When do differences in detail cast doubt on the whole story?

I’ve been reading through both The Lost World of Scripture by John Walton and Brent Sandy and The Lost World of the Flood by Tremper Longman and John Walton … fascinating and thought provoking books. Last week I posted the first book with a provocative title – The Word of God is Not a Book.  I expected the post to raise some eyebrows and generate a reaction. I was not disappointed. This is a conversation we need to have. One commenter was explicit:

In Sunday School I have been known to challenge the class with the following question… “The Bible contains the Word of God. True or False?” Then I explain that if it only “contains” the Word of God we are hard pressed to identify those parts that are the Word of God vs. those that aren’t! On the contrary, I tell them, “the Bible is the Word of God”!

Although the commenter and I likely agree on quite a lot when it comes to the essence of Scripture, I tend to disagree with this statement and lean towards “contains” rather than “is.” The claim that the Bible “is” the word of God doesn’t really solve any of our problems. If the Bible “is” the word of God, then we must work hard to rationalize away the various contradictions, differences in perspectives, and rhetorical hyperbole or symbolic language. After all, if the Bible “is” the word of God and God does not lie, then every statement must be precisely true. (At least in the original manuscripts … whatever this means.)

Walton and Sandy (The Lost World of Scripture) point out a number of variations in the Gospels (pp. 146-148). Among them, Matthew and Luke differ on the order of Jesus’ three temptations (Mt 4:5; Lk 4:9), the variation in wording when God speaks after the baptism of Jesus and again after the transfiguration (“you are my son” or “this is my son”, for example), and the variation in the wording of the placard over Jesus at the crucifixion.  Another example that confronted me when listening to the Gospels several years back is the withering of the fig tree. Did it wither as they watched or was it withered the next day? (Mt. 21:19-20 vs. Mk 11:12-14, 20-21) The genealogies Matthew and Luke give for Jesus cannot both be right. If the Bible “is” the word of God, these variations matter. If it contains and faithfully conveys the word of God, they don’t.  It is the essence of the message – God’s relationship with his people and the Gospel of Jesus Christ – that matters.

The Scripture that we have reflects the oral culture in which it originated. Among other things “the Evangelists felt free to rearrange the order of events to suit the points they were making.” (p. 148) With respect to the withered fig tree … either Matthew removed a day or Mark inserted a day … or at least, the oral traditions from which they derived their accounts removed or inserted a day.

The evidence then suggests that the gospel message preserved the essential essence of things Jesus and the disciples said and did. If there are variations in the written Gospels, it’s likely there were similar variations in the oral texts. It is safe to conclude that a precision of wording was not expected either in the oral transmission or the written records. …

…we may not have the exact words of Jesus, but we do have the essential word. The Gospels can be trusted as reliable representations of the words and deeds of Jesus. (p. 149)

The Word of God. The commenter quoted above was concerned that “…when an unbeliever reads the title “The Bible isn’t the Word of God” he or she will immediately say “exactly, end of discussion” and will not dig beyond that surface statement and I do not think that’s the intent of the author of this article.”  The commenter is right, this is not my intent (and the title of the post was intentionally a little different). My intent, in fact, is to lower some barriers and allow people (believers and unbelievers alike) to dig deeper into the message of Scripture – the essential essence of things. At least in my secular and skeptical University community, the claim that the Bible “is” the word of God won’t convince anyone of anything.  The unbeliever (or even questioning believer)  says … what about this problem in scripture or that problem … and then simply dismisses the whole as not worth the effort.

When we step back and let the Bible tell the story, dig into and study the story. This can make an impact. We need to be immersed in the essential word and message of Scripture. We don’t really need to build fences and barriers to defend it. For me, personally, dropping the need to defend Scripture (and worry about the “problems”)  and digging into the message has been the life and faith changing.

This week on my commute as I listened to Scripture (my habit every morning) I was struck by Paul writing to the church  of the Thessalonians. “And we also thank God continually because, when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as a human word, but as it actually is, the word of God, which is indeed at work in you who believe.”(1 Thess. 2:13)  Paul uses the phrase “word of God” in a number of places in his letters, but as far as I have found, never to refer explicitly to Scripture. For Paul, the word of God was not a book … it was the essence of his message of Jesus Christ (the Living Word as the commenter pointed out).

For some, the claim that the Bible “contains” the Word of God may lead to the attempt to identify the Word of God and separate it from the rest.

For some, the claim that the Bible “is” the Word of God may lead to doubts and questions (it did for me) because of apparent inconsistencies.

What do you think?

One thing is certain. We read, listen to, and study Scripture to discover God and his intent for his creation. This message is faithfully conveyed by Scripture in the community of the church.

If you wish to contact me directly you may do so at rjs4mail [at] att.net.

If interested you can subscribe to a full text feed of my posts at Musings on Science and Theology.

What Christian Women Want, By Leslie Leyland Fields, editor of the recently released The Wonder Years.

How did Beth Moore stay silent for so long? Humility, perhaps? Grace? By now, many have read the popular Bible teacher’s “Letter to my brothers,” posted on her Living Proof Ministries Blog on May 4. Sadly, her account of the treatment she’s received over the last three decades at the hands of evangelical pastors and leaders is all too familiar. Women like me, who attend, speak and teach in conservative evangelical churches, are accustomed to the excesses of complementarianism, the teaching that men and women are equal but have distinct roles in the home and in church.

Over the last four decades, I’ve been involved in churches where women were not allowed to pray from the pulpit, to serve communion, even to take the offering. Young boys could pass the collection plate, but not women. Though these churches were more than 50% women, only one woman was allowed on the board—as a secretary. In one church, someone asked me one year to run for that position. I wondered how that would work. With three graduate degrees and some formal theological training, I would have been the most educated person on the board, but I would be relegated to recording the decisions of the men rather than participating in them.

Another board member conceded to me that a woman’s voice could be helpful when making important decisions because we were “emotional,” and possessed female intuition, which helped balance men’s reason. This narrative continues. Ann Voskamp writes recently of her son returning home from a meeting at church where these very words were spoken. And no one challenged them.

For decades, I sat under the Bible teaching of men in church who knew little about the basics of hermeneutics. I sat under a pastor who took off with his secretary one winter, leaving the church in shambles. I sat under a pastor who was arrogant and dismissive of women. I recently spoke at a Bible college on discipleship from a book I had authored. Despite the fact that the book had won a respected award, because I was a woman, male students could not attend my session.

All of this is routine for women in conservative churches. But I have not been called a heretic, as Moore has. I have not been routinely undermined by pastors. I have not generated the kind of vituperative spirit directed against Moore. In some ways we could shrug it off as the price of fame. But it’s far more.

Even as her letter circulated online, a seminary student who runs a website dedicated to theology and “discernment” chastises Christian leaders for giving her the “silent treatment.” Instead, “you should have been roundly and loudly rebuked by every one of them.” This student goes on to say, “You are utterly unqualified to do what you do.” He concludes his rant with these gracious words:

“God isn’t talking to you. Stop saying He is. You sound crazy. If he is, you’d likely not be such a horrible Bible teacher. Be Gone.”

There are arrogant nutters in every field, and theology has never been exempt, but what is particularly striking is the meanness and the personalness of the attack. How is it that some men with such a high view of scripture have such a low view of women? His response validates and illustrates the heart of Moore’s plea:

“I came face to face with one of the most demoralizing realizations of my adult life: Scripture was not the reason for the colossal disregard and disrespect of women among many of these men. It was only the excuse. Sin was the reason. Ungodliness.”

A number of pastors and leaders responded positively, even apologetically. Pastor J.D. Greer, who is expected to be the next Southern Baptist president, expressed gratitude for her words and reiterated “misogyny must have no place in our churches.” Pastor Thabiti Anyabwile, issued a public apology to Moore, confessing his failure to defend her when others questioned her credentials and reputation.

“I’ve been in rooms where your name was mentioned with disparaging tone. And rather than ask a few basic questions…I said and did nothing. I wasn’t any different from Saul standing by holding clothes while Stephen was stoned,” he said.

Perhaps the most striking response came from Andrew Walker, the director of policy studies for the Southern Baptist’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission: “What amazes me about our failure toward our sisters is that the expectation for us is not even extraordinary. It’s simple decency, kindness, and respect.”

But as hopeful as these responses are, this is not simply a matter of male leaders cleaning up their courtesy. There’s more at stake than good manners. There’s a darker shadow, I believe, behind the “colossal disrespect” accorded to Beth Moore. The larger issue concerns male leadership in the church. But it’s complicated, of course.

I believe there’s an assumption that theology belongs to the professionals, which is another way of saying that theology belongs to men. The great majority of seminary professors and seminary students are men. In 2013, women comprised just 20% of students in evangelical seminaries. Fewer women attend seminary for obvious reasons: Pastoral and ministry positions are less available to women in evangelical churches. How do you bear the cost of a seminary education when full time employment upon graduation is unlikely?

A seminary education is expected, even required for most pastoral and leadership positions. This is reasonable and good. I want my leaders and pastors to be educated in Hebrew and Greek. I want them to be knowledgeable in Church History. I want them to study textual criticism, all that they may “rightly divide the word of truth.” A few years ago I was one of a few who voted unequivocally against a pastoral candidate because he lacked seminary training and exhibited an ignorance of hermeneutics. But in professionalizing the pastorate and leadership positions, I wonder if we have prioritized education and theology over character. I wonder if we have privileged knowledge over humility and the fruits of the spirit. And I wonder if we have unfairly disadvantaged women, to our collective harm.

Enter the outliers. When women like Beth Moore, Ann Voskamp, Rachel Held Evans, Jen Hatmaker, and others outside of the academy gain international prominence for their Christian books and teachings, they’re suspect. Their theology and their character are ruthlessly scrutinized, particularly since, gasp! they don’t possess a seminary degree or hold an office within a church. Rachel Held Evans writes about her encounters with patronizing seminary students:

I am not criticized; I am “lovingly corrected.”  We do not discuss where we agree or disagree; I am informed of what I got right and what I got wrong.  It’s not a peer-to-peer conversation; it’s a session of “pastoral counseling,” initiated by a man who is not, in fact, my pastor. 

Often and unfortunately these successful women are seen as rivals rather than as co-laborers. Yet when they began writing and teaching, they labored in obscurity, hoping not for fame and influence, but simply to be faithful to the gifts and calling they’d received from God. I count myself among them.

So here is what Christian women want: We want to partner with our brothers in Christ to follow Jesus as faithfully and as fully as we can. We want to fulfill the Great Commission given to all of us, “To go into all the world preaching the gospel, making disciples of all nations.”

I cannot claim that every woman’s motive is pure, nor can that be said of men, but even when men were preaching Christ “out of envy or selfish ambition” as others were doing while the apostle Paul was imprisoned, he rejoiced, because “The important thing is that in every way, whether from false motives or true, Christ is preached.”  Are we rejoicing that “Christ is preached” by both men and women? Or are we wrestling jealously over gender and territory?

As I struggle to understand misogyny in the church, I have one more flickering light to shine on that shadow. I have argued before, in the context of transgenderism and LBGT rights, that the Church makes too much of gender. That we obsess over gender differences, gender roles and definitions of masculinity and femininity rather than moving together toward Christ-likeness. I make this argument again, but for different reasons. We’re living in the midst of unprecedented social shifts in men’s and women’s roles in the culture at large. Higher education and the work force were primarily the realm of men for centuries. Now women and men are equally represented in the work force, and women significantly outnumber men in higher education. In the recent Great Depression, women fared much better than men in both the workplace and education. Is it possible that these disorienting gender shifts outside the church are fueling the grip on gender roles inside the church?

And there’s part of the rub. Most of the popular authors and Bible teachers are functioning outside the church. They’re not operating under the authority of pastors and an ecclesial structure. Nor are these women observed in submissive roles to their husbands. Though their audiences and followers are almost exclusively women, I believe this makes some men dismissive, critical and anxious.

These days, I understand feelings of anxiety. Beth Moore’s candid account of decades of misogyny joins a discouraging lineup of news and headlines. Evangelicals are written off as a political lobby group rather than as a people committed to living out and sharing the good news of Jesus. Bill Hybels, one of the founders of Willow Creek and the godfather of the evangelical mega church movement, is deposed after a thirty year career of sexual allegations was brought to light. Paige Patterson, the president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary is under fire for allegedly advising wives to remain submissive to abusive husbands. The #MeToo movement is joined by #ChurchToo, where we read distressingly of sexual abuse that has happened within our churches in recent decades.

I don’t always know how to respond to these issues. But I suspect they are not unrelated. I suspect that at their heart they are bound up in the dark desires of ambition, pride, and power. How easily we forget that the power of the gospel is the power to love, to relinquish, to serve, to lay down our lives for one another, men and women both.

My own story of sexism and struggle ends happily and more definitively. My family and I joined another church. A conservative church where men and women pray from the pulpit. Where men and women collect the offering together. Where men and women serve the elements of communion.

I cried often that first year. Not because I was a woman. Not because I was more emotional than men. Not because I was the “weaker vessel.” I cried because for the first time, I felt fully included in the body of Christ. I felt fully human. Whole. That’s all Christian women want.

What does it mean to be a self that is Christian? What is Christian identity?

These are the questions in the magnificent tome edited by James Houston and Jens Zimmermann, Sources of the Christian Self: A Cultural History of Christian Identity. A big big volume, second-to-none for those studying Christian identity, and written but dozens of authors and specialists.

From this time forward it would be by the name “Christian” that the followers of Jesus would be identified. But what did this term denote for believers down through the centuries? What did it mean to identify oneself as a Christian in different times and places? This is the question posed by this book. The basic calling of a Christian is to identify with “the name” wholly and simply, in a way that one’s confession of Christ becomes the most essential fact of one’s life. But this calling upon every generation of believers takes place under cultural conditions and, indeed, under changing cultural conditions, wherefore it should be possible to write a history of Christian self-identity from the early church to the present. This book is a beginning and a modest contribution to the construction of such a cultural and social history, exploring what it has meant for women and men to identify with Christ in very different contexts—under the state persecution of Diocletian, under the Constantinian privileges of the Nicene era, on the oriental borders of the Byzantine Empire, during the collapse of Romanitas in the late antique period, and so on, through the various episodes in the history of culture, East and West, during which the Holy Spirit has been at work gathering a people who confess that Christ is Lord under their unique conditions, each one saying, “I am Christianos.”

First, the authors write in light of the fundamental shift in epistemology from a reductive model of truth advanced by scientific rationalism in modernity to a richer, more complex concept of human knowing developed by “postmodern” paradigms of knowing.

Second, the essays are written with a clear sense of the cultural changes in terms of personhood and identity that have developed from premodern to modern culture.

John Walton and Tremper Longman III (The Lost World of the Flood) consider many of the stories in the old Testament, and in Genesis 1-11 in particular, to be theological histories. These stories refer to historical events in some sense, but they are not exhaustive accounts. They are structured to convey a theological message.

Biblical narrators thus speak from their worldview and select and emphasize aspects of the past that communicate their interest in God and the relationship between God and his human creatures. For this reason it is appropriate to refer to those biblical books that look to the past as theological histories.

Furthermore, historians, including biblical writers about the past, do more than simply report events (just the facts); they interpret the significance of the events. Indeed, again, biblical authors are not interested in giving us what we need to recreate the event in its pure facticity but rather in using the event to communicate their theological message. It is their theological message that carries the authority God has invested in them. (pp. 22-23)

The biblical authors use rhetorical devices and hyperbole to convey their message.  They do so in a manner that was consistent with accepted practice in the ancient Near East.  The presentation of the message is rhetorically shaped for impact using figurative language. John and Tremper point out that the use of figurative language is not a modern discovery forced on us to resolve conflict with ‘science.’ Origen, writing in the early 200’s noted the presence of figurative language in Genesis 1-3 (See “On First Principles”).  St. Augustine also recognized the presence of figurative language in Genesis.

A personal aside. When I first started digging seriously for answers to intellectual questions raised by the conservative evangelical approach to Christian faith, I read both Augustine’s Confessions and the Ante-Nicene Fathers beginning with volume I. (I did buy a set of books rather cheaply – without matching covers – but you can also find the text online for free, e.g. here or here.) Reading Origen and some of the other early Christian writers was enlightening. The simple “literal” approach of modern fundamentalism was not a universal approach of the church. Reading Origen and Tertullian and others was an enlightening experience. The approach to Genesis was particularly interesting.

A faithful reading of the text as the Word of God will appreciate figurative language and rhetorically shaped narrative for what it is – an appropriate way to tell a theological history relating the work of God in his creation.  “The author wants us to understand the theological significance of these events, and he utilizes figurative language that ancient readers did (and modern readers should) recognize.” (p. 29)

Ok, figurative language is one thing, but what about hyperbole? Isn’t exaggeration simply lying?

John and Tremper point out that it is clear that the Bible does use hyperbole to describe historical events on occasion. It does so in a manner consistent with ancient Near Eastern practice. It does so to emphasize the important theological significance of the events being described. A prime example is found in the book of Joshua. Read the book straight through sometime. The apparent contradictions are obvious. (This is another example that I noticed when listening to Scripture on my commutes. It helped to shape my understanding of Scripture and inspiration. We have to let the Bible define what it means to be inspired – not impose some modern mold and bend the text to fit.) “If we read Joshua 1-12 as a straightforward, dispassionate report of the wars of Joshua, we would have to conclude that all Canaan was taken by the Israelites and not a single Canaanite survived unless they, like Rahab, came over to the Israelite side.” (p. 31) However Joshua 13 and following contradicts this view (as do Judges, Samuel, and Kings). The conquest of Canaan was not actually completed at this point or within Joshua’s lifetime. Nor were all the Canaanites obliterated. John and Tremper conclude with respect to chapters 1-12:

The author is intentionally using universalistic language and intends to convey, rhetorically, that he conquest was complete, but that did not correspond to the actual geographical scope of the conquest, only to the significance of the conquest. Thus is uses hyperbole to make a theological point. (p. 32)

Later they go on:

Our point is that the biblical authors sometimes employed hyperbole in their materials in a way that they expected their readers to recognize. In other words, hyperbole is a convention of writing that was used by ancient authors to make important theological points. (p. 34)

We respect the text as the inspired Word of God. The use of ancient conventions in telling the story doesn’t make it any less inspired. Nor does it make it error-ridden, except when some anachronistic modern expectation is imposed from outside. Hyperbole can be identified in many places throughout the Bible.

They conclude:

Thus, we can see the Bible is not at all averse or slow to use hyperbole to communicate its important theological message … There are historical events behind these hyperbolic statements, but it is hard if not impossible to reconstruct these events in detail because the biblical authors are not so interested in the event itself as their significance for God’s relationship with his people. (p. 35)

Recognition of hyperbole, when it is used and why, will help us better understand the message of the text. It will also help us avoid unnecessary pit holes and rabbit trails.

What role do figurative language and hyperbole play in the biblical text?

How can we recognize these as we read and study?

If you wish to contact me directly you may do so at rjs4mail [at] att.net.

If interested you can subscribe to a full text feed of my posts at Musings on Science and Theology.

In his important book, Faith Formation in a Secular Age, Andrew Root discusses how the age of authenticity (be true to yourself, you gotta be you, I am who I am) is perceived by many as an era of subtraction, and he contends that in this age of authenticity what may be needed is to indwell Secular 3 with our eyes wider open to experience as an echo of transcendence.

First, his (Charles Taylor’s) concept of Subtraction, and that we see the Christian faith as something that secularists have eliminated. Root’s contention is that it is not substracted but that we have added layers over the top.

The social imaginary of Western, particularly Christian, people is one of subtraction. We tend to assume that we’ve gotten to where we are because things have been subtracted from our cultural lives. We see our history as a subtraction wizard’s dream come true. We believe that we are dealing with an epidemic of faith formation because we’ve lost moral commitment, dropped prayer in school, declined in church attendance. Or maybe if that isn’t the list, there are other losses that have led us to this predicament. Conservatives are particularly good at heralding narratives of subtraction, but mainline liberals are also not averse to this interpretation, tending to concede the erroneous and exclusive humanist claim that, once we subtract religion from our civilization, we’ll become a much more logical and peaceful people.

Rather than subtraction, we’ve added layers of authenticity and youthfulness, creating forms of cultural and social life where “the God gap,” for many, simply isn’t there.

In such a context the term “faith” or our “faith” has been changed. It’s not so much encounter with the transcendent God as it is choice of authentic selves.

Because of the age of authenticity, faith is presumed to underlie religious participation and particular beliefs. In the age of authenticity the self is buffered and freely seeks its own path from the place of its own volition, so what I want to do and believe is what I do and believe. What I give my personal time and commitment to shapes my identity. I am what I consent to and participate in.

In the 
age of authenticity, the self is buffered, the world is disenchanted, and God is always on the verge of being reduced to a psychologically created imaginary.

Notice how faith comes to expression here.

The real problem with subtraction stories is that they turn everything, including God, into a concept. In the age of authenticity, I individually evaluate concepts for their worth; I pick and choose those that most help me follow my own path to authenticity. Concepts do not put a demand on me. So if the concept of God helps me be authentically me, then it is worth keeping. … The job of the truly authentic person is to subtract all concepts that are blocking the path to authenticity.

When faith formation is mobilized as a way to keep young people from sliding, drifting, or slipping away from faith, we’ve failed to notice that we ourselves have given in to the logic of subtraction.

In the end, faith is not really “something” but rather “the absence of subtraction.” Faith is not constructive but is rather the (chosen) unwillingness to subtract a concept from your individually constituted fence (most often given to you by your parents). We don’t treat faith as a movement into a new reality or a sense of entering into the Spirit; neither does faith mean relating to God and others in some different way. Rather, we operate as though faith is simply the willingness to resist subtraction.

A great element of this chapter is the three levels of Secular. I give his three then his summary:

Secular 1: Sacred versus Secular Planes
Secular 2: Religious versus A-religious Spaces
Secular 3: The Negating of Transcendence

In Secular 1 the zone for transcendence was a dual plane of the eternal and temporal. In Secular 2 the zone for the transcendent was reduced to spatial locales. Secular 2 locked transcendence in the religious space. In Secular 3 the zone for transcendence becomes negated. Now in front of the doorway into the transcendent are barriers with signs that read “closed” and “out of order.

Moral therapeutic deism is totally reconfigured, not as an invasion but as the inevitable form of faith designed by the age of authenticity.

All of this means that something like MTD (which is paradigmatic for the struggle we feel in faith formation) is not the consequence of a dreary church that has subtracted serious faith formation from its mind. Rather, MTD is the direct project (and in fact the endorsed and honored perspective) of faith built for the immanent frame of Secular 3 and the age of authenticity.

MTD is a form of faith where the actuality of a personal (ontologically other) God is unbelievable and transcendence is impossible.

The additions that allow the immanent frame and Secular 3 to take hold also allow for the age of authenticity to dawn.

To say it technically, an expressive porous self, a scientific positivism, and disengaged reason free you from all obligation and duty, to authentically follow your immanent and natural desires, to seek the natural and material urges of your id before (and even in opposition to) any transcendent call. In other words, you now must serve your own journey, your own desires, more than the call of any divine being or transcendent purpose, because after all (Secular 3 tells us), they may not really exist at all.

Cross pressure is an expression he uses for echoes of transcendence in our experience, as when a parent holds a new born child. There’s more here. (Marcus Borg was well known for his emphasis on “more” in our experiences.)

What is perhaps most suggestive is what we can do about it: if experience is the only game in town in the age of authenticity, we might follow it into its world to find more echoes of transcendence.

Yet, unable to circumvent the blockage and walk through this door, we are more attuned than ever, in the age of authenticity, to our feelings and individual expressions. Therefore, we can’t help feeling the cross-pressure, sensing an echo of lost transcendence we try to ignore. We have to ignore it because it has been negated. But in the oddest way, we hear a soft call to enter this negation. Perhaps the only way to imagine faith and faith formation in the age of authenticity, where Secular 3 reigns, is to explore it through the very zone&Secular 3 gives us—to seek an understanding of faith in and through negation (by “negation” I mean experiences of loss, brokenness, and death, but also the liminality of joy and transformational hope that seeks for the negated to be made new).

This is the final part in a four-part series (part 1 part 2 and part 3) that applies the instruments of social science to address the declining attendance rate in the American church and what to do about it.

The 3^rd ACF: “Me” Culture

How hyper-individualism is killing the Church

A shift has occurred. We have moved from a “we” culture to a “me” culture. Since the 1950s, American society has been reorienting markedly toward valuing individualism, and it’s reached a point where it has become a prime factor responsible for pulling our Church community apart. We are more likely to understand ourselves in relation to our selves than in how we affect and are affected by others.

This is a difficult one for us Americans to fully identify, because describing individualism would be like describing water to a fish. It is all around us — it’s normal. It’s perhaps even one of the attributes that has helped America become so materially successful. But we can see it more clearly by comparing different time periods in America, contrasting today’s society with when we were more community oriented.

During WW2, American propaganda invoked men to participate by calling them to do their duty for their country. To fulfill their community obligation. Not because it’s something that would serve their individual interests, but the good of the whole. In a more individualistic culture, appealing to the value of community obligation would fall flat on deaf ears. Today, the Army applies a different tactic — appealing to the individual. What will the army do for me? The Army will help me “be all I can be.”

In his newest book, Harvard Political Scientist Robert Putnam illustrates the water we swim in by highlighting the colloquial definition of the phrase “our kids” and how it has changed in meaning over the past decades. In 1950, when parents used the phrase “our kids,” in general they were claiming responsibility over the kids of their community at large. Today, in a more individualistic world, when parents invoke the phrase “our kids,” they are much more likely to be referring to their own biological kids. Their sense of responsibility is more confined to their own kin, not the larger social network around them.

An example: How this affects the Church?

Imagine that you are in church that has a youth program that appears to be decaying. How might a parent who is oriented towards community respond compared to a more individualistic parent?

• Orientation towards community (the past)

The parent from the 1950s would be more likely to jump in and see it as her duty to help build the program back up to vibrancy. She might volunteer, host a gathering, or teach a class. If someone asked her to justify her new zeal, she might respond with something like “our kids deserve better than what they are getting — so I’m going to work at it.”

• Orientation towards the self (today)

A more individualistic parent might have sympathy for other kids, but when push comes to shove, it’s his kids he’s concerned about. When confronted with the problem of an anemic youth program, he is more likely to complain, remain silent… or simply look for an alternative youth program and move to a different church so his own kids are better off. If he was pressed to justify his actions, he might say “our kids deserve better than what they are getting — so I’m going to go somewhere else.”

Please read these two stories again. If you are a pastor or elder, can you imagine what your community would look like if it was filled with people that were oriented more toward the whole than themselves individually? Now consider what your community would look like if the people were kind and considerate, but ultimately more concerned about their own well-being. Actually, I doubt you have to imagine, because it’s most likely your reality.

One crucial point: Humans are necessarily both individualistic and collectivistic. This argument is not intended to fillet people for thinking about themselves. The problem, however, is that we’ve reached such an extreme — the “hyper” in hyper-individualism — that it’s having significant impacts on our communities, even our faith, and our systems are beginning to reflect and perpetuate that problem. The pH of the water around us has become so imbalanced that we don’t even realize we’re swimming in acid.

Before church leaders begin pointing fingers and complaining about brothers and sisters being hyper-individualistic (we almost all are, including me), let’s acknowledge that we’re all responsible for selling out and reinforcing a strong me culture by adopting a particular model of church.

Addressing the Me Culture

The most popular form of church employed today is a model that accepts a weekly church gathering as its main expression. The majority of parishioners attend a Sunday worship service that consumes about an hour or two a week, and then done — obligation met. In a consumer-driven me culture, the service with the best music and the most magnetic preacher typically attracts the most attention, so many churches focus the bulk of their resources on enhancements like these. Unfortunately, this line of thinking mistakes grabbing attention as synonymous with building commitment.

Attention is not commitment.

Commitment is the bedrock of community.

Attention is what you find on Tinder: It’s lost as easily as it’s gained.

What is the way forward? Instead of culture guiding the Church, let’s be formed by the Word. The primary metaphor the authors of the New Testament used to describe the Church was not…

A Ted Talk

A show

A concert

A performance

A rally

The primary metaphor of the New Testament authors is… FAMILY.

Family is bound to each other, during times of plenty and of famine. When they enjoy each other’s company and when they don’t. When they want to pay attention and when they don’t.

So where does this take us? What model helps us flourish?

Form and Function

Form should follow function. If you don’t start with purpose first, desired outcomes are not achieved. For example, the function of a green house is to grow healthy plants. Since plants need the sun and a specific climate to thrive, green houses are formed with plenty of windows and air temperature control. Or, consider the example in the negative: What if, instead of windows, a green house had concrete walls all the way around that were painted with thick green paint in order to justify its name somehow? The building’s design would not permit adequate sunlight to penetrate, and the plants would suffer from it. Consequently, the green house would not achieve its goal in growing healthy plants.

It’s a simple example, and yet we violate the same principles all the time. If the Church is called to be a family, and form should follow function, then the form it takes should focus first and foremost on cultivating a family. Jesus used metaphors that we understand intimately. If you are a parent, you probably know better than most what best practices form healthy families. Families eat with one another frequently throughout the week. They share with one another. They bear with another. They take care of each other. An ideal family typically lives near each other in order to check in on one another.

Meeting once a week in large gatherings is not what families do. It’s what family reunion are. Tell me this. How would you feel if you had a family reunion every Sunday?

If the church is going to address the ACF of ME

than the church must prioritize gatherings that cultivate family

Concluding to the Series

I can understand if you find this series depressing. I wasn’t really trying to put a positive spin on the decline of the church. I was diagnosing our problem.

When your dentist says you have eight cavities, he isn’t trying to depress you. He’s trying to help. We all now have two choices concerning our cavities. We can cough up the cash and enter into the intense pain of dental work to repair our teeth or… avoid it and hope that the cavities will go away.

Out of these two options, which one do you think is the right thing to do?

Why?

Sometimes facing reality is tough and depressing.

But you know what would be more depressing? Ignoring the problem and hoping it will go away.

I’m concerned that a mentor of mine is right—for the majority of churches, leaders, elder boards, and church leaders… the patient isn’t sick enough yet for the Church to change.

I hold out hope that he is wrong.

Whatever your disagreements with my proposals on how churches address the ACFs, you must come up with your own methods and practices to address them. The reality is that our house is structurally damaged, and cosmetic solutions will not solve the problem. You must wrestle with the reality that the 3 ACFs are actually poisoning our communities.

• Sprawl
• Technology
• “Me” culture

In my humble opinion, the churches that will most successfully and faithfully navigate the 21^st century challenges the ACFs present are churches that follow… 

The 3 Ws

• Walkability – The congregation living closer together
• Wisdom – The congregation discerning careful, intentional practices with technology
• We – The congregation prioritizing gatherings that cultivate family

If you have questions, I would love to talk.

Send me a Facebook message

Or email me at

[email protected]

To the casual observer one of truly odd features of late 20th and early 21st Century New Testament studies is that historical Jesus scholars (of the Jesus Seminar mode — Crossan, Funk, Borg) rejected apocalyptic as the context for explaining Jesus while some Pauline scholars (of the J. Louis Martyn mode — Martyn, Beker, Käsemann, Gaventa, Campbell) think apocalyptic is the context for explaining Paul. From the non-apocalyptic Jesus to the apocalyptic Paul. Another oddity: scholarship since J. Weiss, A. Schweitzer, and others up through folks like Dale Allison, have all thought Jesus was apocalyptic and not so much Paul. They may have thought the apocalyptic Jesus was irrelevant to moderns but they thought Jesus was absorbed in apocalypticism.

Theologians often pick up biblical scholarship and “theologize.” Combine Karl Barth (or the early Barth) and the apocalyptic Paul and you get a theologian like Philip Ziegler, and his new book, Militant Grace: The Apocalyptic Turn and the Future of Christian Theology.

Let’s skip an important issue: Is “apocalyptic” in apocalyptic Paul and in the apocalyptic turn based on Jewish apocalypses and Jewish apocalyptic or not? N.T. Wright, for one, has made a pretty good case for calling into question the way apocalyptic Paul folks have used the term.

Let’s not skip, nor dwell on, another feature: the apocalyptic Paul and apocalyptic theologians have made this an either-or fight. Either apocalyptic or new perspective? Either apocalyptic or the old-new issues? It’s a false dichotomy for so many, including John Barclay who embraces many elements of old and new and apocalyptic. In addition, there are distinct features of the apocalyptic folks that are also found in NT Wright under categories like eschatology and apocalyptic.

At some point the claim that everything is new, or that it shatters everything prior to the revelation of God in Christ, etc, becomes so new it can’t make sense, so new that it sounds (if you’ll forgive me this one criticism) like the golden tablets of Joseph Smith), so new “Messiah” is divorced from the Story of Israel, and so new the discontinuity crushes the continuity that alone makes sense of what “new” means.

But I want to take a healthy look at Ziegler’s new book and sketch what he has to say. He goes to Beverly Gaventa to define apocalyptic gospel:

As Gaventa concisely puts it, “Paul’s apocalyptic theology has to do with the conviction that in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God has invaded the world as it is, thereby revealing the world’s utter distortion and foolishness, reclaiming the world, and inaugurating a battle that will doubtless culminate in the triumph of God over all God’s enemies (including the captors Sin and Death). This means that the Gospel is first, last, and always about God’s powerful and gracious initiative.

Ziegler states it for himself:

To pursue an “apocalyptic turn” in Christian dogmatics is thus simply to learn anew what it means to “never boast of anything but the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world,” as Paul wrote (Gal. 6:14). The effort, in short, is to do theology in a manner both shaken and disciplined by the “elemental interruption of the continuity of life” that the gospel is and brings about.

I came of age reading Ladd and Ridderbos; I see nothing in these two quotations that I did not see in their salvation historical approach to New Testament theology. I don’t see why old, new and apocalyptic — not to ignore participatory theology in Michael Gorman — can’t find far more common ground than disagreement. The battle in the coming decade ought to be for finding where we can agree.

Ziegler opens with a chapter that contrasts (radically) historicism (of the Troeltschian mode, but do folks adhere to that today? does he not have others in mind?) with apocalyptic theology. Historicism is “allergic to the eschatological” and in it there “is nothing but history” and that “theology exhausts its mandate in the practice of cultural analysis and criticism.” That’s nothing but a radical contrast. At the end of the chp he says historicism is “an intellectually sophisticated mode of unbelief.”

Now, an eschatological dogmatics will inevitably press hard on precisely th
is neuralgic point, resisting historicism’s seeming evacuation of genuine transcendence. … For should we finally be forced to admit that salvation “can signify nothing other than the gradual emergence of the fruits of the higher life,” then closing time will truly have come to the bureau of eschatology, and the world will be left—falsely—to suffer under the chilling laws of its own aimless contingency.

Is all this about Troeltsch? No examples are given.

He finds an ally of his apocalyptic theology in the radical Lutheran theologian, Gerhard Forde. Terms like radical, catastrophic, death vs. life, radical discontinuity, radical break, neo-genesis, but perhaps “salvation by catastrophe” is his singular expression.

Apocalyptic theology is a struggle for transcendence in theological reflection, it is about ends — finality, grace is an ontology and not just eschatology, and monergism.

Ziegler’s contention is that this new apocalyptic theology must be embraced. But…

In view is a new kind of “apocalyptic theology” that overturns the high modern view of apocalyptic as a merely antiquarian curiosity while, at the same time, repudiating the weaponized eschatologies of soothsaying doomsday calendarists, often associated with popular varieties of “apocalypticism.” [Left Behind stuff]

This new sensibility is evident when graduating mainline seminarians are instructed that they must appropriate an apocalyptic “attitude” and “movement of mind,” because their ministry and the churches they will serve “can never make do or be legitimate . . . without the themes of the radical sovereignty of God and the exercise of that sovereignty through the cross and resurrection of [God’s] royal agent, Jesus Christ.”

Thus, re-enter apocalyptic as a theology of grace and gospel.

It represents an originary theological discourse with which Christians have described the world, and we in it, with relentless formative reference to the sovereign God of the gospel of salvation in Jesus Christ.

Ziegler rightly shows the significance of Karl Barth to this new kind of apocalyptic theology. How so?

For Barth’s early theology, as crystallized around the second edition of the Romans commentary, was marked by a volatile conjunction of themes that together fill out the meaning of the Krisis (the radical crisis) that Paul’s gospel represents: the radical priority of divine agency in salvation, the uncompromisingly “vertical” or transcendent nature of God’s action, the real evangelical power of God—a theme taken up from the Blumhardts—the inviolate particularity of the incarnation, and the sharp contrast between the old on which God’s grace and Spirit fall, and the new thing brought into being thereby.

All of this is what Barth meant by “eschatology.” Barth is clearly influential in deep ways on Käsemann and J. Louis Martyn, and then on all the apocalyptic theologians mentioned above. Martyn’s big influence was retrospectively rethinking everything in light of the death and resurrection. In this approach, at times — too often — Jesus is turned into an event (cross, resurrection) and personhood, incarnation, etc., are diminished or ignored. McCormack contends this approach has the weaknesses of the early Barth vs. the later forensic Barth. Ziegler presses on to Walter Lowe, Nate Kerr (critical) and Douglas Harink — who appropriates Barth into an apocalyptic framework.

So Ziegler proposes the following six theses on apocalyptic theology:

1. A Christian theology funded by a fresh hearing of New Testament apocalyptic will discern in that distinctive and difficult idiom a discourse uniquely adequate both to announce the full scope, depth, and radicality of the gospel of God, and to bespeak the actual and manifest contradiction of that gospel by the actuality of the times in which we live.

2. A Christian theology funded by a fresh hearing of New Testament apocalyptic will turn on a vigorous account of divine revelation in Jesus Christ as the unsurpassable eschatological act of redemption; its talk of God and treatment of all other doctrines will thus be marked by an intense christological concentration.

3. A Christian theology funded by a fresh hearing of New Testament apocalyptic will stress the unexpected, new, and disjunctive character of the divine work of salvation that comes on the world of sin in and through Christ. As a consequence, in its account of the Christian life, faith, and hope, it will make much of the ensuing evangelical “dualisms.’

4. A Christian theology funded by a fresh hearing of New Testament apocalyptic will provide an account of salvation as a “three-agent drama” of divine redemption in which human beings are rescued from captivity to the anti-God powers of sin, death, and the devil. In addition to looking to honor the biblical witness, this is also, it is wagered, an astute and realistic gesture of notable explanatory power.

5. A Christian theology funded by a fresh hearing of New Testament apocalyptic will acknowledge that it is the world and not the church that is the ultimate object of divine salvation. It will thus conceive of the church as a creation of the Word, a provisional and pilgrim community gathered, upheld, and sent to testify in word and deed to the gospel for the sake of the world. Both individually and corporately, the Christian life is chiefly to be understood as militant discipleship in evangelical freed
om.

6. A Christian theology funded by a fresh hearing of New Testament apocalyptic will adopt a posture of prayerful expectation of an imminent future in which God will act decisively and publicly to vindicate the victory of Life and Love over Sin and Death. The ordering of its tasks and concentration of its energies will befit the critical self-reflection of a community that prays, “Let grace come and let this world pass away.’