A cool new tool uses info from Amazon to connect a book you like with dozens of others.

HT: Bob Carlton

Amazon has dropped the price of my book, The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier to its lowest price (in paperback) ever – $8.51.

Now’s the time to buy!

I’ve been thinking more about the post I wrote last week about Daniel Kirk‘s new book, Jesus Have I Loved, but Paul?: A Narrative Approach to the Problem of Pauline Christianity.

Daniel takes a generous but conservative posture toward homosexual behavior in chapter nine of his book, the chapter that I was asked to review. He gets there by doing three things:

J.R. Daniel Kirk

1. He basically discounts the passages from the Hebrew Scripture that relate to homosexuality. Because the Christian church doesn’t consider other Old Testament prohibitions binding on us today, it’s unreasonable to take the sexual prohibitions at face value. I agree.
2. He argues that the silence of Jesus is meaningful. More on this below.
3. He argues that the Pauline mentions of homosexuality in Romans 1 and 1 Corinthians 6 develop a normative, Christian sexuality — which is heterosexuality. I expressed my disagreement with him in this regard last week.

But here’s another sticking point with Kirk’s logic. He writes that it’s often difficult to make an argument from silence. Yet he notes that many of us who argue for the full acceptance of GLBT persons in the church like to say that if Jesus didn’t want gays in the church, he would have said something. Fair enough.

Kirk goes on to argue that Jesus’ silence on this matter does just the opposite: Jesus silence on the issue of homosexual behavior is, in effect, an implicit endorsement of the Jewish teaching of his day; namely, that homosexual behavior is a sin. In other words, if Jesus had wanted to overturn the teaching if his day, he would have spoken out against it, as he did with several other behaviors.

But here’s the rub: apply that logic to any number of other moral or ethical issues, and I’ll bet that Kirk and his fellow evangelical biblical scholars don’t agree. For instance, Jesus was silent about:

• Slavery
• Abortion
• The death penalty
• Corporal punishment
• Racism
• Rape

I could go on. Does that mean that we should argue that Jesus was implicitly endorsing each of these? Of course not.

You just cannot argue, one way or the other, from Jesus’ silence. Which leaves us, according to Kirk’s thinking, with two passages from Paul that are keeping practicing gays out of the church. And, if you ask me, that’s not enough biblical weight to disqualify millions of people from leadership in the church.

This post is part of a blog tour for Daniel Kirk‘s new book, Jesus Have I Loved, but Paul?: A Narrative Approach to the Problem of Pauline Christianity.  See all the posts at the blog tour hub.

OK, I’m going to be a little tough on my friend, Daniel Kirk, in this post. Daniel is, admittedly, to my hermeneutical right. He’s a New Testament prof at my alma mater, Fuller Seminary, and I have a great deal of respect for him. But the chapter in his new book on homosexuality, while more generous than many evangelicals, falls short. It does so because it recapitulates the familiar meme, Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin.

Mason Slater has already done a fine job of summarizing the chapter as a whole, so I won’t repeat that here. The bottom line for Kirk, as Slater sees it, is this:

But the real thesis of the chapter, the theme that (rightly I think) trumps everything else, is love.

Central to our calling as Christians is love of others, and it is here that much of the church has failed spectacularly in its approach towards the GLBT community.

Jesus sums up the entire law with “Love the Lord your God with all your … and, love your neighbor as yourself” and then when asked who this neighbor might be, Jesus tells a parable which turns all the audience’s expectations upside-down and shows a hated outsider as more faithfully following the way of Jesus than the religious insiders.

There is, in Kirk’s book, the now-familiar self-flagellation that thoughtful evangelicals do when recounting how horribly they’ve treated gays over the past few decades. And that’s right, they have treated gays horribly, and they should repent. We all should.

However, it’s this paragraph in Kirk’s chapter that I think shows how he fails to embrace a truly narrative hermeneutic, and one that would free him to really love the gays who are in the church:

Indeed, if there is anything genuinely new about our situation in the twenty-first century when it comes to the question of homosexuality, it is not that our culture has more of a place for it than the prejudiced ancients, and it is nopt even that recent science suggests that we are predisposed to certain sexual preferences. The real difference is that there are Christians who are both striving to faithfully follow God and simultaneously living within committed homosexual relationships. This is part of the current-day experience of the church, and one that must be carefully weighed when we consider whether homosexuality is, as Scripture seems to indicate, a deviation from what is acceptable before God or whether it is, as its advocates would claim, a new work of the Spirit in a surprising extension of the mission of God.

It’s that last sentence, in bold, that I think presents a false dichotomy. Homosexual practice is either a deviation or a new work of the Spirit. Caught in this dichotomy, Kirk chooses the former. But it’s a false choice.

Admittedly, Kirk gets here only after quickly dismissing the many scholarly arguments for alternate understandings of the Greek words in Romans 1 and 1 Corinthians 6 that are often translated “homosexual” and “effeminate.” (I found his dismissal of these arguments unconvincing.

Further, Kirk interprets Jesus’ silence on this issue as consent to the Jewish thinking of the day. That is, if Jesus had objected to Hebrew teaching on sexuality, he would have taught against it — as he did, for instance, regarding the Sabbath.

Here’s why the above dichotomy is false: it’s reliant upon an understanding of the Bible that allows no room for science, psychology, evolutionary biology, social movement theory, etc. As Kirk even admits in the paragraph I quoted above, the science isn’t the thing. The presence of faithful gays is the thing.

But I disagree. The reason that many of us know faithful, Christian gays isn’t that they’re suddenly here. They’ve always been here. But they’ve been closeted, often because of the church. Western society has become more tolerant — and more gays are out — not because of the moral decline of our culture, but because we’re more faithfully living the biblical — dare I say, Pauline! — mandate that we see all persons as equally children of God.

Kirk strives mightily in the chapter to state that the overwhelming narrative of scripture is one of love, love, love. He repeatedly reminds his fellow conservatives that heterosexual sex is often just as “disordered” — just as sinful — as homosexual sex. Nevertheless, by failing to allow extrabiblical to resources to amend his hermeneutic, those two passages hang like a millstone around his interpretation. For the gays I know, calling their sexuality “disordered” isn’t love.

I’m currently re-reading God in Creation, Jürgen Moltmann’s ecological doctrine of creation.  It’s my third time through the book — maybe fourth. It’s a beautifully written systematic theology text.  In the preface, Moltmann admits that he didn’t mean to write a thorough monograph on the doctrine of creation, but the more he got into the subject, the more topics he felt he had to cover.

He addresses some pretty cool topics, which will be out-there for some readers. For instance, the Kabbalistic idea of God’s tzimtzum is central to Moltmann’s understanding of how an all-consuming God made room for a creation that is other-than-god. Moltmann also turns to Jewish theology for the understanding of God’s Spirit as Shekhinah — that is, presence.

I’ll be exploring these ideas in posts as I read through the book, especially in light of the interest in Process Theology that’s being generated here and elsewhere.

But what’s likely to generate the most interest here is Moltmann’s wholehearted defense of panentheism. How Moltmann’s panentheism intersects with and differs from Process Theology is something that I definitely want to explore.

If anyone wants to read along with me, jump in!

At The Burner Blog, David Moore has concluded his 4-part series on Mark Driscoll’s new book on marriage.  And Moore is unrelenting:

The concentration on a man’s sexual needs and total ignorance of any non-male-like needs a women might have prevents this from being a useful book on marriage. Therefore, The Burner Blog cannot recommend that any couple needing information/advice/tools to improve their marriage take this book seriously.

I keep writing because think the book really is a bad book. In my (very male) opinion, it’s not affirming or helpful to women. Women are more than tools to be used for their husbands sexual gratification. There is more to sex than intercourse. Children play a role in marriage. There is little mention of the mystery of marriage á la Ephesians 5. Suggestions for improvements in communication or money are absent.

READ THE REST: How to Avoid Satan Himself Laying in the Space Between You and Other Loose Ends From Real Marriage « The Burner.

According to Nielson Bookscan, here are the bestselling books of 2011, along with sales figures.  Nielson covers sales through ABA channels, which means that sales at Christian bookstores are not included.  My question isn’t so much whether you’ve read any of these, but instead what does this list say about America in 2011?

2011′s Top 15: Adult Nonfiction

1 HEAVEN IS FOR REAL*, Todd Burpo (Thomas Nelson; trade paperback; 9780849946158) 1,994,000

2 STEVE JOBS, Walter Isaacson (Simon & Schuster; hardcover; 9781451648539) 1,385,000

3 UNBROKEN*, Laura Hillenbrand (Random House; hardcover; 9781400064168) 913,000

4 KILLING LINCOLN, Bill O’Reilly (Holt; hardcover; 9780805093070) 777,000

5 BOSSYPANTS, Tina Fey (Reagan Arthur Books; hardcover; 9780316056861) 514,000

6 STRENGTHS FINDER 2.0*, Tom Rath (Gallup Press; hardcover; 9781595620156) 510,000

7 THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS, Rebecca Skloot (Broadway; trade paperback; 9781400052189) 502,000

8 A STOLEN LIFE, Jaycee Dugard (Simon & Schuster; hardcover; 9781451629187) 500,000

9 THE 17 DAY DIET, Mike Moreno (Free Press; hardcover; 9781451648652) 490,000

10 IN THE GARDEN OF BEASTS, Erik Larson (Crown; hardcover; 9780307408846) 392,000

11 GO THE F*CK TO SLEEP, Adam Mansbach (Akashic Books; hardcover; 9781617750250) 359,000

12 INSIDE OF A DOG*, Alexandra Horowitz (Scribner; trade paperback; 9781416583431) 350,000

13 THE OFFICIAL SAT STUDY GUIDE* (College Board; trade paperback; 9780874478525) 321,000

14 THE 5 LOVE LANGUAGES*, Gary Chapman (Northfield Publishers; trade paperback; 9780802473158) 316,000

15 GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS (Guinness; hardcover; 9781904994671) 313,000

2011′s Top 15: Adult Fiction

1 THE HELP, Kathryn Stockett (Berkeley; trade paperback; 9780425232200) 1,832,000

2 THE HELP, Kathryn Stockett ((Berkeley; movie tie-in trade paperback; 9780425245132) 1,011,000

3 WATER FOR ELEPHANTS*, Sara Gruen (Algonquin; trade paperback; 9781565125605) 634,000

4 THE LITIGATORS, John Grisham (Doubleday; hardcover; 9780385535137) 535,00

5 THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO*, Stieg Larsson (Vintage; trade paperback; 9780307454546) 493,000

6 11/22/63, Stephen King (Scribner; hardcover; 9781451627282) 486,000

7 CUTTING FOR STONE*, Abraham Verghese (Vintage; trade paperback; 9780375714368) 485,000

8 THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET’S NEST*, Stieg Larsson (Knopf; hardcover; 9780307269997) 447,000

9 A DANCE WITH DRAGONS, George R.R. Martin (Bantam; hardcover; 9780553801477) 444,000

10 THE BEST OF ME, Nicholas Sparks (Grand Central; hardcover; 9780446547659) 436,000

11 THE CONFESSION+, John Grisham (Dell; mass market paperback; 9780440245117) 420,000

12 THE ART OF RACING IN THE RAIN*, Garth Stein (Harper Perennial; trade paperback; 9780061537967) 373,000

13 ROOM, Emma Donoghue (Back Bay; trade paperback; 9780316098328) 369,000

14 THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE*, Stieg Larsson (Vintage; trade paperback; 9780307454553) 359,000

15 SONG OF ICE & FIRE: Four-Book Set, George R.R. Martin (Bantam; mass market paperback; 9780345529053) 348,000

2011′s Top 15: Juvenile Books

1 THE HUNGER GAMES*, Suzanne Collins (Scholastic; trade paperback; 9780439023528) 1,578,000

2 DIARY OF A WIMPY KID 6: CABIN FEVER, Jeff Kinney (Amulet; hardcover; 9781419702235) 1,563,000

3 CATCHING FIRE*, Suzanne Collins (Scholastic; hardcover; 9780439023498) 985,000

4 INHERITANCE, Christopher Paolini (Knopf Children’s; hardcover; 9780375856112) 900,000

5 MOCKINGJAY*, Suzanne Collins (Scholastic; hardcover; 9780439023511) 853,000

6 THE SON OF NEPTUNE, Rick Riordan (Hyperion; hardcover; 9781423140597) 699,000

7 THE THRONE OF FIRE, Rick Riordan (Hyperion; hardcover; 9781423140566) 535,000

8 DIARY OF A WIMPY KID: THE UGLY TRUTH*, Jeff Kinney (Amulet; hardcover; 9780810984912) KINNEY JEFF 524,000

9 ELF ON THE SHELF*, Carol Aebersold (CCA&B; hardcover; 9780976990703) 500,000

10 THE WIMPY KID DO-IT-YOURSELF BOOK*, Jeff Kinney (Amulet; 9780810989955; hardcover) 488,000

11 DIARY OF A WIMPY KID 2: RODRICK RULES*, Jeff Kinney (Amulet; hardcover; 9780810994737) 338,000

12 GOODNIGHT MOON*, Margaret Wise Brown (Harper Festival; 9780694003617) 329,000

13 DIARY OF A WIMPY KID*, Jeff Kinney (Amulet; hardcover; 9780810993136) 309,000

14 THE LOST HERO*, Rick Riordan (Hyperion; hardcover; 9781423113393) 294,000

15 DIARY OF A WIMPY KID 3: THE LAST STRAW*, Jeff Kinney (Amulet; hardcover; 9780810970687) 289,000

My latest book, The Church Is Flat: The Relational Ecclesiology of the Emerging Church Movement, is part of the Patheos Book Club for the next couple weeks.  You can read an interview with me, and read an excerpt from the book about the christological office of “friend.”

The book is $4.99 on Amazon, and if you’re a member of Kindle Prime, you can get The Church Is Flat today for FREE!

I’ve enrolled The Church Is Flat in Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, which is a lending library for Amazon Prime members. Thousands of ebooks are available to borrow in the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library — and there’s no due date!

I won’t be reviewing Mark and Grace Driscoll’s new book.  That’s because I won’t be reading it.  But I’m glad that David Moore of Fuller Seminary’s The Burner Blog did. Dave confesses in his post that he is a complementarian, a position that I find biblically, theologically, and cultural untenable and downright disgusting. Nevertheless, Dave holds it, and he still thinks that the Driscolls’ book is full of misogynistic crap.

Over to you, Dave:

When I received Real Marriage: The Truth About Sex, Friendship and Life Together by Mark and Grace Driscoll, there was a certain expectation. [The Burner] was expecting something irritating, something provocative and something worthy of the “Crazy Mark Driscoll” pet name I use to refer to the Mars Hill (Seattle) pastor.

I saw it coming, and got blindsided. This book is an astoundingly unbelievable disrespect for women.

I’m not much of a feminist. Men and women are different, generally have different gifts and abilities and both are valuable. In our household, I’m the chief decision-maker because my wife and I agree that is what the New Testament instructs. Plenty of people don’t agree with that, and that’s fine.

But holy cow: My wife is still a person, she still has needs that are at least as important as mine, and I am called to serve her as Christ serves the church. I fail a lot, but if I’m not sacrificing my needs for hers then I’m not doing a very good job. (My lovely wife might tell you that I’m not doing a very good job.)

READ THE REST: Mark Driscoll Thinks Wives are Only Good for Sex « The Burner.

My latest book, The Church Is Flat: The Relational Ecclesiology of the Emerging Church Movement, is now $4.99 in the Kindle store.  But, if you’re a member of Kindle Prime, you can

get The Church Is Flat today for FREE!

I’ve enrolled The Church Is Flat in Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, which is a lending library for Amazon Prime members. Thousands of ebooks are available to borrow in the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library — and there’s no due date!