Christianity is Changing
Sometimes I feel there is great misunderstanding as to what my Facebook Page (and now on Patheos) is all about or why I do what I do on Facebook.
First, what I do on Facebook is quite different from that which I do in my writing or in public talks. In the latter I seek to explore the Bible (for the most part) as it pertains to the message of the good news. When I am speaking I am usually not a polemicist. On Facebook, I am trying to get to the heart of what I consider to be the “enslaving elements of the kosmos” (as the apostle Paul puts it) that I see binding Christianity and especially the way Christians articulate this gospel message.
For me, there are several aspects of this ‘kosmos’ (the world of our brokenness, fear and projection) that seem to permeate contemporary Christianity. As one trained to be a theologian, I am acutely aware that there has always been any number of different ways to articulate the gospel message. I have been engaged in ecumenical thinking for over thirty years. Lutherans think differently than Catholics who think differently than Anabaptists who think differently than Evangelicals who think differently than Charismatics and so on and so forth. There is no singular right or wrong way. However there are ways that Christians talk about God, the gospel, humanity, salvation and the Christian life that are burdened with unnecessary baggage, hidden worldviews, presuppositions that ultimately create distortions about the character of God or the way God relates to the world (creation and people).
What some people refuse to see is that these underlying worldviews and presuppositions eventually take center stage and the actual message of the gospel is shoved to the periphery. So, e.g., Christians have always affirmed that God is the Creator of all life. But someone like Ken Ham has turned his worldview (six day creationism) into the message itself and the message of God the Creator of life is bankrupted. This approach to the doctrine of creation virtually obliterates what is in fact actually being said in the Genesis stories.
For the past several years on Facebook and in my writings I have sought to point out these pseudo-worldviews and the implications they have on our proclamation. These include:
Gnosticism: the view that we are saved by correct knowledge [Fundamentalism and portions of Evangelicalism] or by secret knowledge [frequently encountered in Charismatic circles].
Narcissism: the view that we humans are the center of all God does, and that knowing God is for our personal benefit. Behind this view lies the ‘lie’ of the autonomous individual.
Supercessionism: the view that the Church replaces Israel, the New Testament replaces the old Testament, etc. One sees this especially in a lot of [so-called] ‘new covenant’ and [so-called] Finished Works theology.
The Prosperity Gospel: the view that God has an investment in making people wealthy. The real problem here is the assumption that material things make us happy, that our own personal comfort is primary and that ‘God’s blessing’ is tied to our ‘personal faith.’
Supernaturalism: the view that God intervenes in the world when ‘right’ worship is done, or when a person has ‘enough’ faith, etc. This view of God is nothing other than the old deus ex machina of the Greek tragedies (the super-hero god).
Over-realized eschatology: this is the view that Christians can have their cake and eat it too, that we live now in some golden age, that the future has fully arrived. This view fails to take into account that we live ‘between the times’, in the ‘now and not-yet’, that while the new age has invaded the old, the old age (our current time, space and history), Christians are somehow magically to live as though they had become completely freed, liberated and unshackled from the old age, as though ‘sin’ (the structure of negative mimesis, rivalry and scapegoating violence) was not also a Christian as much as a worldly reality.
Perfectionism: this view expresses the dualism of Plato’s influence on Christianity, the difference between the world of the ideal and the world of the real. This view has made all manner of inroads into the Christian world, from the call to holiness, to forms of asceticism, to those who seek other-worldly experiences and deny real world, real life experiences.
Hierarchicalism: the view that there is top and a bottom, man over woman, white over black, clergy over laity, etc. One sees this manifested in many ways, from Roman Catholic institutionalism to the authoritarianism of the [so-called] ‘Shepherding Movement.’ This is what fosters all manner of abuse in the church.
Anti-intellectualism: the view that the world of the mind is trumped by the world of the spiritual, that God imparts ‘secret knowledge’, that God explains the Bible [the Bible as Ouija board view], that education is useless at best or evil at worst. This is usually combined with a docetic view of Jesus where Jesus somehow possessed the ‘divine mind’ and knew whatever God did. [This is actually been condemned as heresy in the fifth century, but most don’t know this].
Each of these (and there are others) all come to us unbidden and are usually very hidden. It is only upon examining our theology that we can see how we have been infected by them. And this is not to mention natural theology and its problems.
Of course if one were to critique Progressive or Liberal Protestant Christianity one could add to these the categories of empiricism, historicism, Cartesianism, pseudo-authoritarianism, syncretism, etc.
When all is said and done, the role of the theologian is to help the church clean up her language so that the gospel is not conformed to the ‘kosmos’ while at the same time learning how to properly frame the gospel in various cultural contexts. There is no direct path from the modern world back to the Bible. We are all products of our history, what we have been taught, and how we have been raised. Our goal is to seek ways to understand, share and experience the life-giving character of God in Jesus Christ by the Spirit. When our message is cluttered with worldviews and presuppositions that have been deconstructed we end up asking people to no longer accept the gospel but the worldviews and presuppositions that have been unconsciously brought in its train.
Today, even the best theologian knows that they too, having examined as many of their presuppositions, will be corrected by tomorrow’s theologians. There is just no way we can ever have a clear picture of who God is and how God works. All of our theology is a work in progress. This is why I tell people that I hope my children will do better theology than I and that my grandchildren will do better theology than my children. We are all simply part of this stream of human history. Theology is not permanent, nor set in concrete. At best all we can ever do is see the ways our the implications of our theology affects others and ‘repent’ or change it. There is no valor in clinging to a theology that has destructive implications.
I didn’t know it at the time but when I wrote The Jesus Driven Life what I was seeking to do was to find a way to look at the gospel apart from all of the ‘isms’ I detailed above. Yet even that book underwent a revision (a 2nd edition) that reflected some of the ways I had changed my mind from the first edition. Theology is always changing, transforming, as it examines it presuppositions.
As I have said before, the bible is neither a handbook of theology (as the ‘conservatives’ would have it, as though the Bible was ‘the Word of God’ in toto), nor is it a handbook about theology (as the liberals would have it as though it just told us what the prophets and apostles believed): it is both at the same time. The Bible is a collection of documents that, when read aright, teach us how to do theology. In the Bible we encounter differing voices and it is this discontinuity in voices that creates trouble for both the conservative and the liberal. The conservative seeks to harmonize these voices as so create a Frankenstein theology; the liberal tends to dismiss voices as though they do not count. We do neither. We seek to engage these voices of religion and revelation, to see how the latter engages, critiques and deconstructs the former. For us there is one Word of God, Jesus Christ.
For most of my Facebook (and Patheos) readers this is a given. However, because so many have unexamined presuppositions the Jesus that they claim to view as their lens bears little resemblance to the living breathing human being from Nazareth. Knowledge of Jesus’ historical context (not to mention that of the apostolic church) produces a Jesus that is bound to metaphysics, speculation, and historical nonsense.
As I look back on the history of theology in the 20th century, what I see (as have others) is the shift from a metaphysical approach to theology (where there is an identity between what we believe and that which we believe) to that of hermeneutics (where we explore the language of what we believe in relation to what Scripture announces). The greatest antagonist to this way of thinking in the 20th century was Karl Barth, but as a lifelong devotee of Barth I think, at this point, his theory of revelation must be criticized (as e.g., was done especially by Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Wolfhart Pannenberg). Even so I see the same trend in virtually all manner of Protestant theologies, particularly those movements which in one or another see Scripture as constituting The Word of God.
As we move forward, I will continue to examine the way others have expressed their theology. I will challenge any hidden presuppositions I encounter and seek to strip away antiquated worldviews. While all experience of the divine is unique to the individual, the role of theology is to examine the language that experience is articulated. When that language is laden and burdened with all manner of useless, speculative and otherwise ‘heretical’ nonsense, it shall be called out. Real love does not fear critique, it embraces it. It is unloving to let Christians remain in the morass of muddled thinking. The Gospel deserves better.
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