Apocalypse and Hope, the resurrection and Mark 13
Nice link from Pete VanderBeek on a CBC series After Atheism http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/podcasts/
Do narcissists or junkies make the best leaders?
Last Chance for a win-win on Same Sex Marriage
Seven Marks of a Good Theologian
Sacbee: Baby boomers realize that they didn’t get a pass on the age of decay.
Pt. 4 of The Postmodern Logic Behind Emergent Calvinism
Discovering Tim Keller in the Sacramento Cluster
I was first introduced to Tim Keller’s work by Roger Greenway in a missions class at Calvin Seminary at the end of the 1980s. He handed out an article by Keller and commented “You’ll hear more from this guy.”
After my time overseas I got involved with church planting in Sacramento and together with my colleagues became more and more interested in his work in New York City. I had grown up in an urban church plant during the racial reconciliation era and by virtue of my father’s relationships with the urban, black and Reformed movement felt comfortable that ethos and its leaders in the 70s and 80s. If you’re familiar with the work of Roger S. Greenway, Harvie Conn you know some of the work I’m talking about. There was even an Urban Missions journal that my parents and I wrote an article for. Westminster Seminary Philadelphia became a center for Reformed urban missionary thought and Tim Keller before he planted Redeemer in NYC was part of this movement.
As a group our CRC cluster in Sacramento were all over the map missiologically. We were increasingly post-seeker. Kevin Adams had planted Granite Springs Church in the early 90s with a seeker methodology but was increasingly critical of the turnkey mentality of that movement. Tim Blackmon and Chuck Dillender planted River Rock Church based on the cell church methodology with a heavy emphasis on the spiritual formation movement led by Dallas Willard. Ron Vanderwell was trying to synthesize some of these movements. Redeemer Presbyterian increasingly came into our conversations. Tim had a relationship with a former Redeemer staffer and was able to arrange some time for us in NYC as a group to visit Redeemer and meet with Keller.
Marc Holland was one of the second generation church planters in our cluster. He was targeting Midtown Sacramento and had seen in City Church San Francisco a paradigm for how he might approach his work. He sought out Scott Sherman, former staffer and church planter with Tim Keller to be his mentor. Marc would go on to mentor Eric Dirksen, bringing him into that network of relationships. David Lindner’s plant would very much be in line with the older urban missions ethos.
The orientation of our group increasingly found Keller’s work a good fit for what we were trying to do as a group church planting in Sacramento. Redeemer was beginning to publish materials for church planting and Keller’s language and vision of the gospel for the city increasingly became our own.
Tim Keller and the Christian Reformed Church
I recently heard two influential CRC pastors complain about the growing public affection for Tim Keller among CRC clergy. After 30 years of brutal church warfare over permitting women to serve in all offices of the church having a broad spectrum of CRC people looking to a complementarian for guidance makes what passes for the left in the CRC nervous.
It is easy to see why Tim Keller is so popular in the CRC. This is a conservative, Reformed preacher successfully growing a megachurch in NYC using off the shelf tools that many in the CRC had thought could not be effectively used for outreach in the 21st century. “If Tim Keller can do it, maybe I can do it too!”
CRC Missions History
It’s also important to understand is that while the CRC was fighting over what women could and couldn’t do it was also, like many other denominations, flailing about looking for a new evangelistic paradigm in order to reverse its numeric slide. The 60s and 70s had brought unprecedented growth and prosperity as it rode the double wave of the baby boom and post WWII Dutch immigration to Canada and California.
Even while the boom was still underway the CRC was trying to come to terms with its ethnic immigrant homogeneity. In a few places like the NY/NJ region, Grand Rapids, Chicago, LA a few pioneers were trying to intentionally plant churches that would embody the racial reconciliation ethos. While white flight was leaving urban centers, some missionaries decided that this was the time to explore incarnational ministry in these places. Some of the many pioneers in this were my father Stan VanderKlay in Paterson NJ, Tony VanZanten in Paterson and Chicago, Dante Venegas, and Earl Marlink. This CRC movement paralleled the Westminster Seminary Urban developments that Keller was a part of.
The next focus of attention would be CRC sons and cousins in the mega church, seeker church movement. The CRC like other denominations faced aging and post-immigrant, post-American-civil-religion downturn and wanted to learn from the church growth school to turn the tide. Christian Reformed Home Missions sent pastors to Robert Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral to learn their program. Schuller was a part of the Reformed Church of America, the long time ecclesiastical sister of the CRC that the CRC had broken away from in the 1860s. Next the CRC would study under Bill Hybels, a son of the denomination who wasn’t pleased by the CRC’s in-house provincialisms and launched the Seeker movement that would transform suburban missions for a generation.
All of these methods, however, were not necessarily distinctly Reformed, something the CRC had embraced as a core value. Even though the CRC would try to put Reformed language on church growth and evangelical methodology the fit was never quite right. CRC conservative confessionalists were rightfully anxious about confessional purity and specificity as increasingly CRC folks suspected that its old confessional identity would need to be left behind if the CRC was to become a missionary church in North America. The CRC they feared not without reason would become more broadly evangelical and less intentionally Reformed.
Making “our” stuff work like we never did
The arrival of Tim Keller on the radar screen seemed to change the picture entirely. Here was a guy who was more conservative than many in the CRC (The PCA was part of a Reformed ecumenical church group NAPARC that kicked out the CRC once it opened the door to full ordination of women), who quoted the Heidelberg Catechism along with CRC intellectuals like Neal Plantinga, Richard Mouw, Alvin Plantinga, Lew Smedes, Nick Woltersdorff and was winning a younger, hipper audience than most CRCs imagined it could attract. He did it with a conservative preaching style (sometimes looking almost like “three its and a poem” similar to the old Volbeda method taught at Calvin Seminary in the mid 20th century) and traditional music done with NYC talent.
Soon CRC ministers would be paying the $2.50 for Tim Keller sermons, something not always easy for cheap Dutchmen, reading his books, and borrowing his sermon illustrations. CRC urban church plants now look more to Keller than Hybels in crafting their strategy and quickly adopt a “gospel approach” and other very Kelleresque language.
Tim Keller is part of the Emergent Reformed Movement
One thing the CRC should have learned earlier was that to study and to copy someone (like Schuller “find a need and meet it”, like Hybels “create a safe space to hear a dangerous message”) is not such an easy thing. Tim Keller is channeling sermons from the 1950s no matter how many Martin Lloyd Jones quotes he drops. He is doing something different. While being able to check off a bunch of conservative shibboleth check boxes Tim Keller has contextualized his message to a postmodern context. He can hang with the traditionalists (look at some in The Gospel Coalition) but he is not simply doing the traditional thing.
I realize that this little narrative is told from the perspective of the CRC. I suspect analogous developments happened in the RCA, the PCUSA and other confessionally Reformed denominations in North America.
Jeff Overstreet writing on Chariots of Fire. Pt. 1, Pt 2
Evangelical leaders split over the violence against women act led me to ponder an industry I always thought existed but knew nothing about. Mail order brides. hmm.
From Patrol a response to David Sessions’ negative review of Bad Religion.
What cultural conditions helped give rise to the surprising re-emergence of Reformed movement?
Many of us who were part of ethnic and historical Reformed churches while appreciating our tradition sometimes considered it sort of an acquired taste. The evangelistic power and migration of young adults from other segments of the American Christian church caught us by surprise.
Not only were the numbers surprising but also the shape. Hard line doctrinal Calvinism attractive in a traditional form was coming from John Piper but Mark Driscoll expressed an edgier, aggressive new breed. In the East Tim Keller was gathering a large, confessional, distinctively Reformed congregation with traditional sermons filled with CS Lewis style apologetics.
Is there a cultural logic behind this movement? Does postmodernity create a context where Calvinism makes a new kind of cultural sense? How might leading with a predestinarian attract some while others are drawn to a message that work on a more Kierkegaardian paradigm?
This question will take more than one blog post to unpack so I’ll make this a series.
Pt. 1: Postmodernity’s Submarine Races
Pt. 2: Augustine, Calvinism, and a Catechism of Suspicion
Pt. 3: The Emergent Bizarro Twins of Mars Hill
Pt. 5: The Epigenetics of Emergent Calvinism
Pt. 6: Tim Keller’s Gospel
The Postmodern Logic Behind Emergent Calvinism
Pt. 1: Postmodernity’s Submarine Races
Suspicion Has A Long History
Postmoderns were not the first to be deeply suspicious of motives. The suggestion by talking serpent in the garden to the woman was a whisper of suspicion. Later the creator’s suspicions were aroused by the man and the woman’s game of hide and go seek. Things beneath the surface matter and we are suspicious of concealment.
Augustine and Suspicion
Among the different Christian traditions Calvinism in particular earned a name for being suspicious of our capacity to do good. Calvinism picked this up from its Roman guide Augustine of Hippo whose most famous book “Confessions” is a treatise on being suspicious of one’s own motives. In one of its most famous passages Augustine contemplates the moral quality of his desire to nurse from his godly mother.
7, 11. O God, hear me. Alas for the sins of humankind! A human it is who here bewails them, and you treat him mercifully because you made him, though the sin that is in him is not of your making. Who is there to remind me of the sin of my infancy (for sin there was: no one is free from sin in your sight, not even an infant whose span of earthly life is but a single day);43 who can remind me of it? Some little mite who is a tiny child now, in whom I might observe conduct I do not remember in myself? What then was my sin at that age? Was it perhaps that I cried so greedily for those breasts? Certainly if I behaved like that now, greedy not for breasts, of course, but for food suitable to my age, I should provoke derision and be very properly rebuked. My behavior then was equally deserving of rebuke, but since I would not have been able to understand anyone who scolded me, neither custom nor common sense allowed any rebuke to be given.
St. Augustine (2007-04-01). The Confessions, Revised (The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, Vol. 1) (Kindle Locations 798-806). New City Press. Kindle Edition.
While postmoderns look suspiciously at those around them, Augustine poured the acid of suspicion on himself and any impulse of moral self-construction. The LORD our God is a suspicious God.
A Catechism of Suspicion
The Heidelberg Catechism, one of the most famous Reformed statements of faith is deeply suspicious about our capacity to do good and fully embraces the idea that poor motives contaminate the quality of external moral behavior before the eyes of God.
In the Catechism’s opening section on misery it turns out attention to the law of God. This law teaches us our misery.
Now just in case you wish to point out your compliance of specific laws in the Bible the Catechism will cut you off and go to Jesus’ summary of the law in Matthew 22. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and love your neighbor as yourself.”
This may seem like a nice way out of Biblical lists of laws that look unreasonable, inconsistent, inapplicable, knotty and unreasonable, but the Catechism doesn’t buy that either. Love cannot be equated to polite or nice. If you skip over to the Gratitude section you’ll discover just how high the Catechism sets the bar for love of neighbor.
105 Q. What is God’s will for you
in the sixth commandment?
A. I am not to belittle, insult, hate, or kill my neighbor;
not by my thoughts, my words, my look or gesture,
and certainly not by actual deeds;
and I am not to be party to this in others;
rather, I am to put away all desire for revenge.
This is why the Catechism, like Augustine, finds self-convenient motivation behind much of what we do.
91 Q. What do we do that is good?
A. Only that which
arises out of true faith,
conforms to God’s law,
and is done for his glory;
and not that which is based
on what we think is right
or on established human tradition.
In other words unless our best actions come out of true faith (motivation), conforms to the law of God (love) and is done for his glory (motivation, love of other, not for our own sake, pride, satisfaction or glory) it is not good. This application of suspicion of motive makes suspicious postmoderns look like wimps.
Why has Calvinism experienced a resurgence in this Postmodern context? Perhaps it is because there is an alignment operating beneath the surface. A deeply suspicious age will likely nudge people towards a deeply suspicious creed. If we are finding fault in the professions of others, some honest and reflective people may begin to apply the same acid test to their own constructed narratives and find fault with themselves. If they do so, where can they find hope?
Next: The Emergent Bizarro Twins of Mars Hill
Blog post written by an African American PCA pastor on whether conservative Christian African Americans should not vote for Obama because of his SSM statement.
Kevin DeYoung weighs in again on “What the Bible Really Still Says About Homosexuality”
Daniel Helminiak CNN Belief Blog “My Take: What the Bible really says about homosexuality”
Good comment conversation on the Patrol piece on the Culture wars with contributions from James KA Smith and my friend Bill Harris.
Can eating organic food turn you into a jerk? Eating the way you should tempts us to indulge and reinforce self-righteous thinking about ourselves.
Another great post by Ann Voskamp on the truth about our dirt.
On Mitt Romney, Liberty U and civil religion.
Who speaks for millennial evangelicals? They have as many different voices as the rest of the generations. Go figure.
John Piper’s letter to a 12 year old about the eternal destiny of those who haven’t heard the gospel.
The Danger and Potential of Memorizing Scripture from Augustine.
Also from Augustine, the famous nursing paragraph.
7, 11. O God, hear me. Alas for the sins of humankind! A human it is who here bewails them, and you treat him mercifully because you made him, though the sin that is in him is not of your making. Who is there to remind me of the sin of my infancy (for sin there was: no one is free from sin in your sight, not even an infant whose span of earthly life is but a single day);43 who can remind me of it? Some little mite who is a tiny child now, in whom I might observe conduct I do not remember in myself? What then was my sin at that age? Was it perhaps that I cried so greedily for those breasts? Certainly if I behaved like that now, greedy not for breasts, of course, but for food suitable to my age, I should provoke derision and be very properly rebuked. My behavior then was equally deserving of rebuke, but since I would not have been able to understand anyone who scolded me, neither custom nor common sense allowed any rebuke to be given.
St. Augustine (2007-04-01). The Confessions, Revised (The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, Vol. 1) (Kindle Locations 798-806). New City Press. Kindle Edition.
When our sexual stories go off the Christian Map from the CT Blog
From Twice a Sunday to twice a month as the new normal for church attendance by Phil Reinders.
Finally, sharks with laser beams! 🙂
Philip Yancey talks about escaping a toxic church. GK Chesterson “The worst moment for an atheist is when they experience a profound sense of gratitude and they have no one to thank.”
“A person who pursues revenge should dig two graves.” old Chinese proverb. from @bakadesuyo.
Pt. 1 of The Postmodern Logic Behind Emergent Calvinism
Defining Postmodernity
I first heard the submarine race joke before I was old enough to get it. I remember my grade school brain racing to try to figure out “where in Northern New Jersey would you go to watch submarine races? What lake in North Jersey has submarines? Are they going out to the shore to watch submarines? How could you watch them anyway because they are underwater?”
Grappling with postmodernity as applied to religion and theology is like trying to watch submarine races.
Defining post-modernity is a struggle in itself. My best understanding of the term (used often, but seldom agreed upon) is a suspicion that all meta-narratives are compromised by selfish motivation backed by power. History is written by the winners. Religion is the opiate of the people, pushed by those who wish to keep the from violent revolution.
NT Wright on Scripture and Postmodernity
NT Wright in his book “Scripture and the Authority of God” weighs in on the positive and negative consequences of Postmodernity’s influence on reading the Bible.
Modernism and its readings have, as I have already suggested, been simultaneously under a different kind of attack, from the postmodern movement. Postmodernism, by unmasking the power interests latent in texts and movements, not least those of the last two hundred years, has offered a sustained ideological challenge not only to many ancient and modern texts but to modernism itself—particularly the economic and cultural hegemony of the Western world which rests on the achievements of the Enlightenment. We have seen all kinds of fresh readings of biblical texts—feminist, post-Holocaust, ethnic, post-colonial, and so forth—all of which have discovered passages which have been used, and which some have suggested were intended to be used, as “texts of terror,” that is, weapons of oppression or worse.
Wright, N. T. (2011-03-01). Scripture and the Authority of God: How to Read the Bible Today (p. 97). Harper Collins, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
Such deconstructive readings, many will conclude, have done us a service by pointing out the ways in which texts can be heard, whether or not they were intended that way. They have also had the effect (in this respect simply increasing the force of modernist rationalism) of removing texts from the implicit canon, while sometimes offering alternative candidates for inclusion. In some cases they render whole books unusable because those writings are deemed guilty of what the postmodern Western world regards, in its new and highly self-righteous judgmentalism, as unforgivable ideological sins. Deconstruction of standard ways of reading texts is by no means always a negative or destructive thing to do; it may have the effect of jolting us out of comfortable half-truths to see something which is really there in the text and to which we had not previously paid attention.
Wright, N. T. (2011-03-01). Scripture and the Authority of God: How to Read the Bible Today (p. 98). Harper Collins, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
Wright gets more negative still…
Postmodernity’s effect on contemporary Western readings of scripture is thus, as with much else in the movement, essentially negative. Postmodernity agrees with modernity in scorning both the eschatological claim of Christianity and its solution to the problem of evil, but without putting any alternative in place. All we can do with the Bible, if postmodernity is left in charge, is to play with such texts as give us pleasure, and issue warnings against those that give pain to ourselves or to others who attract our (usually selective) sympathy. This is where a good deal of the Western church now finds itself. The fact that this position is merely assumed, not usually spelled out, makes it all the more potent, since postmodernity is currently what “feels right” in Western culture, and does not open itself to challenge by coming out into the open. Indeed, challenges are routinely dismissed as an attempt to go back to modernity or even premodernity, leaving us with a fine irony: an ideology which declares that all ideologies are power plays, yet which sustains its own position by ruling out all challenges a priori. Much criticism, both modern and postmodern, has thus left the church, after years of highly funded research in seminaries and colleges, less able to use the Bible in anything like the way which Jesus and the earliest Christians envisaged. This is the reason for the biblical vacuum at the heart of many of the so-called mainline churches on both sides of the North Atlantic and elsewhere. And this is why we are reduced to shouting matches about biblical authority.
Wright, N. T. (2011-03-01). Scripture and the Authority of God: How to Read the Bible Today (Kindle Locations 1447-1458). Harper Collins, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
We cannot evade the problem, as fundamentalism does, simply by appealing to an a priori argument (“The Bible says…”). However, at the level of cultural movements, we are bound to take note both of the implicit cultural imperialism within modernism (which postmodernism itself has unmasked, but also in another way perpetuated by its implicit claim that only the postmodernists really see what’s been going on) and of the failure of postmodern criticism actually to do anything about it. As Nicholas Boyle has pointed out (Who Are We Now? [University of Notre Dame Press, 1998]), all that deconstruction achieves is a nihilism in which the only relief is a kind of hermeneutical narcissism, taking one’s pleasure with the text and letting the rest of the world go by unnoticed. It cannot successfully challenge real evil, since every challenge can itself be deconstructed into the hidden motivations of the challenger(s); and scripture itself is thereby muzzled into silent connivance with radical evil.
Wright, N. T. (2011-03-01). Scripture and the Authority of God: How to Read the Bible Today (Kindle Locations 1460-1467). Harper Collins, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
Cynicism Writ Large
At its worst Postmodernism can devolve into cynicism writ large. Dismissing every narrative, assertion and project out of suspicion that the offerings are corrupted by the motives of the presenters of the narrative leaves us with little. All that remains for us are the enjoyable experiences at the surface of the offerings with the full knowledge that there can be nothing more substantially binding down below. Submarine races are for our enjoyment but don’t ask more of them than be offered.
The Logic Beneath Cultures
You’d be hard pressed to assert that common working folk pay much attention to this kind of philosophical analysis but you’d be equally hard pressed not to admit that broad movements of culture whisper to the masses and shape our lives below the conscious level. We are children of our communities.
We are suspicious of larger ideals but eager to enjoy, experiment and explore the fruits of diverse traditions and religions. The metaphysical assertions of a religion are incidental to the immediate possibility of payout. We are suspicious that all are corrupt, but a cosmopolitan application of “whatever seems works for me now” is the order of the day. We embrace an image of karma for it seems to offer a universe of justice. Reincarnation likewise seems playful and intriguingly mysterious but when someone suggests that birth defects and child abuse are karma’s hand at evening past live’s scores we object.
Postmodernity can consume itself but like the gryllacrididae eating the contents of its own abdominal sack it is unaware and unconcerned about the source.
A hermeneutic of suspicion keeps us looking through and deconstructing and leaves us with little more than “what works for me today is the best that I can do.” We “know” that what lies below the surface disqualifies the grip of larger narratives but we’re happy for a trip to the water to watch the submarines race.
Love
I believe Christianity is about learning to love everyone, all the way up to and including our enemies. In most cases our real enemies are not people far off, or people we can push away, speak ill of or exclude, they are people we sometimes love and sometimes hate because of what they do, how they treat us, the options and positions they hold, whether they be idiosyncratic, religious or political. Our challenge is to love those we disagree with, those who are doing harm to us and to our world.
It is natural for us to wall ourselves off from people who say and do things we don’t like. Right now we as a society are coming to terms with our abusive history towards those who don’t want to or can’t conform with traditional sexual norms. That’s a difficult struggle. Sexuality touches deep things in our identity.
Boxes
The current conversation has created a divisive narrative that puts people into boxes, gay and straight, bigots and “good people”, withholders of rights and victims and sets them all against each other. People never fit easily into any box and all of our labels fall short. This conflict wants to put me in a box and tell me how to treat people in other boxes.
One way to approach it is to say “I’m just not going to talk about it.” Neither side wants that. It is abandonment.
One way is to say “I’ll just be nice to everyone and not take a position or not share with others what I think.” That’s polite, but again, does it really do justice to the history of abuse and discrimination?
I think what we need to do is study, and think and converse and read broadly.
I know too many people with all kinds of positions, lifestyles, etc. to make blanket judgment of “good people” and “bad people”.
Applying the Golden Rule
I’d ask that you afford me what it is that you want me to afford you. Don’t judge me by what I post or read. Don’t judge me by the positions I embrace today (positions change). Don’t judge me by the friends I keep.
If I post something that you think you want to read, read it. If you think I’m crazy or evil or pathetic, then have some compassion for me and perhaps some patience with me. My ignorance and wrong-headedness may be a function of my limited experience or the poor company I keep or the stupid things I read.
Being nice is really not what we want from each other. Being nice is really a way of polite dismissal. It’s better to talk.
Jesus wasn’t nice
Yesterday I read a blog post on remembering the unpopular Jesus. Part of me liked the post and part of me didn’t. The part of me that liked the post reflected on how the author was right about Jesus. Jesus was very unpopular, unpopular enough to get himself killed. I’m currently working through Acts and Paul was the same way.
What I didn’t like about the post was that we Christians are too often simply offensive because of our insensitivity and lack of love. I’ll have to include myself in this group. I can be a jerk sometimes. I can be very insensitive. I fear acknowledging this side of Jesus because I know that my twisted heart will use it as justification for my own poor behavior. I’m a mess.
Jesus loved messy people and he often wasn’t nice about it. Jesus wasn’t nice.
I need to learn to be more gentle, kind, loving, understanding, trusting, but not nice.
Discussion on CRC-Voices on SSM lead to the question of what is happening in the Netherlands. For CRC people looking back over the Atlantic is an old habit, for better or for worse. In the Netherlands marriages are a state business, churches either hold “an affirmation of marriage” afterwards or in the RC setting “complete” the marriage. Also found an interesting article on the first trio marriage in the Netherlands in 2005.
Why do I take and keep these notes? Yesterday I read a piece on Tim Stafford’s blog that I didn’t note and today in a Voices discussion on caring for aging parents I remembered what I read. Tim Stafford is republishing some of his out of print books on Kindle, one of them on caring for aging parents. Here is the Amazon link.
Remembering the unpopular Jesus.
Oregon church sues former member for online criticism.
Can you call a 9 year old a psychopath?
These differences, researchers say, are most likely genetic in origin. One study calculated the heritability of callous-unemotional traits at 80 percent. Donald Lynam, a psychologist at Purdue University who has spent two decades studying “fledgling psychopaths,” says that these differences may eventually solidify to produce the unusual mixture of intelligence and coldness that characterizes adult psychopaths. “The question’s not ‘Why do some people do bad things?’ ” Lynam told me by phone. “It’s ‘Why don’t more people do bad things?’ And the answer is because most of us have things that inhibit us. Like, we worry about hurting others, because we feel empathy. Or we worry about other people not liking us. Or we worry about getting caught. When you start to take away those inhibitors, I think that’s when you end up with psychopathy.”
Eric Dirksen’s reflections on why young adults are coming to his church plant.
The Mythical Land Beyond the Culture Wars
I think most of us loosely think of culture warring as a special class of ressentiment, combat driven by a mentality of besiegement, symbolic struggle, and supposed existential threat to a cultural identity. But I’m not so sure we can make a clean separation between that and good old democratic disagreement. Democracy as we generally conceive it is a structure for managing and containing conflict, a framework for legitimate political struggle. There will always be factions, sides, particular interests, etc, and those imply we will have political friends and enemies. Deep down, I think describing serious political conflict as a “culture war” is part of the liberal allergy to vigorous debate; it tries to shove deep disagreements into a corner with some kind of label indicating that this is not welcome in “reasonable” discourse. “Culture warrior” is an epithet, used by the “sides” against each other and by bipartisan elites against all that shrill partisanship. But the reality is that certain issues like abortion, gay marriage, etc, are deeply divisive, and they symbolize and encapsulate dearly-held views about what is good and right in our country and the identities of people who hold those views. Despite what Washington pundits might tell you, people should have strong feelings about these issues, and they should fight about them. It’s called politics.
You are a very different person when you are sexually aroused.
Rachel Held Evans calls out the magazines at the supermarket.
On CS Lewis, the Medievalist or rather the Boethian.
The Emergent Bizarro Twins of Mars Hill
Pt. 3 of The Postmodern Logic Behind Emergent Calvinism
The Dream of Resurrecting the First Century
At the core of the Protestant ethos is the dream that the root vine of the church of Jesus Christ can be tapped by a direct, fresh and honest reading of the Bible. This dream has been launching churches and church reformation movements long before the Protestant Reformation. We long for the Holy Spirit to come with tongues of fire and blow like a mighty wind, or at least we think we do. We fixate on the success of the honeymoon passages early in the book of Acts but suppress the stonings, beatings, imprisonments, failures, conflicts and martyrdoms of the rest of the story, and the rest of church history.
Part of what this dream is blind to the fact that every fresh reading of the Bible is undertaken from a fixed point in history, just like the events of the Bible happened in their own fixed point in history. The core of the incarnation, that God takes on particularity, Jewish flesh, a labored occupation, a first century religion, Roman occupation politics with its own culture war, is also conveniently suppressed. Every fresh wind of the Spirit will also bear a world of its own particularity. There were no generic prophets and there can be no generic Christians. We all have fingerprints, DNA, context and history.
Seeker Modernity
The Baby Boomers with their parents rode the post-war church balloon high into the sky, but by the 80s it was clear that although the balloon hadn’t burst, it was losing altitude quickly. Bill Hybels created a safe place to hear a dangerous message. Rick Warren, a master communicator of folksy simplicity taught pastors how to run their disciples around the baseball diamond.
The seeker movement tried to reassert the church’s credibility among a population that was losing ground to addiction, debt, and the weary hustle of suburban life by offering programmatic relief. Modernity’s therapeutic tools wrapped in Biblely language packed in “how to” sermons accompanied by churchified popular music helped the faithful bring unchurched Harry and Mary to a familiar mall like space so that older modern evangelistic tools like the four spiritual laws and the Roman road could do their work. If the golf course in the movie “The Sunshine State” was “nature, on a leash” then the seeker movement was a modern missiological way of putting American suburban sprawl on a Christian leash.
The Seeker movement in the 80s and 90s did little to challenge NT Wright’s paradigm of the shape of modern Christianity in North America
Much would-be Christian thought (including much would-be “biblical” Christian thought) in the last two hundred years has tacitly conceded these huge claims, turning “Kingdom of God” into “the hope for heaven after death” and treating Jesus’s death, at the most, as the mechanism whereby individual sinners can receive forgiveness and hope for an otherworldly future—leaving the politicians and economists of the Enlightenment to take over the running, and as it turns out the ruining, of the world. (This political agenda, by the way, was of course a vital part of the Enlightenment project: kick “God” upstairs, make religion a matter of private piety, and then you can organize the world to your own advantage. That has been the leitmotif of the Western world ever since, the new philosophy which has so far sustained several great empires, launched huge and horribly flawed totalitarian projects, and left the contemporary world thoroughly confused. But all this must wait for another day.) Scripture itself, meanwhile, is muzzled equally by both sides. It is squelched into silence by the “secularists” who dismiss it as irrelevant, historically inaccurate, and so on—as you would expect, since it might otherwise challenge their imperial dreams. Equally worrying, if not more so, it is squashed out of shape by many of the devout, who ignore its global, cosmic, and justice-laden message and treat it only as the instrument of personal piety and the source of true doctrine about eternal salvation. Secular and sacred readings—and the scholarship that has jostled between the two—have connived to produce the shallow readings which, as we saw in the prologue, constitute our immediate problem.
Wright, N. T. (2011-03-01). Scripture and the Authority of God: How to Read the Bible Today (pp. 89-90). Harper Collins, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
The Emergent Movement: Ecclesiastical Generational Differentiation
While the boomers were working out their stuff in the churches created to retake their generation, younger generations were having none of it. Employing modern marketing methods to lure people in to hear a modernistic “dangerous message” sounded all too familiar. Their generation had been the target of the Merchants of Cool and could were nearly allergic to anything that might feel “inauthentic”.
Jim Belcher in his book “Deep Church” answers the question “What is the Emergent Church Protesting?”
1. Captivity to Enlightenment rationalism
2. A narrow view of salvation
3. Belief before belonging
4. Uncontextualized worship
5. Ineffective preaching
6. Weak ecclesiology
7. Tribalism
The recommendation blurbs on the book are a who’s who of the early Emergent movement:
Tim Keller: “This is an important book”
Scot McKnight: “Deep church is the book we need…”
Mark Driscoll: “Deep church is a thoughtful, helpful and practical addition…”
Dan Kimball: “Deep church takes us beyond just the surface…”
Rob Bell: “This is the Jim Belcher I used to hang out with…”
Living on Htrae
“In the Bizarro world of “Htrae” society is ruled by the Bizarro Code which states “Us do opposite of all Earthly things!” Bizarro twins are the same, but opposite.
Rob Bell and Mark Driscoll were born 49 days apart in 1970, that’s seven weeks exactly for you numerological readers of Daniel 9. Both of them established large growing churches named “Mars Hill” and echo church plants around the country. Both pastors have produced significant controversy and at this point in time followers of one would likely have suspicions about the followers of the other. Both would come from the Emergent response to the traditional church and the seeker movement. Both would wind up taking it in entirely different directions.
Mars Hill Grand Rapids (Rob Bell) grew in one of the most Christian and reformed cities in the United States. Mars Hill Seattle (Mark Driscoll) grew in one of the most resistant cities in America to Christianity. Both would methods shaped and suited to a postmodern context. In the city with deep Reformed roots the message would be more accommodationist. In the city resistant to church growth the message would be more antithetical and reactive to the pervasive local culture.
Rob Bell: Using Narrative to Respond to Postmodernity
Rob Bell would make a name for himself by trying to help people hear and live a better story. It seems ironic that a movement that is suspicious of meta narratives would be so enthralled by narrative but that seems to be the way it is. Stories have within themselves their own logic and justification. Stories create within themselves their own discrete universes that to one degree or another ask us to not worry about the structure and plumbing beneath. Rob Bell through his preaching, teaching, writing and video work created attractive worlds for us to live within. As a skilled subcreator he was able to connect his created worlds sufficiently to our worlds so that the two could inform each other. This is essentially what the Biblical narrative does for us.
The job of the preacher is through the sermon or sermonic story is to take from our context and the Biblical context and create a small third derivative story between them that makes sense of the two foundational worlds. Bell follows the Seeker movement by attempting to create a safer, better, derivative world which lends credibility to the Biblical world by showing it to improve on the listener’s contextual world. If you look at Rob Bell’s most famous book “Love Wins” the contours of the approach are clear. Bell wants to help make Jesus and the Bible credible by showing how it improves on impulses already found and accepted within the culture. Justification for opening postmoderns to considering a metanarrative is found in the accumulation of self-justifying smaller narratives.
From the west coast one might reasonably ask “How postmodern is Grandville Michigan really?” Late in 2011 Rob Bell announced that he was leaving suburban Grand Rapids for California to write books, speak and continue his video work. There is a sense among some church leaders in creative, urban, postmodern hotspots that this type of accommodationist approach only gets traction among skeptical Christians looking for something fresh from remnant puddles of Christendom. If you look enough like everyone else no one has any reason to make time to hear what you really have to say. There may be something to the fact that the next two Christian leaders are striving to create alternative Christian communities in post-christian contexts while embracing positions antithetical to the flow around them.
Mark Driscoll: Will the Whining Never End? Who can save us from this misery?
If Rob Bell is a therapist-story teller who wants to help you live a better story, Mark Driscoll is a drill sergeant that is going to yell and even cuss at you until you get your spiritually rebellious ass off the sofa of eternal destruction.
Cultural projects among real people (as opposed to the ones in our imaginations) have a way of bringing about what they were designed to avoid. Modernity was supposed to eliminate religion (as a subset of superstition) giving us a world of reasonable peace and prosperity. It gave us two World Wars. It gave us the lesson that if your neighbor has something you want (like the rest of the planet) and is opposed to giving it to you and your countrymen it seems reasonable to take it and dispose of your neighbor and her progeny.
Postmodernity was supposed to eliminate metanarratives by exposing the truth beneath them that all were conveniently deployed by the powerful of history to oppress the weak. If postmodernity itself is a metanarrative… you get the picture. Power ought not to be used to advantage oneself over the weak, but we find that use of power by its very definition disadvantages the other by virtue of their weakness.
We imagine that a newly empowered formerly weak person would wield their new power in a more moral way, but when we imagine this we conveniently forget the reason we coined the word “reprisal”. Any good therapist will tell you “hurt people hurt people.”
Playing the weak victim in a meta-narrative where victims are afforded rights to free themselves from tyranny creates a race for the status of “more victim than thou”. The old ways of obvious and clear power grabs are replaced by the drama of trying to out whine your adversary in the theater of victim entitlement. Into this morass of self pity and sycophancy the unreconstructured male takes the stage and shouts “I can’t fucking stand it anymore!” and he is not alone.
If power structures can’t be trusted, and all metanarratives by their nature are corrupt, and we learn that we ought to be suspicious of our leaders, our parents, and even our own moral and religious selves, what person in the universe is there left to turn to? When our institutions are so thoroughly compromised by human corruption, and our hearts themselves can deliver no earthly good, we need a deliverer who is powerful enough to deliver us from our sin and misery and yet human enough to be one of us.
Wait a minute, I’ve heard something like this before.
15 Q. What kind of mediator and deliverer
should we look for then?
A. One who is truly human and truly righteous,
yet more powerful than all creatures,
that is, one who is also true God.
Antithetical in all the right ways
Church growth experts have long known that conservative churches grow larger and faster than accommodationist churches. Conservative church leaders like to repeat the point. They seldom fess up to the fact that the same dynamic holds true for other counter-cultural groups that they regard as heterodox. The key is learning to be antithetical in all the right ways.
The logic of accommodation is that you must remove barriers so that your neighbors can come in, but why should they take the time? You must be antithetical enough to be interesting enough to warrant a first and second look by your neighbors, while accessible and attractive enough to make it possible for them to join you and sacrifice to continue to follow you.
Every religious group that grows has figured out an equation to fit this paradox whether or not they know how they are doing it. Once we find a formula that works, however conscious we are of the particulars, we tend to keep doing it. Next we write a book about how others can do it too. Reward begets repetition.
Suspicious of everything we see? Offplanet the choosing!
The logic of emergent Calvinism like Driscoll’s offshores our choosing with God. If all human choosers are suspect then God must do the choosing and by our alignment with his revelation we can see that he has chosen us.
The dance of antithesis and alignment brings us many ironies. Conservatives who may be suspicious of science while embracing a worldview whose determinism doesn’t look out of step with determinisms found in science. People who are more comfortable with choosing their God and their beliefs ironically embrace a science that is rapidly undermining the ontology of human choice. Human choice may merely be an experience of the consciousness after the subconscious has already made the decision. (Read Eagleman’s Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain) If our brains themselves are doing the choosing apart from us, we need a chooser with no such limitation.
Emergent Calvinism leans hard on predestination, insists on what is viewed as traditional community structures and Biblical readings while in their suspicions finding alignment with a suspicious context. If certainty cannot be found in humanity, it can only be found in God.
Only an affluent, powerful, prosperous civilization can support skepticism as a lifestyle. Real world choices require action and in a scientistic age action and repeated expected response invite the chooser into certainty. Driscoll’s church is made up of people who work for a living, people who have been knocked around by this world and have had to make choices. This isn’t the first time Calvinism has taken root in areas of immigrants from cultural exile.
If Driscoll is attracting a population seeking certainty in an age of whining, how is emergent Calvinism also making inroads into communities of the cosmopolitan elite?
Next: Stalking Tim Keller