Weekly Meanderings 10 May 2014

Last updated on: May 8, 2014 at 2:18 pm By Scot McKnight

But did they really discover Herod’s tomb?

After Herod died in 4 B.C., he was buried at Herodium—but where? A few years ago, it seemed that the question was solved. Eminent Herodium archaeologist Ehud Netzer declared that he had found Herod’s impressive mausoleum. (Netzer passed away in 2010, and all of his BAR articles—including his posthumously published article on the discovery of Herod’s Tomb—are available here for free).

The Israel Museum put together the exhibit Herod the Great: The King’s Final Journey around the 25-mile procession from the throne room in Jericho to the tomb Netzer discovered in Herodium. This extremely popular exhibit guided visitors around the modest tomb of the megalomaniac ruler. This discrepancy gave some scholars pause; would one of history’s most renowned builders (and, let’s not forget, largest egos) really have been interred in a simple tomb?

Hebrew University scholars Joseph Patrich and Benjamin Arubas are just as confident that this was not Herod’s tomb as Netzer was sure that it was. In “Was Herod’s Tomb Really Found?” in the May/June 2014 issue ofBiblical Archaeology Review, editor Hershel Shanks examines the evidence and weighs in as the hunt for Herod’s tomb continues.

Shanks writes, “Netzer did find an impressive mausoleum at Herodium. It contained three remarkable sarcophagi. It is located, however, on the slope of the dramatic man-made mountain that marks the site from afar.” Patrich and Arubas compare Herod’s tomb at Herodium with contemporary royal tombs of the period, and Herod’s pales in light of the others’ monumentality.

Diane Leclerc:

If we define human holiness as being sinless, we have defined it merely by an absence. But holiness is never a passive condition of having abstained from certain wrongs. It requires the purposeful desire to walk rightly. The best definition of holiness, then, is love—an active, engaged, embodied love for God, each other, and the world.

In the context of the church, holiness means living out this call of love in relation to one another. In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul outlines how a holy church should function.

First, the church’s purpose is to represent Christ on earth. We become the body of Christ in his bodily absence. We are to go where Christ would go and do the ministry Christ would do. We are to minister to the poor, the outcast, the stranger, and the vulnerable. We are to feed them, invite them in, heal them, and show them hospitality. Our hearts are cleansed by God; this impels us, as the church, to get our feet dirty in the world’s messiness. If the church is to be holy, it must fulfill its ultimate purpose as Christ’s body, with outstretched hands.

Second, the church is meant to fulfill its purpose by living with each other in a vital,interdependent way. There is no individualism in the body, no such thing as a solitary Christian. The ear or eye cannot say of another part, “I don’t need you.” Rather, every part of the body needs every other part if the body is to fulfill its purpose on earth. Although we are called to love the whole world, there is a particular love we owe to each other. When one part mourns, all mourn. When one part rejoices, all rejoice. We depend on each other when life becomes difficult. We depend on each other to lift our praises to God. If the church is to be holy, it must be characterized by relationships of mutual love and care.

Third, the body of Christ is called to value all of its parts in equal measure. This would have been surprising to Paul’s audience. “Equality” was not a concept in Greco-Roman society. Everyone had a particular part to play, but it was very clear who had value—who had power and authority—and who didn’t. Paul dares to proclaim that in God’s economy, the less presentable parts have equal value. The “disabled” parts are treated with special honor. If the church is to be holy, it must affirm that every part—every person—is highly valued, equally needed, and deeply loved.

And, of course, 1 Corinthians 12 is followed by chapter 13, the grand “love chapter.” Paul implies that all the problems he has addressed up to this point would work themselves out if only love reigned as it ought. Love is at the very center of holiness. Love is how holiness expresses itself. We could even venture to say that holiness itself is love.

Chicago Muslims call for more efforts:

A Chicago Islamic organization is joining the global outcry, calling on President Barack Obama and other world leaders to do more to help rescue more than 200 kidnapped Nigerian girls and stop attacks in the country attributed to militant group Boko Haram.

“They’re having a field day that we as members of the world community should not let them have,” said Aminah McCloud, a professor of religious studies and director of the Islamic World Studies program at DePaul University.

In a sometimes emotional press conference Thursday at the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago office downtown, Muslim leaders and educators condemned what they call barbaric and horrific mass kidnappings and other deadly attacks in Nigeria attributed to Boko Haram.

Obama’s administration announced Tuesday it would send an American team of experts to Nigeria to support the response to the April 14 kidnapping of the girls. The militant group’s leader has threatened to sell the girls “on the market,” prompting a warning from the United Nations that this would make the perpetrators liable for war crimes….

The Muslim leaders also sought to differentiate Islam from the acts of the militant group. Boko Haram’s five-year insurgency is aimed at reviving a medieval Islamic caliphate in modern Nigeria. The group has claimed responsibility for deadly bomb blasts in recent weeks.

But there is no interpretation of Islam that would explain or justify these acts, said Dr. Mohammed Kaiseruddin, chair and co-founder of the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago.

Brian McLaren responds with grace and not a little challenge, all in classic McLaren fashion:

So if my only option were to be a Christian in the way you are, I simply could not be a Christian. My conscience wouldn’t allow it. My understanding of the Bible wouldn’t allow it. My devotion to Christ wouldn’t allow it. If you want to define me as a false teacher, not a true Christian, etc., etc., you are certainly free to do that, and I don’t hold it against you. I honor you for speaking your mind, and for doing so with far more decency and kindness than some of your colleagues. You are a good man with a good heart, trying to do the right thing.

When I started on this path, I knew it would not be an easy road. I expected to lose almost all my friends, lose my ministry, lose everything. But I felt, as Paul did, that it would be worth it to risk and lose everything in order to honestly and truly seize hold of what I believed God was calling me toward.

Yes, I did lose some friends. In fact, there have been many losses. But to my surprise, there were other blessings that came. People started approaching me, often in tears, saying, “If I hadn’t found your books, I would have left the faith entirely.” Not just one or two people, but many. Many pastors have even told me the same thing. This has continued for over 15 years now, and if anything, the intensity and frequency of these responses only seems to be increasing.

I know you hope and pray that this won’t happen, and I realize this is pretty unlikely … but when your kids or grandkids are older, one or two of them may come to you and say, “Dad (or Grandpa), I’m sorry, but I just can’t believe the version of Christianity you taught me. I love you, and I don’t want to displease you, but I took this course in college, and we learned ….”

If that happens, I’m sure you’ll do your best to turn them back to the straight path as you understand it. But if that doesn’t work, if they simply can not in good conscience follow your path, I hope you’ll consider slipping them one of my books or something by the kinds of post-conservative/post-liberal writers I mentioned earlier. It will not be what you would have wished. It will not motivate them to believe in verbal plenary inspiration, absolute inerrancy, TULIP, women’s subordination, the unacceptability of gay people as gay people, or eternal conscious torment in hell. But it will encourage them to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God. There are worse things they could live by than that.

Latin Americans in the USA and their shifting faith:

Hispanic religion is in a huge period of flux in the United States, a new survey finds, with the share of Latinos who call themselves Catholic dropping sharply — by 12 percentage points — in just the past four years as many are drawn to both spirit-filled Pentecostalism and to disaffiliation.

Experts say the future of U.S. Catholicism depends on adjusting to Latino needs….

But Cary Funk, a senior researcher with Pew, said the movement away from Catholicism in the U.S. was “striking” even with all the spiritual browsing that Americans are doing. The survey found one in four Latinos is a former Catholic.

Fifty-five percent are Catholic, down from 67 percent in 2010. Twenty-two percent are Protestant, 18 percent unaffiliated.

“Broadly, it’s a similar level of religious switching. But the size of the change and the speed is unusually large,” she said. “What we’re seeing is a greater religious pluralism among Latinos.”

Many experts feel the U.S. church hasn’t been fast enough at responding to the growth in Latinos, and a Boston College study also released this week found only one in four parishes has an organized ministry to Latinos, even though 33 percent of all Catholics are Hispanic.

Jackson Wu and the gospel:

One should not confuse the gospel and the response. If we do, we run into a logical problem, which could either be called a “vicious circle” or an “infinite regression” (depending on how you frame the problem). Let me illustrate.

Greg Gilbert and Kevin DeYoung, in What is the Mission of the Church? make this critical mistake. When discussing Mark 1:15, they write,

“It is wrong to say that the gospel is the declaration that the kingdom of God has come. The gospel of the kingdom is the declaration of the kingdom of God together with the means of entering it. Remember, Jesus did not preach ‘the kingdom of God is at hand.’ He preached, ‘The kingdom of God is at hand; therefore repent and believe!’ ” (110–11).

They misquote the end of the verse. It should say, “. . . repent and believe the gospel.”

Why does their misquote matter?

In short, they would have disproven their own point if they had quoted the passage correctly. Observe how the grammar proves the distinction between the gospel and our response.

In other words, the content of the gospel and the response to the gospel are separate ideas and should not be collapsed into one.

Gilbert and DeYoung assert the gospel itself includes the way we are saved, i.e. if we respond with faith and repentance, we are saved. However, if this is Jesus’ meaning, what actually is Jesus saying? We can do some simple substitution of terms.

“believe the gospel = believe [that by repenting & believing the gospel, we are saved].“

But now we run into a problem. The thing we are supposed to believe (i.e. the gospel), includes the need to believe the gospel! Accordingly, if Gilbert and DeYoung are correct, then Jesus commands something like this:

“. . . repent and believe that you can repent and believe the truth that you can repent and believe . . . .” (and so the cycle goes on).

I know that last sentence makes little to no sense. That’s the point.

(I tried to make clear what I think their misquote makes unclear by italicizing the word “that” in the quotation. I do this to signify the content that one is supposed to believe. In Mark 1:15, Jesus inserts “the gospel.” However, if the gospel is a “how-to” message, then I could simply plug in a conditional if-then statement in its place.)

What results? If we must believe the gospel is a conditional statement wherein we are saved if we believe the gospel, then we end up with a vicious cycle. We wind up with an infinite loop.

The “gospel” (as the Bible uses the word) is not a “how-to” concept expressed in the form of a conditional sentence (i.e. “If . . . then . . .”).

Instead, it is a declaration that implies a command.

The gospel is a declaration of Jesus’ kingship, implying a summons to allegiance.

To be Biblical is to be Political (2, by Jackson Wu)

Last updated on: May 2, 2014 at 8:27 pm By Scot McKnight

Jackson Wu teaches theology and missiology for Chinese pastors. He blogs at www. jacksonwu.org. Wu has also written Saving God’s Face: A Chinese Contextualization of Salvation through Honor and Shame (2013). Follow him on Twitter by clicking here.

A Review of Christian Political Witness (Part 2)

In the last post, I reviewed the first few chapters of Christian Political Witness. The authors lay the solid theological foundation for the essays that follow. They all argue that being biblical necessarily entails being political in a more comprehensive sense than most people think.

What does this look like practically? This is the subject of chapters 5–12 in CPW.

In the coming weeks, I will look at a few of these essays in detail, applying them to the situation in China as it relates to the Chinese church.

Being Political is Practical

Theology is inherently political; this is why it is practical.

George Kalantzis (ch. 5) explores the social (i.e. political) significance of civil disobedience and suffering, especially martyrdom, as evidence by the early church. Jana Bennett (ch. 6) argues that family is far more political than people typically assume. Intriguingly, the sharp distinction between family and public life makes an idol of the individual and compromises the church’s witness. William Cavanaugh’s brilliant analysis in ch. 7 shows how emphasizing economic freedom over political equality subtly creates a class system in contradistinction to the gospel.

Peter Leithart (ch. 8) and Daniel Bell (ch. 9) challenge the reader to rethink what (s)he means by terms like “violence” and “justice.”

According to Leithart, we should distinguish “power” from “violence.” The most common use of force/violence appears where power is absent or is threatened. Thus, violence is not to be identified with power (158–59).

This misunderstanding about power and violence leads people to misunderstand the church’s political nature.

According to Bell, the way one talks about war exposes how far we veer from biblical thinking.

People tend to go through a list of criteria to decide whether a war is “just.” In addition, “just wars” typically concern the defense of national interests. Yet, Bell warns, unjust people cannot fight just wars. Rather than looking for reasons why “we” shouldn’t kill the enemy (traditional “just war” theory), why aren’t Christians more concerned with helping our enemies?

Being Practical is Costly

How does the church distinguish itself from the state? In what sense can Christians say “we” when talking about the actions of their country, e.g. “We went to war” or “We won’t get involved in that conflict.” Who is the “we”?

If “we” is the church, Jennifer McBride (ch. 10) suggests that “we” should repent of the various ways we have been complicit in social problems and apathetic to political injustices. When Christians forget that they fundamentally are citizens of God’s kingdom, not the national-state, then they become arrogant or presumptuous in political matters.

Even when we are not directly to blame for some social injustice, the church should follow the example of Christ, who took responsibility for the world’s sin, despite the fact that Christ was sinless.

Finally, David Gushee (ch. 11) and David Gitaritt (ch. 12), each in his own way, provide sober reminders that gospel ministry is costly in more ways that some think. Gushee’s dizzying survey of contemporary social-political debates is sure to offend everyone; for that, we should be thankful. His provocative essay should push readers to consider why they (dis)agree and how they plan to solve the problem.

Gitaritt’s chapter is a testimony that a Christian political witness is not a theoretical issue. It is costly. His struggle against various injustices in Africa illustrates one way that one man has tried to practice what he preaches.

Theology without Politics is Theoretical

Some readers will find these chapters difficult.

At one level, some topics like “just war” and “injustice in Africa” will seem theoretical and far removed from daily life. In addition, others will consistently want to insert a “but . . . ” in the middle of a paragraph to counterbalance a writer’s argument.

At another level, however, these chapters demonstrate afresh that theology should be concrete. If, for example, our theology does not compel people to confront evil in the world and solve problems in society, then we must question whether our theology is Christian. None of the authors ever minimize evangelism; they in fact affirm the necessity of preaching the gospel. However, they recognize a fact often overlooked:

Evangelism is an inherently political action. Why? The gospel . . .

. . . calls people to give ultimate allegiance to King Jesus, not the nation-state.

. . . creates a distinct, holy people who shine as lights in a dark world, exposing its demons and corruption.

. . . proclaims a kingdom that spans the entire world.

. . . transcends ethnicity, culture, gender, economics, and political affiliation.

I would offer this advice to those who read the book (which I recommend people do). Do not expect the authors to tell you exactly how to apply each point to your context. That is too much to ask of one book.

That is why I will be following up these posts with an entire series that gives a “practical review” of select essays. I will focus on implications for the church in China.

Finally, I hasten to add that the authors consistently make “positive” arguments. They do not simply rail against “the West.” Neither do they campaign for a particular political party.

What else is needed?

Though I have been long on praise for the book, I will note a few potential drawbacks. Admittedly, books cannot do everything.

If I could have added a chapter, I would have liked to see more concentrated attention given to the topic of evangelism specifically. To be clear, the authors certainly affirm the importance of evangelism. However, I would like to see more than simply arguing for a both-and relationship between evangelism and social action (cf. Gitaritt’s chapter). I think readers would find it helpful to see how the authors reconceive or reframe the topic of evangelism.

In my opinion, a few essays lack in clarity to match the profound points they make. For instance, I would like to have seen Bennett and McBride develop their line of thought a bit more so that readers will not miss their valuable contributions. As they are, I had to give considerably more time to understanding their reasoning.

Even so, it was worth the labor.

Weekly Meanderings, 19 April 2014

Last updated on: April 18, 2014 at 6:24 pm By Scot McKnight

Best story of the week:

Most children, Asher Svidensky says, are a little intimidated by golden eagles. Kazakh boys in western Mongolia start learning how to use the huge birds to hunt for foxes and hares at the age of 13, when the eagles sit heavily on their undeveloped arms. Svidensky, a photographer and travel writer, shot five boys learning the skill – and he also photographed Ashol-Pan.

“To see her with the eagle was amazing,” he recalls. She was a lot more comfortable with it, a lot more powerful with it and a lot more at ease with it.”…

He describes Ashol-Pan as a smiling, sweet and shy girl. His photographs of her engaging in what has been a male activity for around 2,000 years say something about Mongolia in the 21st Century.

If you are in Lake County and want to eat some good BBQ, check out Big Ed’s BBQ.

I like this part in Kermit’s post about Bubba Watson: (by the way, my friend Kermit Zarley helped start the PGA Tour Bible Study, and he’s full of stories about faith on tour).

He grew up in Bagdad, Fla., as one of the good guys: “Didn’t cuss, didn’t cheat, didn’t steal, didn’t lie, didn’t drink, didn’t do drugs,” he said. “I was doing the right things but I didn’t know what that meant.”

It wasn’t until his senior year in high school when two twin neighbor girls, from the house directly behind his, invited Watson to their youth group. He went and found a place where he belonged.

“The girls asked me to go to church,” he said. “And after a few times going I realized this is what I wanted to do. This is truth here. And I gave myself to the Lord.”

But with all the pressures of college golf, especially on the weekends, it wasn’t until 2004 that Watson became serious about his commitment to Christ at the University of Georgia. He began dating Angie Ball (former WNBA player) and the two began living for God as a couple.

“We wanted to be Christ followers,” Watson said. “We wanted to do the right thing. We started turning to the Lord for our decisions.”

The couple married in September 2004 and were both baptized later that year, the day after Christmas: “I would say 2004 was my true time of becoming a Christian,” Watson said, “and shaping me into the man I am today.”

Jeni Rogers, the kind of teacher we all want to have:

After several minutes, one of her 24 students, a boy, eased up to her the way fifth-grade boys do, looked her in the face and said, “I’m so glad you’re here. I love you so much.”

And suddenly Jeni Rogers, a teacher known throughout her school community for her ability to build connections based on mutual respect with her students, their parents and her peers, felt it all pay off.

The teacher who has built a career by building confidence in others, by knowing exactly what motivates them and how to push them to excel, by demonstrating the importance of caring, had come face to face with a student who not only learned those lessons, but instinctively knew how to apply them.

“It was,” she says now, “like a gift from God.”

Funny she should say that, because after almost 30 years in Prairie classrooms, many of the folks she has come in contact with feel Rogers is something of a gift herself.

“I cannot do justice in words to express my gratitude for the passion, commitment and excellence of Jeni Rogers,” parent Jennifer Curtin wrote in one of many emails the Daily Herald received nominating Rogers as a teacher worth celebrating.

Curtain said her son was in Rogers’ class and she hopes her daughter will be, too.

“She changed my child for the better, and we feel absolutely blessed to have had her in our lives,” Curtain wrote. “Jeni Rogers is a diamond among gems in our Naperville Unit District 203 school district team.”

William Hurlbut, at Big Questions, addresses what makes human distinct:

In the felicitous phrase of Benedict Ashley, the human person is “embodied intelligent freedom.” Conceived in this way, no single capacity or function defines the essence of human nature. Rather, the full human person, body, soul and spirit, forms an irreducible psychophysical unity of lived experience within the dynamic journey of historical being.

Our particular form of embodiment: upright posture, free swinging arms, and fully formed hands with opposable thumb, the range and cross referencing of our senses, including our highly refined sense of sight—all of these extend our reach and realm, allowing a knowing and accurate encounter with the world and a freedom for creative and constructive action within the world. Our furless face, with thirty fine-tuned muscles of expression and vocal articulation, provide the means of intersubjective relationality, social communication and cooperation, allowing cultural transformation and the transmission of accumulated knowledge. And our cognitive capacities for perception, analysis, interpretation and productive imagination, allow a coherent and comprehensive rationality that penetrates to the principles of cosmic order. All of these qualities and capacities combine to make the human being a creature of a radically distinct nature, not simply a difference of degree, but a difference of kind. Unlike animals with a limited repertoire of perception and response, we are adapted for adaptability, open in flexibility and freedom within the world.

But this embodied intelligence, and the freedom it implies, comes with a danger unique to the human species. Sensitive and self-aware, open and indeterminate, we are acutely conscious of the ethical and spiritual dimensions of our lives. Yet, terrified by death and driven by our natural appetites and ambitions toward an imagined ideal of perfect bodies and perfect minds, we are drawn forward by the seductive promise of technological self-transformation….

It is a beautiful development of history that the words human and humility share a common root in the Latin ‘humus’ meaning earth or soil. Fashioned from the dust of the earth, given life by the very breath of God, and rescued and restored by the free gift of grace, we are radiant with possibility. Unique among creatures, we behold with wonder the majesty of the Creator, and bow before him in worship and praise— humility, gratitude, and abiding faith; these are the true marks of human distinction.

First female pastor and Baptists:

A North Carolina church credited with opening doors for women in ministry by ordaining the first Southern Baptist woman to the gospel ministry 50 years ago lifted its own stained-glass ceiling April 6 by choosing a female pastor. Members of Watts Street Baptist Church in Durham, N.C., voted unanimously to extend a call as senior minister to Dorisanne Cooper, currently pastor of Lake Shore Baptist Church in Waco, Texas. On Aug. 9, 1964, Watts Street ordained Addie Davis, a 1963 graduate of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary from Covington, Va., to the ministry….

Opportunities for women in ministry increased during the 1970s, and by the early 1980s Southern Baptist seminaries encouraged women feeling a call to preach. Roy Honeycutt, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote a tract titled Affirming Women in Ministry in 1984.

The climate changed with a debate over the inerrancy of Scripture beginning in 1979. The Southern Baptist Convention adopted a resolution opposing women’s ordination in 1984….

The Baptist Faith and Message was amended in 1998 to declare “a wife is to submit herself graciously” to her husband and again in 2000 to clarify, “While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.” Disenfranchised moderates withdrew from the battle to control the SBC to form the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship in 1991 around principles including support for women in ministry. Opportunities for female pastors have increased slowly but steadily in CBF churches.

Pam Durso, executive director of Baptist Women in Ministry, now lists 157 women identified as pastor or co-pastor of churches affiliated with the CBF or in state conventions located in the South. Durso said it is no longer an “oddity” for a Baptist church in the South to call a woman. She said she is particularly encouraged by the fact that female ministers like Cooper, with more than 11 years in pastoral experience, are now finding a second church.

Doug Glanville story, hold on:

It was an otherwise ordinary snow day in Hartford, Connecticut, and I was laughing as I headed outside to shovel my driveway. I’d spent the morning scrambling around, trying to stay ahead of my three children’s rising housebound energy, and once my shovel hit the snow, I thought about how my wife had been urging me to buy a snowblower. I hadn’t felt an urgent need. Whenever it got ridiculously blizzard-like, I hired a snow removal service. And on many occasions, I came outside to find that our next door neighbor had already cleared my driveway for me.

Never mind that our neighbor was an empty-nester in his late 60s with a replaced hip, and I was a former professional ballplayer in his early 40s. I kept telling myself I had to permanently flip the script and clear his driveway. But not today. I had to focus on making sure we could get our car out for school the next morning. My wife was at a Black History Month event with our older two kids. The snow had finally stopped coming down and this was my mid-afternoon window of opportunity.

Just as I was good-naturedly turning all this over in my mind, my smile disappeared.

A police officer from West Hartford had pulled up across the street, exited his vehicle, and begun walking in my direction. I noted the strangeness of his being in Hartford—an entirely separate town with its own police force—so I thought he needed help. He approached me with purpose, and then, without any introduction or explanation he asked, “So, you trying to make a few extra bucks, shoveling people’s driveways around here?”

All of my homeowner confidence suddenly seemed like an illusion.

Yasiel Puig‘s story of getting from Cuba to the LA Dodgers — this is a crazy, crazy story:

Seemingly from the moment Cuban refugee Yasiel Puig showed up at Dodger Stadium out of nowhere, arriving last June unwilling to discuss his unknown background, the talk behind the batting cages has been rife with unprintable rumors.

There were rumors Puig was smuggled out of Cuba by members of a Mexican drug cartel. There were rumors he still owed the smugglers money, and that his life could be in jeopardy. There was talk about Puig being essentially owned by a Miami businessman with a criminal record who hired those smugglers in exchange for 20% of the ballplayer’s future earnings.

Who knew that all those rumors could actually be true? According to a richly researched and chillingly written story by Jesse Katz in the May issue of Los Angeles Magazine, Puig’s journey to Los Angeles was even more harrowing than realized, and continues to be more frightening than imagined.

Rwanda, Twenty Years Later

Last updated on: April 8, 2014 at 7:59 am By Scot McKnight

Lauren Wolfe:

Today, 20 years after an ethnically motivated genocide in which nearly 1 million Rwandans died and up to half a million women were raped, thegovernment forbids certain kinds of public discussion about Hutus and Tutsis. When I visited the country in February, I heard a lot of chatter about something called “Vision 2020,” which is supposed to transform the country into a thriving state marked by good governance and a healthy economy. Construction is booming in the capital, Kigali, and President Paul Kagame has expressed a desire to make his country more like Singapore—a sort of authoritarian democracy. There is a robust effort, in other words, to deliberately “move on” from the tragedy—a determination to never lose control again.

But what Rwandans endured is so extraordinarily horrifying—in terms of how many people experienced or witnessed brutal acts, and the sheer scale and speed of the killing—that the more time I spent in the country and talking to Nishimwe and others, the more I wondered how such a place could possibly go on after what happened in those horrible 100 days from April to July. How did each person survive? How does a whole country thrust into a hideous nightmare of people hacked to death and raped and tortured survive? What is it like to live in a society in which nearly everyone over the age of 20 has memories of such inhumane deeds?…

[Richard] Neugebauer has worked on and off in Rwanda since 1997, and is quick to emphasize that he cannot speak for the Rwandans he has met. But his observations as a clinician are devastating. When he first went to the country, he said, “the laws of nature were reversed. The dead were more alive than the living. The dead were everywhere in the sense that you could almost feel them around you, clamoring to be heard. Whereas the people who were literally alive were so bereft or left empty for the moment that it seemed they were dead.” (When he returned to the country in 2010 and 2011, he again sought out some of these people, who seemed younger and revitalized.) It is this strong pull of deceased relatives and friends that “must be overcome to actually live,” he said.

Church and Our Projections (Josh Graves)

Last updated on: April 2, 2014 at 5:47 am By Scot McKnight

Josh Graves is the Preaching Minster at the Otter Creek Church in Nashville.

We are all caught up in an inescapable mutuality (paraphrase of Harry Emerson Fosdick).

For several years (in various settings), I’ve noticed something about life that I couldn’t quite “diagnose” or “describe” but it was something real and potentially toxic. Then, it hit me . . . one of the dangerous attitudes that creeps into a local church (probably true of a sports team, academic department, schools, family, not-for-profit) goes undocumented. Individuals in a given context (church, team, family, etc.) tend to hold the “larger group” to a standard they themselves are not willing to live up to. Moreover, individuals want to be a part of something that gradually looks like a community/school/team honed in their own image.

I’m not thinking of any one person, context, situation . . . just offering general insights into something that continues to resurface.

Please NOTE: I’m not suggesting that disagreement, debate, healthy open challenge should dissipate. In fact, I think open debate is a sign of true health in a family, church, team, local organization. The leadership meetings I am part of within the local church I serve, for instance, are often lively, spirited, passionate, and complex. Those who are around me for any length of time know that I love to debate theology, politics, current events. In fact, as a twin, I probably love to debate more than is healthy (my twin brother and I can argue about whether or not we should be arguing something mundane–it’s an art form).

So, debate, disagreement, healthy open dialogue must be cultivated. That’s a beautiful thing when done well, with love and maturity. I’m aware that many men and women have experienced silencing, power games, manipulation in various contexts . . . that is wrong and unjust.

The projection I’m talking here is something different.

I’m talking about projecting, that is, I/you/we project onto the “larger group” a value, passion, or belief that I’m not willing to live out in my own personal life. Instead of dealing with one’s own self-disappointment, we place all of that angst, anger, and anxiety somewhere else, the next closest thing that allows us to unload without having to face the person in the mirror. Let me give you some examples of this.

*You are a staunch fiscal conservative who regularly finds ways to take advantage of others. Or you are a staunch liberal who gives very little to any local church/justice/compassion effort.

*You are adamant that the leadership of your church address sexual purity/issues of sexuality when you are in an adulterous affair or have a struggle with a serious pornography addiction.

*You yell at the TV screen in front of your children about a pro athlete who fails in a clutch moment while you are drinking beer and red in the face. Literally gaining weight while you scream.

*You abhor the fact that your local church is carrying some debt while you are carrying a huge mortgage that (relatively speaking) is a far more dangerous debt to income ratio than said local church. Again, for the record, I’m for debt free living . . . but that’s a sizable mountain for any family or church to climb. That journey should be embarked upon with diligence and care.

*You grow angry and bitter towards a family member for not reaching out to you when you have done the very same thing (or not done ) for months.

*You pretend the politics of church is any different than a local university, not-for-profit, academic community, etc. Of course I hope that life is different in a local church, that a different politic is at work but to suggest that politics (interpret: tricky relationships) don’t or should not exist in a local church seems naive to me.

*You rail about something you don’t like happening in your local church (particularly the way it’s happening, lack of communication), organization, family but you do so via twitter and Facebook. This is known as “keyboard bravado”–instead of doing the explicit Jesus thing you write vague tweets, Facebook posts, or super-charged e-mail’s to those who are not doing things like you think they should.

*You believe your family, local church, business should be involved in a critical work but are unwilling to help lead to ensure this very thing happens.

*You desire that your wife change in some significant ways but you are not willing to do so.

*You want more “Bible” taught in your local church but you hardly ever crack your own Bible.

*You want the student ministry and college ministry to take 50 students (your children or grandchildren) to do mission work but you have never even considered traveling to Africa, Central America, etc to see what the kingdom sounds like in different places.

*You insist that the preacher address gay marriage and set the record straight but also insist that the preacher never mention greed or nationalism or lust again.

Hypocrisy isn’t failing to live up to one’s ideals. We all do that. Hypocrisy is failing to admit that this is the case. Before spending your time focused on how you want to change everyone and everything else, take some time and breathe. Projection and avoidance are real. These are toxic realities. And it is happening in all corners of our society. Starting with me. And with you.

Last thing. How do you want to be known after you’ve died/left a place? Do you want to me known as a person who always focused on the bad? A person who could only see the shortcomings? A person who constantly complained, whined, projected, unloaded anger on others? Or do you want to be remembered as a person of joy, hope, courage, laughter, and possibility. A person who a) didn’t deny shortcomings and failures but mostly b) saw the way things could be.

The local church isn’t a thing. It’s you, and you, and you, and you, and me, and them, and us, and ours. Your disillusionment is based in something real but it is ultimately a sign that you’ve given up on the idea that people can change. You’ve given up on the truth that you can change. And because you don’t think you can change anymore you project on the local church an anger, attitude, belief that is reserved for yourself. If only you’d ever let yourself admit this is the case.

Complementarianism and Colleges: Is this the wedge?

Last updated on: March 21, 2014 at 1:40 pm By Scot McKnight

Source

A recent chapel talk by Cedarville University’s new president has sparked discussion over campus changes related to his complementarian view of gender roles.

In his March 10 chapel talk, Thomas White discussed the concept of headship based on 1 Corinthians 11:2–16. “We operate with the presupposition of inerrancy. So what I tell you today is not something that I wrote, I made up, or I started,” he said. “I’m just going to preach to you what the text says.”

Cedarville, which recently weathered a turbulent year of disagreements and resignations, has also restricted classes in the women’s ministry program—functionally, every Bible class in the fall schedule taught by a woman—to only female students, according to alumni and a university representative.

“In courses where we seek to equip women for women’s ministry in the local church, classes have been reserved for women in order to accomplish this goal most effectively,” said Mark Weinstein, spokesman for the university.

Weinstein declined to say how long the classes have been restricted. Cedarville alumna Sarah Jones said the course was co-ed as recently as the late 2000s, when Joy Fagan taught many women’s ministry classes. Fagan has since left the university because she did not feel like a good fit, she told Religion News Service (RNS) in December.

Other alumni who were students between 2005 and 2012 confirmed that women’s ministry classes and general education Bible classes by female faculty were open to students of both sexes during that time.

Eleven Elements of Liberal Orthodoxy

Last updated on: March 16, 2014 at 6:45 am By Scot McKnight

As I have said in a previous post, evangelicals have written the story of liberalism and that story, reluctantly but seemingly irresistibly, has been absorbed by liberals themselves. That story is that liberals have surrendered key theological beliefs and their churches are in rapid descent and the former led to the latter. Oddly, though liberalism has been for more than a century been perched in fat and pretty in positions of power, it has never bothered to tell its own story through its own lens in a compelling way. Perhaps this is why liberalism’s numbers are in free fall. Maybe liberalism lacks a story, or better yet, a story teller.

Until now. Liberalism occupies a perch of power that can be described as powerful in voice but a minority in numbers. When I say powerful I don’t mean as powerful as it was in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, but I believe their power remains. That story is changing as liberalism seeks to write it’s own story and striking out for new opportunities. A number of fresh books have come my way, all telling the story of liberalism. One senses liberalism has seen the narrowing of its tunnel of light and now realizes that it, too, must compete in the open market of ideas by telling its own story. One can say a new era of liberal apologetics has arisen. I have looked at Christopher Evans, Liberalism without Illusions, and today I want to sketch the eleven elements of “liberal orthodoxy” in Michael J. Langford’s highly readable and important study, The Tradition of Liberal Theology (Eerdmans).

Langford’s contention is that there is a liberal orthodoxy or a moderate-to-conservative liberalism as well as a more radical liberalism, sometimes called “wooly liberalism.” His version of liberalism, then, is “mainstream” Christianity, it adheres — with revision — the classic creeds. Perhaps most notably, he does not include Friedrich Schleiermacher in “liberal orthodoxy” but rather in a more radical version. Schleiermacher’s emphasis on feeling (he defines this well and accurately) does not fit well with the more “rational nature of the tradition” (13). The major alternatives to his “liberal orthodoxy” today is Barthianism and postliberalism.

So, what is it? Liberal orthodoxy is a “balance between religious faith and human rationality” and is thus closer to “apologetics” that appeals to “reason rather than to emotion” (1). He affirms classical theism: God as creator ex nihilo and that this God has a personal relation with humans. He thinks Schleiermacher’s focus on feeling vs. reason fails the test of liberalism, as does his diminishment of the creed and his openness to other faiths. Postliberalism does not a true “measure of universal rationality” (16). His problem with conservativism is that it is rationally suspect and fanatical. And he suggests the liberal orthodox are born again.

Now to the eleven elements, up through 1900:

1. A use of the Bible that is not always literal.
2. Reason and revelation are in harmony.
3. A nonlegalist account of redemption.
4. The possiblity of salvation outside a narrow path.
5. Toleration.
6. Original sin, but not original guilt.
7. Belief in free will.
8. A view of providence that respects the integrity of the natural order.
9. The joint need of faith and works.
10. A minimal number of basic teachings.
11. A range of acceptable lifestyles.

His discussion of miracles is muddled: what do we mean by “miracle”? Miracles should not be used to prove the faith, and faith can lead a life to see a variety of miracles, liberals vary on miracles — that is, one believes Jesus is the Son of God and therefore in miracles. On the resurrection of Jesus he focuses on the presence of the living Christ.

The 20th Century sees a few more themes in the matrix of liberal orthodoxy: (1) human sexuality and gender, (2) women in ministry, (3) scientific developments, and (4) capitalism.

So, who are the liberal orthodox? He gives thirteen names, and his focus is on the English tradition: Justin Martyr, Origen, Peter Abelard, Sebastian Castellio, Elizabeth I, Richard Hooker, William Chillingworth, John Smith, Jeremy Taylor, Hannah Barnard, JFD Maurice, JB Lighfoot, and Frederick Temple.

Weekly Meanderings, 15 March 2014

Last updated on: March 14, 2014 at 4:10 pm By Scot McKnight

High school dances — going the way of high button shoes? (One of my favorite movies of all time in that pic.)

Your high school may have had different names for them, but you probably recognize what they are: school dances. A staple of American culture, the dramatic climax of countless high-school movies, and the background of so many of teenage memories. The dances were something to look forward to. In 2001, more than 800 students gathered in clusters on the squeaky gym floors at John Jay High School in Westchester County, bopping up and down to Nelly songs. In 2010, only 26 students showed up to the Homecoming dance in that same gym. You can imagine my surprise when I returned home this past Christmas and asked my youngest sibling, a senior at the same high school I graduated from, if she was excited about the 2014 Winter Ball.Those nights in the school gymnasium, transformed from sweaty dodge ball venue to magical glittery ballroom, held such promise.

She rolled her eyes at me. “We haven’t had a Winter Ball since I was a freshman,” Lucy said. It turns out my alma mater in Cross River, N.Y., began to cancel school dances in 2010 when attendance started to drop. Lucy told me she thought the reason students didn’t attend was because everyone would rather be home texting, Facebook messaging, or Snapchatting each other.

A mom gives ten reason why she wants her children to have handheld devices.

Rachel Held Evans has a fantastic post about abuse and Christian patriarchy, and this is but a clip… go to the link and read it all:

Over the past few months, the whistle-blowing website, Recovering Grace, has given voice to 34 women who say there were sexually harassed or molested by Bill Gothard or someone in his conservative, homeschool-based ministry. Gothard resigned from his ministry earlier this month.

While such abuse once thrived in the darkness of secrecy, silencing, and cover-ups, the Internet Age has helped shine a light on the problem of abuse not only in the Catholic Church but also among evangelical churches and ministries. Survivors have spoken out about pervasive abuse or sexual misconduct situations withSovereign Grace Ministries, Vision Forum, Jesus People USA, the Bill Gothard Ministry, Bob Jones University, Patrick Henry College, Pensacola Christian College,and several missions organizations.

My evangelical brothers and sisters, we have an abuse problem and we need to talk about it. Talking about it does far less damage to Christ’s reputation in the world than covering it up.

Now obviously, abuse is a result of sin and no denomination or community is immune to sin’s effects, but we do see a trend in which most of the organizations facing scrutiny over abuse and sexual misconduct charges of late are characterized by authoritarian, patriarchal leadership and by cultures that routinely silence the voices of women.

So the point I want to make today is not that all who subscribe to patriarchy are abusive, but that patriarchy in a religious environment, just as in any environment, has a negative effect on the whole community and creates a cultural climate more susceptible to abuse than one characterized by mutuality and shared leadership between men and women.

Honeycrisp, the greatest of apples and the most expensive:

I would argue that the first time you find yourself grumbling about prices these daysmarks a rite of passage on par with the shedding of baby teeth, tasting your first legal beer, or buying your first home. It tends to happen over something really trivial, like postage stamps, or a vending machine candy bar, which makes your outsize fury seem all the more ridiculous. For me, the first consumer good to send steam shooting out my ears was an apple, for the simple reason that, as the granddaughter and niece and cousin of New York State apple growers, I think I know what an apple should cost.

I am talking, of course, about the Honeycrisp. With Galas and Romes and Granny Smiths and Red Deliciouses still going for a dollar and change per pound, the price of Honeycrisps — presently hovering around $4.50 a pound here in New York — is something previously unheard of in the scheme of apple pricing. In almost 400 years of cultivating apples on these shores, Honeycrisp may be the first true name-brand variety to hit the shelves — a designer apple, the first malus domestica to price out of a segment of the market.

I agree with this Chip MacGregor post about Driscoll’s buying his way onto the NYTimes list:

What’s wrong with buying your way onto the bestseller list? It’s an expensive, short-term ego stroke for the lazy and dishonest, and it excludes real writers from actually making the list. My two cents.

Track and Field’s Albuquerque Spring:

The scene was unprecedented: seven runners walking off the track hand in hand, in quiet protest against their own governing body. The women had just run the 1,500-meter race at the U.S. indoor national championships on Feb. 23 in Albuquerque. The day before, the winner of the 3,000-meter race, Gabe Grunewald, had been disqualified by one of the most powerful men in track, Nike Oregon Project coach Alberto Salazar, for supposedly interfering with one of his athletes. How Salazar managed the feat is still unclear, but to fans and to other runners it was obvious what had happened: The people who really run the sport had prevailed upon the people who nominally do to change a result in their favor.

By itself, this was nothing new—dictatorial, rule-bending judgments are the order of the day in track. What was new was the backlash: an immediate eruption on social media and the small, televised show of solidarity after the 1,500, which a day later led to Grunewald’s reinstatement as national champion. And the outcry is ongoing. People are pissed about the way the sport is run—about the lack of transparency, about the way the athletes are left out of the process, about the appearance of Nike favoritism—and for the first time they’re saying so en masse and out loud, right there in front of God and Phil Knight. Call it the Albuquerque Spring.

22 quotes from influential women.

David Frum on millennials and trust and the common good:

Yet there’s another — and more ominous — explanation lurking in the numbers. Robert Putnam of “Bowling Alone” fame has collected data showing that social trust declines as a community becomes more ethnically diverse.

“The short run effect of being around people who are different from us is to make all of us uncertain — to hunker down, to pull in, to trust everybody less. Like a turtle in the presence of some feared threat, we pull in.”

In other words, in a more diverse society, it’s not just those who feel vulnerable who trust less. In a more diverse society, everybody trusts less. The clarion call of common purpose begins to sound more like a warning alarm that your group is about to be used for the benefit of another. The accusation that the (non-white) “takers” are plundering the (white) “makers” has powered protest politics since 2009. If anything, that accusation looks likely to increase in its political effect in the years ahead.

As America has become more ethnically diverse, political leaders have insisted ever more persistently that this diversity is a source of strength. Let’s hope that proves to be true. America will need that strength in a future that, by the number, seems likely to be more mutually suspicious, more alienated, more unequal and less united by patriotism.

Love the ducks.

Redditor CriticalFumble found this duck outside his home window a few months ago, and what was to happen over the next few weeks was quite amazing.

Best of all, he documented it all with these awesome photos!

Christian Identity and the Church as Family (by Sara Barton)

Last updated on: February 19, 2014 at 6:31 pm By Scot McKnight

Sara Barton serves as University Chaplain at Pepperdine University. She is the author of a wonderful book about a woman called into ministry where the environment is not always welcoming, called A Woman Called: Piecing Together the Ministry Puzzle.

Lots of bloggers are responding to Donald Miller’s post about church attendance, and I’ve been invited to contribute to that conversation on Jesus Creed. So, in one way this is a response to Donald Miller, but in reality, Miller is simply and quite courageously articulating the views of many of my own friends and family members, The conversation, therefore, propels me to consider ongoing conversations with flesh and blood people in my local context. The way I see it, if Donald Miller creates healthy, local conversations about the role of the church in individual lives, then good for him.

In the ideal, we experience the church as the communion of the Holy Spirit in which our spirituality is not individual but communal. In baptism, we experience rebirth into a family that has the unique privilege of addressing the creator of everything as “Abba Father” (or Daddy or Mommy, as we might say in our culture). Our experiences of God as a parent define us, and we can no longer delineate self without relationship to our siblings, whom God has called beloved children. As the body of the risen Christ, the church gives us vocation and calling in relation to other members of the body without whom we each counter-culturally proclaim to be nothing.

So, when it comes to communal practices, the church doesn’t merely provide any one the means to become spiritual as an individual through worship experiences, sermons, teaching, works of justice, and service opportunities by meeting individual needs and preferences or catering to learning styles. Sometimes those practices do meet individual needs, and sometimes they don’t. In short, we don’t grow spiritually through a particular communal practice that floats our individual boats. We’re capable of growing spiritually when we experience communal practices, based not on personal preferences but on the growth we experience collectively with our siblings.

A Christian’s whole identity, then, is rooted in rebirth into family, and identity is something much more than a personal decision. Identity is not so much about personal ethics or psychological wellbeing (although they are outcomes); instead, identity is radically communal. The experience of spirituality in the church is something akin to a dance with God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit and family in Christ, a dance with which we are in step, apart from the tune of natural birth or society.

Leaving that family, therefore, is a very serious matter. I would not know where to place my feet, apart from them. I would not know the tune that guides our collective dance.

So, in the ideal, we would not want to forego gathering regularly with the family with whom God has given us identity. Regular gathering for worship, teaching, and the sacraments has been consistent in Christian tradition from the very beginning, so if we’re to be the generation that breaks that tradition, I hope it’s with communal discernment rather than the idol of individualism that so wants to own us today. If departure is based on our personal likes and dislikes, personal lifestyle choices such as how to spend our weekends, the idol of busyness, conflict avoidance, or aversion to submission to authority, perhaps our culture is informing identity more than identity in Christ.

One could rightly say that we’re talking about two different things when we talk about how often we attend Sunday worship services at a local congregation and our identity in Christ through a larger set of Christian relationships. Friends of mine who have left congregational membership also see Christianity as a set of relationships, even as a dance, but maintained informally instead of formally. And, they have a good point. The church is in need of a corrective because her complete identity has for too long been found in Sunday morning services. That’s a discussion we’re having in our culture these days, and it’s vital to Christians. It shouldn’t be avoided.

My focus on the family needs a caveat. I am well acquainted with family dysfunction, church and otherwise. Unfortunately, we do not live in the ideal. Called to ministry in a group that does not recognize the call for women, I could certainly point to the dynamic as dysfunctional, at the least. The opinion of many of us is that it’s far beyond dysfunction and highly destructive. It’s not just my group that doesn’t recognize the call of women to ministry. It’s pervasive in Christianity. Even in groups that ordain women, hierarchies and glass ceilings still prevail, with women as perpetuators of the situation as much as men. And we could cite dysfunction after dysfunction in church family dynamics. We can certainly cite instances that go beyond dysfunction – some families are abusive.

So, if people are leaving the church, perhaps we need to avoid defensiveness and ask some hard questions about family. Sometimes individuals leave families of origin because of abuse, because of dysfunction that threatens to overtake the entire family system. Could it be that many of our friends and neighbors are leaving church because of dysfunction that needs deep introspection? We can easily cite stories of people for whom the church is functioning. We should celebrate those stories. But, the church is not functioning for others, to such an extent that they are leaving. Instead of being defensive, maybe what we should do for a while is merely listen.

What would it look like for the church at large to stop and listen to the all Donald Millers we know?

Could it be that in those conversations, church would break out?

Putting People in their Places

Last updated on: February 1, 2014 at 2:43 pm By Scot McKnight

Humans look at others and assign the others a social location. Not all humans do this because there are some who like to think they don’t assign others. We may strive not to assign others but those who are successful are few indeed. The Romans did not even try; in fact, status and honor and social location was the Roman Empire. When the apostle Paul, therefore, invaded the Roman Empire with a gospel that radically subverted the quest for status in the Roman Empire, called cursus honorum, he met more than an ordinary challenge. Judaism itself had its own form of the cursus honorum so his quest to create a church without status shaping one’s identity and value became constant pastoral theme.

Enter now a brand new book by Joseph Hellerman called Embracing Shared Ministry: Power and Status in the Early Church and Why It Matters Today. Hellerman has updated and made his dissertation highly accessible — fit for any pastor or Bible student. The book is a pastoral theology that gives a cruciform shape to power. Here is a book that makes the Roman and historical context of direct value for today’s pastoral ministry.

So what was status like in the Roman Empire?

1/50th of the Roman Empire was made of the elites, and the elites encompassed the Senators, the Equestrians, and Decurions, and each of these had gradations within the status. The non-elites, the 49/50ths of the Roman Empire, were the Freeborn (citizens and non-citizens), the Freedmen (citizens, non-citizens), and slaves. How did one become Elite? Family and ancestry, mostly, but wealth and land were involved. But one could not buy one’s way into the Elites.

Perhaps most notable was how Elites marked themselves out.

First was clothing: the toga and the color of one’s stripes (broad purple for senators, thin purple for equestrians with a gold ring on the finger) and freedmen were known for their “cap of liberty.” One ought, then, to see the clothing statements in the NT to be a potential source for postures toward the Roman Empire, and I’m thinking of Jesus in Matthew 11 and James 2 and the statements about women’s attire in Paul and Peter.

Second was where one sat in public gatherings and banquets. Think of Jesus’ funny parable about where to sit (sabotaging a system) and James and John’s request to be at the left and right of Jesus in Mark 10. Meals marked one’s status. Invitations mattered; seating did too. Sitting above one’s status could get you in trouble, and Hellerman provides good discussion.

Third the courtroom where status mattered sometimes more even than justice and law.

Hellerman’s point then is to provide the groundwork for the cursus honorum, the Roman quest to be honored in one’s society. I think he overdoes the quest of honor but there is no doubt honor mattered deeply to the elites (more so than among the non-elites). To parade one’s status, or to acquire honor, which was as much done by the one who wanted it and had it than by others, a person participated in public benefactions, like building fountains or bridges or stadiums. And on the monument or benefaction one paraded one’s titles.

He sees three levels of honor: Rome’s Elites, local government, and one’s private associations. The big picture is that there were various titles from the lowest to highest: quaestor, aedile, praetor, consul (and then emperor, of course). Those titles were mimicked in what he calls “value replication” in local communities and then even lower in one’s voluntary associations (religious, guilds, et al).

His focus in the Philippian church and he sees the temptation to value replication in the church as he sees the church as a kind of Roman association. Perhaps laying his strongest foundation is that Philippi was a Roman colony formed around Roman leaders, especially military status and culture, who were intent on replicating Rome in Philippi so that the cursus honorum shaped the elite culture and worked its way down.