with great certainty. Indeed, might not one view conversion as punctiliar and divine converting activity as durative without expecting exacting perception and tracking of these things by believers themselves? Our comprehension of God’s hand in our own lives and in the lives of others remains proximate and provisional, and that’s OK. For Charles Spurgeon, the ability to nail down with certainty the timing and nature of what happened to ourselves or others back when was less pressing than the presence of discernible evidence for regeneration today.

Emerging Church: Learning From Gibbs and Bolger 2

2006-12-11T17:47:00.000-05:00

***“Standing up for truth… has no appeal to emerging church leaders” (Gibbs-Bolger, p. 124).

Dan Kimball objects to the stereotyping of emerging churches and who can blame him? Effort to understand before critiquing is common courtesy; it is an act of doing unto others as we would have done to ourselves. In particular Kimball counters charges of emerging church doctrinal latitudinarianism: “All the emerging churches I know believe in the inspiration of the Bible, the Trinity, the atonement, the bodily resurrection, and salvation in Jesus alone.” The above quote from Gibbs and Bolger, while not justifying some of the more rash generalizations that one encounters, does help explain why concerns are being raised.

Scott McKnight says that Gibbs-Bolger “show that the center of the movement is about ecclesiology not epistemology.” It may be true that Gibbs-Bolger’s impressive marshalling of primary source material shows this and, more importantly, it may actually be true. But Gibbs-Bolger also tell us that the movement was shaped “at a time when there was growing ferment that not only the methods but also the message needed to change.” Then Todd Hunter is quoted thus, “We got the gospel wrong” (p. 49). Not epistemological? Pages 69 and following argue for epistemologically significant narrative approaches to scripture texts and single out foundationalism for special critique. Even in the introduction, an emerging church leader impatient with the generational focus of some church growth leaders is quoted thus, “I couldn’t really figure out why people were obsessing about a subgroup when an enormous epistemological shift was occurring.”

To my ears at least, Kimball and McKnight strike a very different notes than much that I am reading in Gibbs-Bolger.

The Nativity: The God Who Stoops

2006-12-10T19:58:00.000-05:00

***The Nativity did not disappoint, even though after habituating the audience so thoroughly to words of comfort and warning from angels and through dreams, the producers inexplicably departed from the Biblical witness and had the Wise Men think better of returning to Herod with the location of the child King on their own, unaided by divine messengers. Go figure.

But the movie captured a fundamental message of the Biblical narratives: our God delights to bestow special favor on the poor, the aged, the disenfranchised, and the world’s rejects and to take his place beside them. It has been his way from the beginning. The history of God’s dealings with humanity is replete with such upside down divine dealings. He makes Israel; not a people, a people. He chooses younger despised brothers—Jacob, Joseph, and David to represent him.

Are we healthy and wealthy? By global and historic measures, most Americans certainly are wealthy. Are we popular and powerful? If so the word of the Lord shouts, “Watch Out! Do not be deceived.” What do we have that is not a gift? And if a gift, why do we boast? God’s blessings confer favor but also responsibility.

Are we poor, sick, despised, and without influence or status in the estimation of the world? The word of the Lord shouts, “Watch Out! Do not be deceived.” Our God resists the proud and lifts up the humble. When God took own humanity in Jesus, he came in low indeed, and stayed low for a long time. When he was finally lifted up, it was on a cross that we deserved. But the grave could not hold Him.

This is the way of our God. He stoops to us to help us but also to model what he expects from and empowers in us, his children; that we would think soberly, humble ourselves and serve the poor, the sick, the outcast, the aged and the prisoners. By so doing, we show acquaintance with the ways of the only God and knowledge of what it cost him to make us ours. Our imitation of him does not make us his, but it does please him and because he causes us to fall in love with him, his pleasure is ours as well.

See The Nativity at a theatre near you.

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

2006-12-08T14:57:00.000-05:00

***“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

2006-12-07T17:16:00.000-05:00

***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?

2006-12-06T21:15:00.000-05:00

***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

2006-12-05T16:07:00.000-05:00

***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

2006-12-04T12:25:00.000-05:00

*** 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?

Running Home To Mummy: C.S. Lewis, Mark Driscoll, Tim Keller, Emerging Conversation, Postmodernism and Felt-Relevance

2006-11-27T14:22:00.000-05:00

***Why sure. If I could believe the Bible with traditionalist, evangelical, Vacation Bible School naiveté without having to shove my brains in my pocket to git ’er done, I’d ah done it years ago. But I’m all growed up now, what with all the book-larnin and post-enlightenment storying and postmodern profanity and verb conjugating and noun declining and most especially, blogging―I find myself stuck in a patronizing pose and having to settle for all manner of proud doubting and nuancing and on-the-one-hand-but-on-the-other-handing and such. In this postmodern world, as Walter Truett Anderson put it so well some sixteen years ago in a book of the same title, “Reality, Isn’t What it Used to Be.”

Or isn’t it?

Perhaps no theologian (besides F.D.E. Schleiermacher himself) attempted so impressively to keep Christianity relevant in the face of the Enlightenment as did Paul Tillich (1886-1965) in his 3 volume Systematic Theology. This unapologetic embrace of the utterly apologetic method of correlation insisted that the unbelieving audience of Christian proclamation determine the itches preaching had better scratch if it expects to survive.

Among the many ominous warnings Tillich issued was the pronouncement of the obsolete status of the word “God” itself. Thankfully, Tillich provided the positively brimming-with-relevance replacement for the tired old nomenclature for the divine creator of us all. That’s right. We have none other than Paul Tillich to thank for the now all-too-familiar and oh so precious term of endearment for the heavenly father we have come to take for granted . . . “The Ground of Our Being”. . .oh well . . . I guess making felt-relevance one’s chief aim does not always result in the achievement of it.

When Rudolf Bultmann averred that the question of Jesus’ historical, bodily resurrection or the possibility of resurrection for future disciples mattered little to modern persons like himself and his Swiss buddy, Karl Barth suggested that when God actually stood Rudi up from the ground at some future date, the relevance of a straightforward reading of 1 Corinthians 15 would likely lock-in for him fairly quickly.

Meanwhile two worldwide phenomena present themselves for consideration: Traditionalist, orthodoxy-protective, Bible-loving, evangelicalish Christianity (read e.g., Roman Catholicism, the Southern Baptist Convention and the global charismatic movement et.al.) expands while Left-leaning, doubt glorifying, Christianity re-shaping communities (think especially of mainline Protestants) shrivel up and find it harder and harder to gin up as much doubt as they had hoped for while fewer and fewer dollars present themselves for the propping up of the doubters in their endowed chairs and cushy administrative posts. Go figure.

And then there goes little Jack Lewis all growed up and running home to mummy. The solid traditional Anglican Christianity of his mummy that is. I do declare, the more that boy studied the further his brain and body and heart listed to the right and the less impressed he became with “things new, shiny, and relevant.” Who is this Lewis? Why, its the writer, lover, and interpreter of stories; stories happily laden with nuance and mystery yet without the slightest pinch of that squeamishness regarding the story’s capacity to carry both embedded and in-your-face truth claims even of a propositional sort and meant to be taken as universal and permanent truth claims at that.

But some Narrative shepherds of our souls would free us from the shackles of such horrifying certainty as might be gained [and millions of Christians past and present (poor dullards) thing they do gain] should we actually believe in the truth thus taught. It must be frustrating when such an unreconstructed, old style (not necessarily modern) truth lover sells so many books and keeps being found relevant left and right. Does C.S Lewis not know better than to be caught being found relevant when so many bloggers have proven he can’t be? Do not be fooled. The Bible’s narratives lose nothing in nuance and mystery when their truth claims are allowed to stand.

And the gall of Mark Driscoll and Tim Keller, reaching that thoroughly postmodern twenty-something set on both the Right and Left coasts of our great nation (and Darrin Patrick smack dab in the middle) not only without chucking their doctrines (even election and predestination!!) but just carrying them about in the open! For shame!

Whenever you hear the word “postmodern” just prior to being told what you are allowed to find relevant―Achtung, Baby! Taking on traditional, orthodox, evangelical Christianity might sell a lot of books and play well on the PC circuit but it has yet to prove it can build and sustain over time anything recognizable as “church.” Carl Henry urged Protestant liberals to stop trying to fix Christianity and just admit that they don’t like it, reject it, and move on. Most eventually did! Folks who work too hard attempting to fix Christianity in the quest to keep it relevant (Protestant liberals and perhaps now, the “left,” most provocative wing of the emerging conversation) too often break the Christianity they started with and achieve precious little relevance overtime to boot.

A BIG Thank You To Conservative Evangelicals; A BIG Thank You To Southern Baptists; thank you emerging conversation? yes, but only a little one so far

2006-11-21T13:15:00.000-05:00

***My fascination with the emerging conversation continues. A cluster of insights, critiques, and values (mainly ecclesiological, methodological and cultural ones) intrigue and attract: (1) the missional seriousness, (2) the recovery of mystery and the arts, (3) the endorsement and embrace of narrative, (4) the commitment to a nuanced and discriminating assessment of the significance of culture and to the planting of culturally contextualized churches (5) the ecumenical openness (notwithstanding the myopic and historically misinformed exclusion of conservative evangelicals from the group hug by some) (6) the recognition by some that none of the preceding need or ought to threaten the retention of orthodox and evangelical doctrinal commitments which really amount to the retention of biblical seriousness. And so, thank you emerging conversation/movement for these insights, critiques, and values. Thank you for the congregations consciously attempting the embodiment of these insights and values. Thank you emerging publishers of books and blogs as well.

But only a little thank you so far. At least compared to the BIG thank you due to conservative evangelicals including especially, in my case, Southern Baptists. Why? Because of the thousands of hospitals, schools, churches, and relief organizations you have created and sustained. [One of the first phone calls made whenever hurricanes bear down upon the United States (or Banda Aceh, Indonesia for that matter) is to Southern Baptists who have earned a world wide reputation for mobilizing effective and sustained help in the aftermath of natural disasters.] Because of the thousands of missionaries you send and support all over the world. And last but not least, thank you for the undeserved opportunities you have provided for me to serve the Lord and support my family for over thirty years.

Without backing away from a single expression of gratitude to or hopeful interest in the emerging conversation, I think a little historical perspective helps to cast matters in the proper light. The wisest and most knowledgeable friends of the emerging conversation have, perhaps rightly, eschewed even the designation “movement” to describe what lies behind the diverse collection of bloggers, writers, and pastors that can include such odd bedfellows as Mark Driscoll and Brian McLaren. Modesty, they insist, commends the term “conversation.” I agree. Some recognize that the conversation may end up serving merely as a prod to existing denominations, churches, and movements rather than become one itself. One prominent “pastor” of one of the (left wing?) emergent (not emerging!) “churches”/fellowships admitted to me that it might be better if his “fellowship” serves as a mere spiritual way station for spiritual wanderers who may move on to an actual church or not rather than become a real church itself. The reticence to have “church” as part of the name of some of these communities may end up being more prophetic than some realize! So the call for modesty commends itself.

Yet, some of the books and blogs fail the modesty test, especially where conservative evangelicals are in the crosshairs. Sweeping and dismissive caricatures take over. Straw men are set up and knocked down by these mere conversers at the drop of a hat. Smugness sets in and backslapping, self-congratulatory, guffawing rhetoric flows freely.

Why is this so? Especially given the embarrassing disparity in shear numbers, historical legacy, geographical presence and actual accomplishment between the emerging critiquing conversers and the conservative evangelical movement? Certain reasons seem obvious:

When your club is young, small, diverse, difficult to nail down, and hasn’t done much, you lack the history and identifiability to become an easy target. (I expect D.A. Carson is learning this afresh). When accomplishment is meager, little presents itself for critique.

Whereas, when you are old, successful, and established, your warts become all too obvious and inviting to the adolescent impulse to point them out.

I fear that some protest-driven, former conservative evangelical emerging conversers imagine that their insights, since absent from their own limited, idiosyncratic exposure to the enormous global movement that is conservative and evangelical, are thus absent from the whole shebang, and that is not so. Emerging conversers, authors, and pastors bring energetic articulation and attempted implementation of the insights and values that define them, not creation of those insights and values. Every authentically biblical value they highlight already exists and even flourishes among conservative evangelicals, but without the prominence or consciousness that pervades emerging thinking about and practice of the same.

A fair amount of distortive projecting and extrapolating is going on here. Friends of emerging rightly cry foul when the distortive generalizations appear in evangelical construals of the emerging conversation but display comparative high tolerance for the broad brush when critiquing evangelicals. If the emerging/emergent conversation/movement is too diverse to put up with (as Scot McKnight has correctly insisted) such a reductionistic construal as D.A. Carson settled for in his book, then the same applies to conservative evangelicals only exponentially more so.

Is the emerging conversation/movement diverse? Conservative evangelicalism is much more so. Is emerging tough to characterize? Evangelicalism much more so. I tell my students that Roman Catholicism must be treated as a special and complicated entity and phenomenon because of its long history, its global reach, and its historical importance and influence. I warn them that the temptation to caricature and dismiss runs high when Protestants, and especially evangelicals, attempt to understand Roman Catholicism. I tell them that the attempt to comprehend Roman Catholicism is often akin to a man blindfolded in a room with an elephant. What he thinks he encounters depends upon where he grabs hold! All of this could be said of conservative evangelicalism. And some of the emerging/emergent books and blogs don’t get this. This is troubling when some set themselves up as the respectful ones, the appreciators of nuance and mystery, the ecumenical community, the “friends” in conversation—the orthopraxy police!

Why do I care? Because I love conservative evangelicalism, Southern Baptists, AND much of what I see in the more doctrinally orthodox streams within the emerging movement. And, I believe my own denomination stands to benefit much from engagement with this conversation. And I believe that dissemination of the best insights from the emerging conversation within a denomination like Southern Baptists offers profound possibilities for their wider dissemination and longevity. And I do not want the possibilities for this kind of thing short-circuited by historical amnesia and sloppy caricature from any quarter.

So, just a little thank you to the emerging conversation/movement so far, but hoping for and even expecting the opportunity to give a Big thank you in due course.

McLaren McKnight Nice Guy Fest

2006-11-14T17:04:00.000-05:00

***Thank you Scot McKnight for working so hard to understand and interpret the emerging movement to a widening audience. As a professor in a Southern Baptist Seminary I am doing my best to correct Donald Carson’s distortive reduction of the movement “almost” to the writings of Brian McLaren that too many evangelicals have already accepted. The straw man is already knocked down. Carson’s reductionistic caricature matters to me because I believe many dimensions of the emerging movement offer much needed insights for the global church, including evangelicals and my own Southern Baptist denomination.

I do question whether Brian McLaren is as gracious and unassuming as McKnight depicts him. I mean in his writings, not his stage or coffee table persona. We know he has got that disarming “conduct” down. But what we write matters too, as McKnight has rightly noted in his critique of Carson’s book on emerging.

As Mcknight notes in his excellent paper delivered at Westminster Theological Seminary, we do not know for sure how big the emerging movement is or will become. We do know that the Southern Baptist Convention is quite large. There are also many Southern Baptist pastors, mostly youngish ones, who are part of the emerging conversation. I am convinced that the SBC would benefit much from certain insights and emphases prized within the emerging movement conversation.

However, I do think that McKnight gives McLaren a bit of a pass regarding how gracious he is. McLaren is, as McKnight says, a provocateur. For those he sees fit to caricature, critique, and often dismiss, (such as conservative evangelicals, you know, like Southern Baptists such as myself) the provocations sting, not only because we find that they hit their target (though they sometimes do) but because of the caricature element, the straw man knocked down. These reductionistic slams strike many of us as mean spirited. I am not sure the designation provocateur is a sufficient fig leaf for one so pumped up about praxis to hide behind.

Pillar of Fire: A review of "A More Radical Gospel: Essays on Eschatology, Authority, Atonement, and Ecumenism," by Gerhard O. Forde

2006-10-27T10:44:00.000-04:00

***.

A More Radical Gospel: Essays on Eschatology, Authority, Atonement, and Ecumenism. By Gerhard O. Forde. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004, 223 pp., $22.00.

As I begin this review, a mere four weeks separates me from Gerhard O. Forde’s passing. After almost four decades of teaching, this revered Professor of systematic Theology at Luther Seminary in St. Paul succumbed to pneumonia on August 9, 2006 after a long struggle with Parkinson’s disease, Personal gratitude for the help I have received across the years from Forde’s writings, combined with an instinct to protect and propagate his legacy, tempts me to abandon the review in favor of eulogy. Happily, this particular collection of essays provides an excellent entrée into the Forde’s major contributions to the church. Academics, ministers, or students looking for an introduction to Forde’s thinking will find A More Radical Gospel representative of the themes that dominated his interest, the impressive incisiveness of his theological vision and the special humor that endeared him to so many. Those seeking in-depth engagement with Forde’s thinking should look to his weightier and more comprehensive monographs. While this volume fairly represents Forde’s thinking, the lack of indices and dearth of footnotes do not facilitate the kind of scholarly engagement the impressive content tends to invite.

Lutheran Fundamentalist
At his retirement in 1998 Forde expressed the aim that had sustained him for so long as a minister and a teacher in this way: “I have tried through the years to present the integrity and truth of the tradition, especially as found in Martin Luther, in a way that is interesting, compelling, and exciting.” Forde assumed the role of prophet within his own Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, calling her back to her own roots, to the radical apprehension of the only gospel worthy of the name by Martin Luther.

Certainly radical Lutheranism can boast no more clear and persistent advocate than Forde. The essays included in the atonement section rehearse in bold and penetrating fashion Luther’s own insistence upon a declarative, imputed righteousness enjoyed by faith together with the concomitant relegation of the law to the negative role of accuser. No third use of the law for Forde. Only grace through faith produces works pleasing to the God who died for sinners. Box-checking holiness programs begone!

Starting All Over Again
Several essays revisit a fixation precious to many contemporary Christians that Forde loved to despise—progressive sanctification. Luther once said that sanctification is just beginning again with justification, with the gospel, with the proclamation that one’s sins are forgiven. Forde defined sanctification as “the art of getting used to justification.”
Like Luther, Forde understood that the slightest drop of works righteousness mixed with the pure gospel of grace poisons the whole pot. Next thing you know forgiven sinners turn away from the gospel toward their own navels where they gaze and gesticulate in the quest to achieve and earn what they once received as a gift—forgiveness of sins, membership in the family of God and the hope of eternal life. For Forde, preoccupation with some traceable increase in personal holiness amounts to an abandonment of the gospel Paul identified among the Galatians and undercuts the attractiveness of Paul’s desire to “be found in [Christ] not having a righteousness of [his] own.” Perhaps no one in recent memory has expressed more pointedly and with such humor as Forde the ironic impotency of the law to produce what it demands.

Substitutionary Atonement Gone Wild
Forde was less a creative theological constructionist but more the flamboyant defender of the traditions. If he contributed something new to the theological lexicon it may be his notion of the “continuously existing subject” wrongly imagined by non-Lutheran construers of the Christian life. Forde is referring to the “old man,” the “man of the flesh” who has been crucified with Christ. “I no longer live,” Paul could say. Some falsely imagine that the buried man lives. He died. God has not fixed us so that we can get on with getting better. Instead, Forde reminds us, God kills us, buries us with Christ and raises us up to new life. Walking by the Spirit continues to be a walk apart from the law (Galatians). Our lives continue to be hidden in Christ. Christ’s substitutionary role extends beyond the cross and defines the very character of the Christian life, not just entry into that life.

Persnickety Contrarian
Forde’s utter commitment to the radical Lutheran heritage he believed had been abandoned by its rightful heirs sometimes resulted in his identification as a bit of a contrarian. Just as Lutheran chins began to quiver with that peculiar happiness only ecumenical activity produces, there was Forde to rain on everyone’s parade. The essays included under the ecumenical section provide adequate exposure to Forde’s instinct for confessional faithfulness in the face of the mirage of unity purchased by compromise. Forde shines his search light on how thin is the payoff when ecumenical activity attracts those least committed to the distinctive convictions of the traditions they would ostensibly represent at the negotiating table. Only confessional loyalists are equipped to identify where bases for unity appear and where the ways must part.

Pillar of Fire
Not unlike Luther, Forde’s unique contribution is not a broad and systematizing grasp of many things, but a clear, penetrating vision of a few things, vital things without which the character of the whole faith would be endangered. Forde is the man who saw a narrow pillar of fire descending from heaven to earth. Its name is justification by grace through faith alone. It is enough for this one man to stand guardian of what he can no longer pretend he has not beheld rather than venture out into things less certain and perhaps less essential. A More Radical Gospel offers a platform from which to observe this gospel guardian at work

The Regulative Principle VS. Normative Principle Vortex of Pain

2006-09-25T10:37:00.000-04:00

While I admire the intentions of the Regulative Principle as stated in the previous post, I think the regulative principle expects too much regarding worship services from the Bible from the git go (git is a word in Spartanburg, South Carolina) and then has to do all sorts of ducks and feints and back-flips to keep the comprehensive pretensions of RP propped up. The “use of musical instruments controversy” strikes me as an apt window into the inevitable cu-de-sacs endemic to RP. Again, the RP’s are right to listen hard to the Bible and try to do what it says. But I doubt it is saying as much as they imagine or think they need to have it say if biblical ministry is to take place.

Emerging? In his book Confessions of a Reformission Rev. Mark Driscoll at least could say “no commanded order of church service is to be found anywhere in Scripture, nor is any detailed example of a worship service from the first-century church,” which my colleague in New testament and expert in first century Greek papyri and inscriptions would concur with. The consequence of critiquing RP might be to open an unbiblical Pandora’s Box where preaching has to fight for its life but this need not be the result. Driscoll, in the same book, recounts his own strenuous effort to hear whatever guidance the Bible had to offer regarding church governance, which he thinks he found in some sort of elder rule.

Is it not clear that we should let the Bible regulate whatever it means to regulate but not more? Check out the scriptural support for Chapter 21 (the RP section) of the Westminster Confession. Virtually none of the passages read in context bear directly on the questions they supposedly answer. I suspect that at least two tendencies are at work here: 1. What Karl Barth calls an alien norm, an external question brought to the text which then the text is bound to deliver on and 2. the treatment of the Bible as a puzzle that the Puritan divines have largely put together for us. We have much to thank the Puritans for and the Westminster Confession is a gift to the church, but in this matter exegesis should trump and correct our theology.

***

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