Review of Rob Bell’s “Love Wins”: The Jeopardy of God

Posted on April 29, 2011 by PaulVK

“Let’s be very clear, then: we do not need to be rescued from God. God is the one who rescues us from death, sin and destruction. God is the rescuer.” Kindle Loc. 2196

I touched on some of this in my review of chapter 3, the Love of God. I think there are two things to ponder with respect to this assertion. 1. What is the evidence? 2. Our experience with glory

1. What is the evidence for this assertion?

Do we have evidence for this assertion on the basis of what in Christian theology we call “general revelation”? Does what we see in this world lead us to believe this about the creator God? Nature is red in tooth and claw. There are more species extinct than species that currently exist. People suffer from illness, natural disasters, and especially from each other. I see no basis for this claim from general revelation.

Jesus certainly said many things that you can appeal to to base this claim. Can we find the basis of this claim in Moses? Tougher. In Mohammed? I don’t know. Is there a unique creator, all governing god comparable to Yhwh in Hindu or Buddhist traditions? It is Jesus that tells stories of a heavenly father that you can count on and creates this base.

This base, however, is deeply tied to the Hebrew Scriptures where Yhwh is a consuming fire who breaks out in the camp. The children of Israel both depend upon Yhwh’s presence but have issues with it as seen in their request to Moses at Sinai that Moses be their mediator. Israel in fact will always be dependent upon mediators throughout the story which is precisely where Jesus comes in. The mediator enables Yhwh to be the God who wages war and is victorious over more powerful foes, Egyptians, Philistines, Assyrians, while at the same time keeps mediates the relationship insuring that this great power does not destroy the people. Can we really honor the Hebrew Scriptures without coming to terms with this aspect of the tradition?

The dangerous power of Yhwh and the jeopardy of the people energizes the law and will bring the exile. Yhwh need not always destroy directly, he can simply withdraw his hand and allow Israel to be taken by the greater powers in the region.

Is this complex relationship eliminated with Jesus? Why does what seems like a small lie over the size of a church donation end in the death of Ananias and Saphira causing fear to spread throughout the church?

Bell simply here reflects contemporary sensibilities. This position is most susceptible to contemporary dismissals of religion as wish fulfillment projected large against the sky. We want a jeopardy free spiritual world and so we simply assert it. Upon what basis are we making this assertion?

2. Our experience with glory

Were you ever nervous meeting a person of consequence? When you were a child were you scared of your teacher or nervous about going to the principles office? Does your heart run faster if you are approached by a police officer or the IRS? Why? Because what you say or what you do or what you have done could be enormously consequential in terms of your future. Our situation before the face of God is exponentially greater than any of these.

There is also a more existentialist argument. We all tend to base our self-worth and our self-esteem on some attribute. We regard ourselves as good looking, smart, moral, qualified, etc. What if you were the smartest kid in your class and you based your identity on this attribute? What happens when you go away to college only to discover that your self-worth was based on your relative performance amidst a very small pool and that when the pool was enlarged you were only average in that pool? Envy tends to creep in and it is common to feel crushed. Now image coming face to face with the most beautiful, the most powerful, the most brilliant, the most moral, the most perfect being in existence. If you have any pride within you and if you identity is based on that pride your identity will be crushed.

I think this is also the best argument for the existence of Satan and our way to understand destructive, counter-productive evil. What if Satan had within him pride in himself being, relatively speaking, and angel of tremendous power and glory and smarts? What if it was Satan’s desire to be the most powerful, the most beautiful, the most consequential being in the universe? What is Satan wanted to replace his maker only to discover that despite all his glory he still falls short? That envy would drive such a being to be destructive, to hate the good, to hate the beautiful, to hate anything that reflected or pointed to the glory of the creator. That being would constantly want to tear down, to destroy, to accuse.

I think on the basis of the lack of evidence and our experience with glory that the jeopardy of God is a most reasonable thing to imagine. I don’t think its reasonable to risk Bell’s position.

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Jesus’ Backwards Post-Resurrection Plan

Posted on April 28, 2011 by PaulVK

Jesus’ time management has always been a bit suspect for me. Let’s imagine Jesus had a life coach and he was going to map out his ministry. The first issue would be 33 years. Now we’ve got patriarchs living well over 100, 33 seems a bit brief for definitive revelation. Maybe we can maximize and have sweet baby Jesus do some miracles (see Talladega Nights ).

No, we don’t get the ministry thing rolling until about age 30. Then we get three years with a hand picked group of disciples that consistently appear to learn very little from him during that short time. Again, a good life coach might have begged to at least push the public ministry from 21 to 33 if God isn’t going to give us more time. No. Request denied.

The time culminates in a betrayal, a crucifixion and resurrection. Now Jesus shows up after the resurrection and we would hope he would now be a fount of useful information for us or at least answer a bunch of questions we might have. In Luke 24:36-49 Jesus in fact does all the talking, and gives us some of the most important nuggets of information we want, but it’s not the stuff that I was necessarily looking for.

The first thing we see is the reaction of the disciples, fear and doubt. Now this is completely normal, natural and expected, and very much in keeping with both divine and angelic appearances throughout the Bible.

Usually we get the command to “fear not” but Jesus comes at it in a different way. “Why are you troubled? Why do doubts rise in your mind?” It is as if Jesus has expectations for his disciples that they should know him and that they should know better, which of course they should. A hallmark of the post resurrection messages is the repetition that this was, over and over again told to them by Jesus and that they hadn’t or couldn’t understand. Again, this is the “trouble seeing” problem of something beyond our expectations that we human beings deal with all the time.

Jesus offers physical, experiential evidence of who he is and their demeanor changes to joy and amazement. The outline of this passage is simple in one respect.
1. Jesus knows his disciples need an experience of the risen Jesus, and he gives it to them. 2. They also needs to point them to the Hebrew Scriptures and locate himself within that context.
3. He then gives them a plan and
4. promises to equip them for that plan.

What is interesting that instead on elaborating on what their resurrections will mean, whether it will help them catch fish, find fish better, or whether or not they will need to eat with new, imperishable bodies, he keeps pointing them backwards. What they need to know is a new interpretive filter to the Hebrew Scriptures and that will be enough.

Now again, just like with time thing, this seems backwards. Don’t we want some new vision all written down by Jesus himself? Can’t he scratch something onto notes or golden tablets or two new stone tablets to replace the ones that Moses got? Why back to the Old Testament?

We might even complain that this is culturally backwards. Repentance and forgiveness of sins proclaimed to all the nations, but the nations don’t know the Hebrew Scriptures! That doesn’t seem right. Maybe it will be good for the Jewish people, but not the other nations. Why should they go back and have to learn about all that stuff in the Old Testament? Why should they have to then figure out what to do with circumcision, dietary laws, the history of the sons of Israel, etc? It all seems very strange, very counter-productive, very illogical.

What’s more, if the Hebrew Scriptures were so clear about it all, why were the experts of Jesus day in those Scriptures the most resistant to him? In fact, most of them were the ones who put Jesus to death in the firstplace?! These were also the ones that Jesus was wrangling with and arguing with almost constantly.

Maybe Jesus should just take a bit more time and write a set of Scriptures, or at least leave us a Study Bible of the old ones with footnotes and things that would say things like “shellfish are cool now” or explain that whole Canaanite genocide thing. Nope. He doesn’t do it.

He opens their mind to THOSE scriptures with shellfish prohibitions and genocide and all, and wants them to focus on three things that quite admittedly seem like minor elements of them if you can find them at all. He wants them to open those Hebrew Scriptures along the lines of three things:

1. that the Messiah must suffer,
2. that the Messiah must rise from the dead,
3. that repentance and forgiveness are to be proclaimed to all nations.

In order to do this work the Father is promising something that will cloth them with power to accomplish it. Well that’s a good thing because from what we’ve seen of this group they certainly need something more than what they’ve had before.

Again, if I am to evaluate this plan I would have to suggest that Jesus get a new one. My plan would stipulate:

1. Jesus give more time to training the disciples. They clearly failed with the whole arrest, abandonment thing.
2. Jesus write a book. Eye witness accounts tend to vary on details which leads people doubt which or what is true.
3. Jesus include in that book a lot more information about what happens after you die and/or are raised again. These books really sell well and are very popular (See Lauren Winner on Love Wins). We have lots of questions too. Are we old? Are we young again? Is there sex? How about eating? Do we get everything told to us or do we get to discover it? Is the Internet in the new creation? etc.
4. Jesus do a book tour. There will be lots of follow up questions that will need to be answered not the least of which to clarify a lot of questions about those pesky Hebrew Scriptures he keeps trying to get us to read.
5. As publicity stunts we might revisit some earlier suggestions, stones to bread, playing “catch” with the angels from the pinnacle of the temple, running for political office. Three clearly solid suggestions.

The really shocking thing, however, is that Jesus’ plan works. Repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached to the nations and non-Jews will embrace those old Hebrew Scriptures as their Bible and they will do so in droves. So many in fact will come to it despite persecution, a world of questions, and frankly a whole bunch of lousy behavior by Jesus’ followers and some additional bad ideas but the darn thing in fact works out.

Ironically here we stand today puzzling over the same appearance issues, divine-plan-time-management questions, fears and doubts, and second guessing Jesus repentance and forgiveness plan including the whole “power” thing. Do we buy in?

What’s maddening about the whole business is that it is so uncompromising. Working the plan only halfway through always seems to complicate it and make it more difficult to follow but working it fully seems absolutely nuts sometimes.

This, however, is exactly what we see from Jesus again and again and again, consistently throughout everything we know about him. He never accepts a half-way relationship, it’s always all or nothing and a great many people choose “nothing” or keep trying to ride the fence. But this is him, take him or leave him.

Posted in Culture commentary, On the way to Sunday's sermon | Leave a comment

Franklin Graham’s definition of a Christian and the Evangelical Brand

Posted on April 26, 2011 by PaulVK

The two main interviews of “This Week with Christiane Amanpour” were with Franklin Graham and Tim Keller. I found both interviews very illuminating on a number of levels.

The Franklin Graham caught my attention almost immediately. Amanpour began the interview it seemed to me by throwing Graham a softball. “What’s the word that you most dearly associate with Easter? Is it sacrifice, is it love? What is it?”

To me the most obvious word to associate with Easter would be…resurrection?!

Graham doesn’t go here. Here is his answer:

“When I look at Easter, I look at my sins and realize that Jesus Christ paid my debt in full when he died on that cross, he died for me, he died for you, Christiane” Transcript Link

Even though I’ve been working over Rob Bell pretty good because of his book “Love Wins” Franklin Graham illustrates the reason Rob Bell has an audience.

Good Friday and Easter are obviously connected, but the persistent reduction of the gospel to personal debt forgiveness is typical of American evangelicalism and its inability to point to what debt forgiveness is in service of.

The second most illuminating element of this interview in terms of Franklin Graham’s understanding of the gospel comes with his evaluation of President Obama’s Christianity. First he goes to “birther” territory and then turns to whether Obama is a Muslim. All the time I am wondering whether he is trying to speak to the donation base of his organization or if he simply doesn’t have a decent publicist. He then gets into the “definition of a Christian”

“As it relates to Muslim, there are many people that do wonder where he really stands on that. Now, he has told me that he is a Christian. But the debate comes, what is a Christian?

For him, going to church means he’s a Christian. For me, the definition of a Christian is whether we have given our life to Christ and are following him in faith, and we have trusted him as our Lord and Savior.

That’s the definition of a Christian, it’s not as to what church you’re a member of. A membership doesn’t make you a Christian.

AMANPOUR: Do you believe him when he tells you he’s a Christian?

GRAHAM: Well, when he says that, of course. I can’t — I’m not going to say, “Well, no, you’re not.” God is the only one who knows his heart.” Transcript Link:

In other words Christianity is a private heart matter between an individual and God and public identification with a church is inconsequential.

A rush of ideas flood my mind. It seems clear that this “reverend” doesn’t really pastor a church because when I talk to pastors of churches they pull their hair out over this idea. Americans are individual consumers of religious services who hardly value any meaningful commitment to a local congregation as an important aspect of basic Christian discipleship.

I also wonder where Graham lives because the days of nominal Christian participation in a church in order to maintain some sort of Christendom appearance are over, at least in the places I live. This for me was brought home by Tim Keller in the next interview.

AMANPOUR: And how, also, do you account for the fact that there is so much more secularism and yet there is also so much more religion in our lives, in our politics?

KELLER: What’s happening is secularism and devout religion is growing together. And what’s going away is the kind of mushy middle, where people are just part of the — the synagogue, the mosque or the church because it’s expected. So what’s actually happening is polarization. Transcript Link

Tim Keller and Franklin Graham speak from two different places in American culture and to two different audiences.

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The Central Challenge of Discipleship: Recognizing Jesus

Posted on April 25, 2011 by PaulVK

The four synoptic gospels all seem to assume:
1. the historical existence of Jesus of Nazareth
2. Jesus to be a great teacher
3. Jesus to be a miracle worker
4. Jesus to be a sort of a prophet.

If the world had need of only these four notions I don’t think any of the 4 canonical gospels would have been written.

With the possible exception of point 3 for western secularists, most people today also would embrace these points. Muslims believe it. Hindus believe it. A great many people of harder to label religious belief believe it.

The urgent message of all four gospels is in fact that Jesus is something more than these four things. That is why they were written.

CS Lewis in Letter 23 of the Screwtape Letters makes the point that the gospels weren’t so much written to convince non-Christians of something about Jesus, but rather to strengthen Christians in their belief.

The earliest converts were converted by a single historical fact (the Resurrection) and a single theological doctrine (the Redemption) operating on a sense of sin which they already had—and sin, not against some new fancy-dress law produced as a novelty by a “great man”, but against the old, platitudinous, universal moral law which they had been taught by their nurses and mothers. The “Gospels”, come later and were written not to make Christians but to edify Christians already made.

The gospels seem to locate the central dilemma of the mission of God as the inability of the people of God to believe. This had been the central problem of God’s mission through Israel as seen in the desert and the in the promised land. This problem was seen in the rejection of Jesus by the religious authorities of the covenant people and then again it is seen in the disciples of Jesus themselves.

In Luke’s story of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus the scene is played out once again. Here we have two disciples of Jesus who accept points 1-4 but stop there. They have now been faced with the account of the empty tomb and we find them bewildered and stuck.

“Stupor” seems to be the best word to describe the status quo of Jesus followers throughout the gospels. “Stupor” seems to be a pretty apt word to describe the status of the church in nearly every age. Every now and then some clarity breaks out in brilliance, usually from unlikely places and unlikely people, but “stupor” is status quo.

If we were to add another common assumption about Jesus today it would likely be “nice”, but this story destroys that assumption. Jesus’ response to these disciples is not “oh, I really appreciate the support you two have given to our little movement. I’m sure it was a terrible inconvenience to walk these seven miles to Jerusalem. Would you please take this survey to see how the Almighty could give you a better spiritual experience on your next visit to Jerusalem?”

No he says “how foolish you are and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared. Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter his glory?”

He then goes back through the Hebrew Scriptures and re-orients their assumptions.

We might imagine Cleopas and his friend to beg off but remember that this guys really are Christ followers and the way we can tell is that they persevere even through the chastisement. In fact they are turned on by what Jesus walks them through and this energizes them to greater levels of belief.

It seems that the work of the gospel here is not simply to get people to agree with points 1-4 but to get them to point 5, to the audacious, unbelievable point that this Jesus is to be worshiped, followed and obeyed in a kind of absolute manner than ancients had some experience with (they knew slavery) but we moderns have almost none.

Posted in Devotional Reflection, Understanding the Bible | 1 Comment

“People of Faith”

Posted on April 25, 2011 by PaulVK

This Week had a round table discussion with “people of faith”. As is usual for these types of gatherings it makes me ask the question what is meant by this term “people of faith” and how it is used? On the panel there are individuals who speak for or from various religious traditions, in this case Christian, Muslim and Jew but if you have any sense at all of these religious communities and the factions I wonder what the point of the labels and the particular configuration is at all. It was clear very quickly that the discussion would fall along the usual political/cultural partisan lines that most discussions in the media fall along. I wondered what the point of supposedly interjecting “faith” into the discussion was at all? Adding a person who would supposedly speak from an atheist or agnostic perspective wouldn’t have changed a thing in the discussion.

It is clear that this category of “faith” is supposed to mean something. Supposedly all of the representatives at the table have something substantive and critical in common that persons would do not profess a “faith” would not have but I’m hard pressed to imagine what difference it would make. This of course is the repeated argument made by individuals without any overt profession to any specific religious tradition and I think their point is quite correct. “Faith” at least in terms of this discussion and many others seems to not make much of a difference about anything.

To me it is also important to ask what those who use the term “people of faith” mean by it. The best that I can tell “people of faith” are supposed to be more tolerant, more loving, more optimistic, more “spiritual” (another shibboleth). As the debate is engaged it seem that the term itself wants to present itself as one that creates common, less sectarian space but instead is simply another naked assertion that doesn’t want to fess up to its assumptions.

The two earlier interviews were with Tim Keller and Franklin Graham. I’ll have more to write specifically about the Franklin Graham interview (most of it not good) but the content of the Franklin Graham speech I think highlights the problem with the “people of faith” language. Christiane Amanpour in that interview wanted to spend time on some elements of evangelical Christianity that this supposed “people of faith” group would not have in common. What good is your supposed category of “people of faith” that is intended to establish some sort of workable “least common denominator” approach when someone like Franklin Graham can’t seem to find his way within the circle? What was clear was that Eboo Patel, Al Sharpton and Steve Roberts had a lot in common not only culturally and politically but I would assert also religiously making the Muslim, Christian, Jew distinctions appear inconsequential. Their implicit solutions for “bringing people together” seemed to have very little to do with any of their particular religious traditions.

Earlier in the year Christiane Amanpour had done a very interesting show on Islam that brought into the discussion a far broader spectrum of voices on the subject. Get enough “people of faith” in the room and this supposed common ground established by “faith” seems to evaporate pretty quickly.

If someone would like to defend the use of the term or find some actual use for it I’d love to hear it.

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Rob Bell “Love Wins” Chapter 4 Review, Good Friday Edition

Posted on April 22, 2011 by PaulVK

Does God Get What He Wants?

I haven’t written another chapter review from Rob Bell’s “Love Wins” for a while but today is probably as appropriate a day to answer the question posed by the title of chapter 4. “Does God get what he wants?”

There is a reason atheists are often angry. A lot of people that I see who don’t believe in God are also angry with God regardless of the obvious inconsistency of the two ideas. The nagging question many of them deal with is “is THIS what God wants?” meaning this world of suffering, death and corruption.

Throughout most of human history most peoples around the world easily assumed the jeopardy that the spirit world posed to people. The spirit world was a hazardous, dangerous place where humans, living or dead, needed powerful allies in order to not be its victims.

It is easy to psychologize away this fact of human history if you’re an ardent secularist or an atheist as simply human privative projection based on fear of an overpowering natural world. The difficulty with this kind of position is that the natural world, despite a definite increase in human power and creature comfort still completely dominates out future. One way or another human life will end according to every imagined scenario of the universe and everything we’ve ever loved or cared for will be gone and remembered or cared about by no one. If there is no future there is no ontological meaning today.

In my review of chapter 3 and the love of God I noted that our loss of this assumption of the threat of God to us is a product of evangelical success. God has been recast into an omni-nice parent whose real goal is to never have to say “no” to any of his creatures. It of course echoes Harold Bloom’s assessment of the God of American religion that “God loves us and is just dying to get close to us”. See also Christian Smith’s Moralistic, Therapeutic Deism.

This basic assumption of ours, deep within our culture, deep within our church culture too in fact, asks us to perpetually ask of our lives “Is this what God wants?”

This question in this age of decay becomes a very burdensome question to bear. When the tsunami hits we ask “is this what God wants?” When we lose our jobs or our life is threatened by illness or chaos “is this what God wants?” When someone fails us or betrays us we ask “is this what God wants?”

The question haunts us because of our omni-nice assumptions of the Almighty and the obstinate refusal of the objective order to confirm to our individual demands.

So Bell in his book will assert that in the end God gets what he wants even if this requires spinning off future worlds and contexts after our individual deaths to get this.

We’ll have to return to the question of what worlds Bell is imagining to tie up the unresolved issues of planet earth but for now we should ponder the question on this Good Friday “Does God Get What He wants?”

Throughout the book, one of the things I in fact like about Bell’s book is that Bell values this world and says that God values it too. The American evangelicalism that Bell is pushing back from is overly gnostic with respect to this world and Bell is trying to make a correction. Multiplying worlds in which to resolve the problems and decisions of this world, however, may also devalue it.

So “Does God get what he wants?” Good Friday is a good day to ask that question because in a sense according to various streams of Christian theology a lot of characters get what they want on Good Friday.

From a substitutionary atonement perspective God the Father, the judge of history gets what he wants on Good Friday because his wrath gets satisfaction. (See the “In Christ Alone” debate.)

From the Christus Victor atonement narrative Satan gets what he wants on Good Friday which is the Son of God mocked and dead. Easter, of course, will prove a less than happy day for him.

If we drop down and see it from the list of human witnesses to the crucifixion the picture gets more complex. The religious authorities get what they want. Jesus is shamed, stripped naked, spit upon, mocked, and his movement discredited. The sword is the best test of claims of divinity. If it dies it ain’t God.

Jesus’ disciples are horrified, shattered and scattered. This man that they had put their hopes in to set the world right has now fallen victim to the same power that captured God’s chosen people. The cross appears to be the absolute vindication of the power of Rome.

Onlookers are disturbed. Yet another political storm ends in the affirmation that might makes right. There were hopes for Jesus but he failed just like all other messianic aspirants.

What does Good Friday teach us about the context and the complexity of God getting what he wants?

It happens in history, in this world, and its appearance to us is in some ways inscrutable. The irony of the cross was that none of the witnesses on that day could fully grasp what was happening before their very eyes. One of the most ironic scenes of the whole Bible is that of the religious leaders mocking Jesus on the cross “he saved others but he cannot save himself.” The truth is that he was saving others because he won’t save himself and no one, absolutely no one on the ground that day can see it.

Do we need to ponder all kinds of hypothetical after-death scenarios by which God somehow constructs yet another context, another world, another reality in which to impress upon disembodied human souls the niceness of God and their stupidity for not embracing him, or do we dare to imagine that Good Friday is the day in which God in fact gets what he wants and the vehicle for that getting what he wants is the full cup of judgment for our barbarity, rebellion and record of atrocity against this planet and against each other.

Now in fairness Good Friday is only part of the process by which God will get what he wants, Easter will come.

My answer to the question of “Does God Get What He Wants” is yes. He does. I also embrace the lesson of Good Friday that God’s capacity to get what he wants is far beyond my ability to see him getting it in real time and my evidence for that is the cross of Jesus Christ. If we can see God getting what he wants in the seemingly contradictory moment of the execution of an innocent man, perhaps our minds can become open enough to seeing God getting what he wants in the more mundane dramas of our ordinary lives here in ordinary time.

Posted in book review, Culture commentary, Devotional Reflection | Tagged | Leave a comment

The defeater dynamic of everything new

Posted on April 21, 2011 by PaulVK

From http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVtCO84MDj8

1. Students think they know it
2. They don’t pay utmost attention
3. They don’t recognize that what was presented differs from what they were already thinking
4. They don’t learn a thing.
5. They get more confident in the ideas they were thinking before.

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Why we can listen to 52 sermons a year and never learn a thing

Posted on April 21, 2011 by PaulVK

Got a nice link from Bill Harris on an article about why clear communication isn’t always the best for learning. That link then led me to a good youtube link that talks about why students don’t learn from very clear science videos.

The first thing I thought of in reading the article was what Spud Snapper taught us in our education class at Calvin Seminary that you must first raise dissonance in the mind of the listener if you want them to learn something. Spud was a life long teacher who taught elementary, secondary, college and post-graduate levels of formal education. He was an amazing man who probably taught me more about preaching and teaching than anyone else. His point was that unless there is dissonance very little is often retained. This is a very similar point to the article linked.

The YouTube piece on effective science videos goes further. It applies some of this understanding to the study of students learning science. The video makes the point that their observation and application is specific to science but I think it is very germane to religious instruction as well. Why would learning science and learning religious have so much in common? Because (unlike conventional wisdom that asserts the occupy two different spaces in reality or at least knowability) in both cases the “student” has a wealth of first hand perceptions and formed ideas about the way things are and are confident in their positions on this subject. This is illustrated nicely by the video regarding the physics of a ball traveling through space.

The author of the video pretty clearly goes through why it is that students don’t learn and don’t assimilate what is being taught by the science video:

1. Students think they know it
2. They don’t pay utmost attention
3. They don’t recognize that what was presented differs from what they were already thinking
4. They don’t learn a thing.
5. They get more confident in the ideas they were thinking before.

I can’t tell you how true I have found this to be in church work. I won’t name names or tell stories but this is very much the way it is.

In a post recently I was working on the question of Jesus’ trial and what Jesus’ options were. Both Jesus’ disciples and Jesus’ enemies simply could not believe anything Jesus was telling them. The distance between his assertions and the plausibility structure they were all living in was simply too vast. What could change that?

The Easter morning story in Luke is brief and to the point. The women who went to the tomb to perform the embalming of Jesus’ body get told by two men in dazzling clothes that Jesus is risen just like he said. They go back to the disciples and they are immediately disregarded because they are women and their story is dismissed as an “idle tale”. Again, there is nothing in the plausibility structure that will allow the disciples to believe what the women are asserting.

It will take multiple appearances of Jesus doing a variety of things to rework their plausibility structure. The dissonance will be incredible. He will have to prove to them they are not dreaming. How? We don’t dream together, we dream alone. He will have to prove to them that he is not a ghost. They will have to touch him. He will have to prove to them that he is their friend, Jesus of Nazareth. Thomas will have to place his fingers in the nail holes he saw made on Good Friday and his hand into the wound in Jesus’ side. He will have to redo some miracles and he will have to spend a lot of time going over material from the Hebrew Scriptures. He will have to make food for them and break bread with them. He’s going to have to be with people who knew him intimately as well as be with large crowds of people at one time.

What will happen is that this new piece of information will need to be worked into their present plausibility structure regarding a number of elements about their world view. Their ideas about a general resurrection of the dead (not some gnostic soul/spirit escape into ethereal realms) will be employed and worked through theologically to yield Pauline passages like 1 Corinthians 15, Colossians 1 and Romans 8 where this resurrected body of Jesus is not simply some isolated event but the beginnings of a process that will culminate in the renovation of the cosmos. With this reworked plausibility structure what was remembered from the words of Jesus gets understood in a radically new way to live and an ability to love that appears reckless and inappropriate for people trying to save their own lives and make their “you only live once” life “count”.

One of the best witnesses to the fact of the resurrection is in fact the change in plausibility structures. Prior to Easter the assertions that Jesus had been making all along were unthinkable. Only the insane claim to be the creator God. They are immediately disproved by prison walls or the restraints we use for the dangerously insane.

One of the most ironic elements of the Good Friday narrative is that the demand to execute Jesus pursued by the religious authorities actually validates the fact that Jesus was speaking clearly and claiming to be Yhwh come to rescue and judge his people. The religious leaders conducted what was the most logical and conclusive test for such a claimant, kill him. God of course cannot be bound by our chains or held by our walls. The best way to demonstrate Jesus to be a dangerous lunatic was to kill him.

Jesus’ disciples were actually a bit less sane. They lived in the nether world of kind of embracing some of it while not fully thinking the matter through. Judas was likely the smartest of the group.

What changed all of the math on who this Jesus was is the resurrection. Even smart lunatics can get free of chains and prisons, but none can break the power of death. Everyone in the world has always known that only God can do such a thing. We also know that only God can also raise someone not simply to die at a more advanced age of the common things that take us, but to give him flesh not subject to the age of decay, flesh that doesn’t have a shelf life, flesh that is of creation 2.0, flesh that isn’t winding down starting from zero hour of the big bang. Only God can create a new heavens and a new earth out of a corpse of a Jewish bastard.

The difficulty we face in church is exactly what this little video details. Our plausibility structures have been sufficiently altered to allow us to furnish new answers to old questions. “Could Jesus be God?” “sure” but then we go about our business like it doesn’t matter.

We share the same problem as the disciples living in the nether land of kind of believing Jesus and kind of not. Most of us find ourselves so deeply steeped in today’s baseline religious assumption, moralistic therapeutic deism that church raises exactly zero dissonance for us. The defeater dynamic of anything new:

1. Students think they know it
2. They don’t pay utmost attention
3. They don’t recognize that what was presented differs from what they were already thinking
4. They don’t learn a thing.
5. They get more confident in the ideas they were thinking before.

Has us in its box.

It’s a miracle we believe even half of the gospel. Good thing miracles happen.

Posted in Institutional Church, Links, theological, Understanding the Bible | 1 Comment

What can role should Established Churches Play?

Posted on April 21, 2011 by PaulVK

Dan, a pastor from Pella in Iowa on CRC-Voices then asked what role established churches can play if church plants are doing most of the evangelism. This was my answer to him.

To answer Dan’s question about what the purpose of the established church is:

First let me clarify that I pastor an established church. Ours is not a church plant and our growth through evangelism numbers are sometimes an embarrassment to me. A couple of Sundays ago we had an almost 70 year old man make profession of faith after being with us for 10 years. I’ve baptized two 70 year old men. I regularly have people come to me after services, most of them African American, who say “I wish you had given an invitation because I would have joined your church today.” and I explain to them that we don’t work that way (the way many African American congregations do.) Why? We take a long time with people. Many come and go and come back throughout the process but I’ve found that for the most part slow is better.

New church plants could not be started without the established churches and the established churches are in many ways the foundation for all of the evangelistic activity out there.

I resist a theological perspective that reduces God’s mission to the world to evangelism as understood by getting people to identify and participate in the church. We are constantly working to evangelize ourselves, each other, and the world out there that is always in a sense on the fringe.

I’ll make a list:

1. Established churches bear witness to the community of the saints through time in a long term, stable, sustained way. Church plants are exciting but tiring. Everything needs to settle into community and established churches do this well.

2. Established churches afford a long obedience in the same direction. People need a sustained, predictable community around them in order to grow in Christ and to be surrounded by a body that affords them a context for the real work of saint creation.

3. Established churches continue to do outreach to the communities out of which they were formed. I’m always amazed at how able my congregation is to enfold people of the generation that founded the church. I’m not of that generation but my church reaches out to that demographic well. Our church plants can’t do that like my church can. Because of the generation that founded this church this often means re-activating dormant nominal Christians who have some nominal relationship with a church in the past. Church plants often reach out well to the generation of the church planter initially but then continue to age with their population while actually they broaden and diversify. The Granite Springs church which was for years all the age of the church planter or younger now his a nice demographic spectrum. It matured as it endured. This is a natural process in most churches.

4. Established churches parent new churches. Just like parents they have children and in a healthy relationship they both celebrated their children and struggle with them, sometimes because of them.

5. Established churches shoulder much of the theological, maintenance, broad spectrum ministry that the church should be involved in. We see this in CRC agencies: CRWRC (relief and development), CRWM (world missions), BTGMI (media ministries), Home missions, institutions of higher education, theological pursuits and questions, etc. Established churches are in a sense the adult supervision of the body of Christ. The kids are off pushing boundaries and establishing the church in new areas and breaking new ground but the established churches offer some wisdom hopefully combined with flexibility so that all may learn together.

6. Established churches help the saints persevere. The perseverance of the saints is a key mission of the church and the established churches often afford and ideal context for this. I pastor a lot of older people and one of the things I see is that a key life goal for Christians is to grow in faith and trust throughout so that when they reach the age when the age of decay strips them of all security, dignity, prosperity, confidence, self-sufficiency that they may have hearts that are ready to rely on Christ alone. People need a community to walk this dark valley. Established churches do that well.

7. The established church is there to be loved by God in all of its mediocrity, bumbling, failure and blessed endurance. It’s a context where God works in surprise ways just like in church plants. God as warrior is seen in church planting, God has faithful father and faithful husband is seen in established churches. Parents shouldn’t have an identity crisis because their children are all cool, hip, hot and popular. Parents should be parents, understanding the part that they play. Kids need parents, parents need kids. It’s part of the whole family.

Established congregations should continually strive to be more effective evangelistically but also be secure in the variety of other roles that the play in the broader body of Christ and the much longer narrative of the perseverance of the saints.

Posted in CRC, Saved CRCVoices Posts | Leave a comment

Why Clustering in the CRC

Posted on April 21, 2011 by PaulVK

In that CRC-Voices thread on CRC/RCA church planting plans David Snapper, church planter and pastor from the Washington State reminded us of the thorough research he did that showed that the greatest determiner of CRC church plants getting above 200 within the first 5 years was their proximity to an established community of 2000 member of the CRC in general. Almost no CRCs planted outside one of these established CRC communities made it above 200 (Granite Springs in Lincoln in our cluster is one of the exceptions). Clustering is a key strategy both of Christian Reformed Home Missions and of this new CRC/RCA effort. He challenged me on why we are pursuing this effort in this way. This was my response.

Clustering:

Do you know (according to the physicists) how planets and objects in space form? Gravity. I’ll add a new metaphor to the mix. (See David Brooks http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/12/opinion/12brooks.html) Bodies of mass pull together.

The seeker movement sought to use a big bang to create critical mass. Call people. Get 200 in a room. Catalyze the operation by getting the right preacher, the right music, the right promotional campaign (Here at Happy Suburb church sermons aren’t boring, the kids love our play structure and we have clowns teaching them about how to be moral and that God is love, you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, we serve Starbuck’s coffee, plenty of parking and friendly service, giving is optional, come and go as you please, see if we can’t help you feel better about yourself and be the best self you can be…)

Our clusters are made up of little churches and we cling to life like little mammals surviving the asteroid strike that brought the extinction of Christendom in the west.

The CRC/RCA thing hopefully helps get a bit more gravity. Our immigrant clusters were geographical leveraging of clusters and gravity. Economics, family ties, language, etc. created these clusters. They had vision and ideas too. We’ve got less of what they had to leverage but we are struggling to put specks of dust together and the more little specks that accumulate the more gravity we get.

Is it a desperate mission as Rod noted? Yep, but it’s also a loving and joyful one, and I don’t know of any other way.

Along the way we’re finding (just like immigrants did) that there are others we can bond with and that working together is better than working alone.

One of the four Kingdom Enterprise Zones is Wyoming Michigan. When someone told me this he almost apologized for it, but I told him it was a terrific choice. Not only are the new, non-immigrant based clusters tough, but the immigrant based ones continue to lose gravity. The vision that drew them together continues to dissipate. We see that in the conflicts in GR.

I know full well that if I took a church in a traditional CRC cluster I could have more faces looking at me every Sunday AM to hear my sermons. That would feed my ego. On most days I do like the challenge of taking bits and specks that are floating through space, trying to knit them together in a strange land, and see what God might want to do through it. Foolish, maybe. But I don’t know of a better way for the CRC and the RCA and the DeVos foundation to spend its money. 🙂 pvk

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