As we’ve blogged about, Nadia Bolz-Weber has been getting a lot of attention as an ELCA “pastorix” who, for all of her tattoos, ministry to gays, and violation of “culture wars” stereotypes, preaches justification by grace through faith, Christ’s Atonement for sin, and the theology of the Cross.
Now a British journalist has written an article that asks the question, “can Nadia Bolz-Weber save evangelicalism?” (See excerpts after the jump, along with my thoughts.) But I wonder if what people are so impressed with is just a matter of her “style” or if it isn’t even more so a reaction to her Lutheran theology, which comes across as new, mind-blowing, and just what people need to hear.
From Andrew Brown, Tall, tattooed and forthright, can Nadia Bolz-Weber save evangelicism? | theguardian.com:
A little over six feet tall, well-muscled and extravagantly tattooed, Nadia Bolz-Weber little resembles the Vicar of Dibley. Also, she recognised the ringtone on my phone, an intricate guitar passage cut from the middle of a 20-minute Grateful Dead improvisation. So of course I liked her. She’s a Lutheran pastor from Denver, Colorado and one of the stars of the younger generation of American evangelicals because she seems to have found a way out of the trenches of the culture wars so she can uphold tradition without being homophobic or nasty.
She has in some respects the classical evangelical salvation story: brought up good, went to the bad, found Jesus once again and turned out – not good, she says, but “so so”. She parodies the hymn Amazing Grace: “It’s not like ‘I once was blind, and now can see’: it’s more like, ‘I once was blind and now I have really bad vision’.” She is an enemy of smugness.
But although she is opposed to the megachurch culture of American evangelical protestantism, she is also scathing about the standard liberal pieties. She has queers and freaks and outcasts of all sorts in her congregation, and her church helps run a day shelter for gay teens, but churches which pride themselves on their “inclusiveness” seem patronising to her: “You do that and you’re just going to get muscle cramps from patting yourself on the back.”
She doesn’t like charity generally: “Americans have a tendency to idolise the non-profit industrial complex,” she says, but that is not how she understands the character of God, who is wasteful and profligate. As a Lutheran she has to believe that God does not reward goodness, and no one reaches heaven by good works alone. So her church work is as much geared to transforming the people who do it as to changing the recipients.
“There are things that we do, but they are just a natural extension of what God has done among us.”
It makes an unusual mixture. The fact of her tattoos, she says, is really not shocking in the States. But they are, when you look at them, extravagantly Christian. It’s not just the four-inch oval belt buckle she wears, with an enamelled icon in the middle of it, and the words: “Jesus loves you” etched around the top. Her left arm is almost like a cathedral window, covered in scenes from the Bible. There’s a creation, surprisingly small; a nativity; Jesus in the desert; the raising of Lazarus; the angel at the empty tomb; and Mary and the disciples at Pentecost. She is having the Annunciation tattooed all over her back.
This is an unusual form of evangelism. But it may be the only kind that can break through the crust of dislike and suspicion which insulates increasing numbers of younger Americans from Christianity.
“An unusual form of evangelism”! But is it really? Or is the evangelism part only unusual in today’s evangelicalism?
People who call themselves “evangelicals” need to get the “evangel,” the Gospel, right, and yet many evangelicals today are either leaving the Gospel out, changing its content, or transforming it into another kind of Law. I would think that Luther could help all evangelicals get the Gospel straight.
Lutheranism could also help evangelicals disentangle themselves from politics and culture wars, while still showing how they can be productively engaged in political and cultural issues.
Lutheranism could also resolve the fights between Calvinists and Arminians, as well as Catholics and Protestants, “emergents” and “fundamentalists.” It also offers liturgy, sacraments, a theology of God’s Word, a theology of suffering, the doctrine of vocation, and other things that contemporary Christians are said to lack but that many have a yearning for.
“Pastorix” [her term] Bolz-Weber falls short of Lutheran orthodoxy as we Missouri Synod Lutherans understand it when it comes to women’s ordination, gay marriage, and other issues that separate us from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Maybe she could help save the ELCA and mainline Christianity in general by proclaiming the Gospel of Christ despite the reigning paradigm of non-supernatural liberal theology. But maybe her evangelical fans could go deeper to find the true source of what to them seems so radical and liberating.
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