My Story of Clustering in Sacramento

Posted on April 21, 2011 by PaulVK

This from a post I made on CRC-Voices in a discussion of the upcoming effort of CRC/RCA church planting that I will be involved in.

The church I pastor was planted in the late 50s and organized in 63. When the first church plant was proposed in the Sacramento area in the early 90s it was somehow deemed by some as a threat to Sacramento CRC’s existence. When I got here in 97 the pastor of that plant and I started meeting, praying and dreaming about planting more and more churches in the city. In almost every case imagining that a new plant will harm your existing church is like worrying about your car washing sponge absorbing a pond. There is SO much work to do. Church plants are a great way to go because they can adapt to the context faster. They do cost the parent churches but in my opinion the net gain in an area is positive.

I know that when there is a CRC “market” and a new CRC church plant goes in it often siphons off sometimes the most energetic and also disaffected remnants of existing congregations and this can be very difficult. Suddenly churches that were just humming along suddenly have to figure out some new ways of doing ministry. Usually they tend to activate people who were less active.

In 1991 there were probably 150 people attending a CRC church in the Sacramento area. Today there are close to 700 and double that have some relationship with the churches. Many of the people very few people this church sent to plants left the plants after a time anyway meaning they would have left here too. NOT planting churches isn’t really a strategy for holding on to people. Many others have come into the CRC who never would have come to the old Sac CRC. Many more baptisms, conversions, people served in ministry, etc. than old Sac CRC ever could have no matter if you threw all of the money put into church planting in to Sac CRC.

Now there isn’t one CRC pastor in Sacramento there are 10. There aren’t 150 people pulling there are 700 or so. We still are mostly small churches but we’re alive and scrapping, doing the basic work of the church. We also have a collection of churches that attract different people with different emphases and the truth is we need lots more.

People look at the cost and say “wow”, but compare it to a lot of costs for a lot of other things we spend money on in the church. Investments in church planting I would argue produce more fruit and the possibility of exponentially far more future fruit. It’s better than building a bell tower or having that landscaping look just so. Church planting dollars attract more money to the denomination as a whole and to the effort.

In areas that meet the Snapper thesis “cluster” model results in fact are far better. I think probably the greatest missing element the CRC is failing at today is that they are not aggressively planting churches in areas where there is a large CRC population and a lot of dying CRC congregations. Those are places they should really be planting aggressively. The resources are already there and potentially far greater resources.

I keep pushing the churches in Ripon to plant new ones and there is some movement now but mostly the churches are very scared of what they will lose. The truth is that they have far more to gain because they are going to lose a lot anyway. New churches revitalize the area and actually often allow the established churches to specialize sometimes along lines (like traditional worship) where they already have strength and expertise.

Anyway, there’s my pitch. pvk

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The Trial of Jesus, his Resurrection, and the change in Plausibility Structures

Posted on April 20, 2011 by PaulVK

Christians during Maundy Thursday and Good Friday services this week will be once again reminded that Jesus stood trial and was convicted. I think it is worth while to think through a bit what that trial was about, why and how it unfolded like it did. There are plenty of commentaries out there to go into the details found in the Christian canonical accounts but I want to approach it from another direction. What were Jesus’ realistic options within the trials? I’m going to follow the gospel of Luke simply because I’ve been preaching on it this year. A student of Jesus is challenged by the wealth of material with each gospel writer exploring things from a particular angle but I’ll just stick to Luke for now.

The first question they want to know from him is if he is the “Messiah” or “anointed one”. Is Jesus a man sent by God to deliver his people from their brutal gentile overlords? Is a he sort of prophet/king figure who in the tradition of other past rescuers of Israel (Judges, David, Maccabees, etc.) to deliver them from their in country exile?

This of course is the question that has been teasing Jesus’ followers and his adversaries all along. We know that during this time period there were many aspirational Messiahs who tried to free the Jewish people from the Romans, each of them failing. Jesus of course showed promise given the miraculous power he demonstrated. Also in this respect, however, was part of the political weather. The political/religious factions within the Jewish people had competing perspectives, ideologies and approaches towards how God would free his people. It seems at this point that Jesus within this context has few friends. He had a band of followers that abandoned him at the garden with only Peter daring to follow but in the passage before fleeing in tearful despair at the threat of his own arrest.

Jesus responds in a very strange way for someone who as we would expect would want to live to see another day. His first comment is a statement of fact: “If I tell you, you will not believe. If I question you, you will not answer.”

Jesus has been debating the religious authorities at the temple throughout the week and had been pretty clear about who he was claiming to be and what he thought of their administration of the flock of Yhwh. This quite clearly was the reason for his arrest and their desire to have him executed. No matter what he says, they will not believe. I’ll come back to that after I comment on his next statement.

Jesus then goes on to say “But from now on the Son of Man will be seated at the right hand of the power of God.”

Jesus’ examiners were experts in the Hebrew scriptures and this statement which may sound strange to us would have been crystal clear to them. Jesus compiles his answer based both on Psalm 110 (the Psalm most often alluded to in the New Testament, whose treatment seems exclusively Christian making it likely that Jesus started this interpretation of that Psalm) and Daniel 7. What Jesus is saying to them (which all four gospels record him as saying all throughout his ministry) is that he is no mere kingly or prophetic deliverer of Israel from their pagan overlords, but he is a divine deliverer.

How I know this is how they reacted to his statement. “Are you then the Son of God?” He said “You said it” and it is case closed, trial complete. He is guilty of a crime against their religion and culture. They are ardent monotheists and Jesus has just claimed to be Yhwh or another god beside him within the monotheistic religion. Now they have a different problem. They want him to be executed by the Roman powers which means getting the polytheistic Pilate to find him guilty of an executable offense. The executable tripwire for the Roman occupational government was of course insurrection. Jesus’ claim to be the “King of the Jews” would have to be the angle, so that is what they do.

Now let’s imagine this scene from Pilate’s perspective. He’s the servant of a guy who claims a form of divinity or that claim will be asserted after Caesar’s death. There are lots of claims of divinity around in the world of Pilate. Such claims, however, are usually supported by political, economic and military power, the kinds of power the world recognizes and respects easily. Jesus is brought into Pilate with no such accessories. If he is supposed to be a god or descended from a god could he perhaps do some signs and wonders that would certify his divine credentials? Jesus in Luke before Pilate and Herod is very non-compliant. Not much to say. No arguing or begging for his life as anyone else might suppose a normal person would do.

OK, back to the main subject. What were Jesus’ options?

First of all Luke makes it clear that this was God’s plan all along so its easy to see that Jesus’ aim was not to go free. He didn’t mount a defense that would have resulted in his freedom. It doesn’t seem unreasonable that he could have talked Pilate out of what it seems Pilate didn’t want to do anyway.

The trial with the Jews as a strange angle to it. If Jesus asserts who he says he is, which is what he does, he will be executed. If Jesus lies and says “I just made the whole thing up to get attention and maybe some chicks” then he goes free, maybe.

Could Jesus talk them INTO believing that he is the Son of Man from Daniel 7? He had in fact been doing this all along the way to Jerusalem in Luke and a number of times in his dialogs with the religious authorities after the triumphal entry. Jesus had been making this point over and over and over again and they didn’t believe.

Here’s another question. By virtue of their time and place in history COULD they have believed him? They religious system left them completely unprepared to accept the audacious claims he was making. This in fact hasn’t changed. The interpretive filter of many modern readers likewise excludes the possibility that Jesus would be the Daniel 7 Son of Man who defeats the empire monsters and establishes an everlasting kingdom. There is no way to believe him. He must be a lunatic.

To make matters worse even his disciples don’t believe him. If in fact they truly believed he was the Daniel 7 Son of Man why would they have run? Now they might have kind of imagined this right up until the arrest and then his arrest unnerved them. They would have imagined that this Daniel 7 figure would have done some wondrous thing to defeat the soldiers who came to arrest Jesus, but he is arrested and then abused and held trial. Their assumptions and expectations where not that different from Pilate’s in that they assumed that a “King” comes with armies to display his glory. The arrest and trial in fact unnerve the disciples who were of anyone most likely to believe who Jesus was claiming to be according to the canonical record. Jesus’ position, standing trial, arrested, seemingly helpless, having lost all political and potential military power informs everyone that he in fact was not who he said he was.

Now for the really big question. What would have changed this community from imagining Jesus was a liar or a lunatic into imagining he was the unthinkable, that Daniel 7 Son of Man?

If Jesus had done a miracle for Pilate or Herod what would it have accomplished? Would they have listened to him? Maybe. They might have treated him differently, with some respect, but their situation of power within the world power structure would not have changed. Jesus could well then have then been on track towards the same end as John the Baptist. Very seldom do people give up power and privilege for a religious belief.

What would have changed Herod’s and Pilate’s relationship with Jesus? The only thing would likely have been a change in the political power structure where Jesus would have defeated the armies that kept Herod and Pilate in power. Would a military coup combined with a miracle have changed Herod and Pilate? What might it have changed them into?

There are a lot of revolutions in the world where political and military power changes hands. Did the American invasion of Iraq turn Saddam Hussein into a regular guy? Did it change his mind about much of anything except his fortune? People of power and privilege whose fortunes are changed by a violent political revolution are seldom model citizens of the new regime. What they desire is to get back to their position of power and privilege that they enjoyed before. So what were Jesus’ options?

One of the things that changed, and took hundreds of years to change was a thing called a plausibility structure. After Jesus suddenly the divinity of Jesus Christ became believable to the point that all sort of people would say “yes” to a pollsters asking if Jesus was the Son of God. The plausibility structure shifted radically making the possible embrace of that idea possible.

To me as a Christian minister that is a positive thing, of course. A bunch of monotheists would have their monotheism altered to a more trinitarian frame of mind. A bunch of polytheists would adopt a Christian trinitarian frameworks and cultural transition would create space for this within the plausibility structures of massive numbers of people. Culture matters. The resurrection effectively changed world history in a very dramatic way.

I hope to come back to this because the relationship between the believability of Jesus and the plausibility structures around us is important when we start to wrangle with the kinds of issues that are getting passed around via the Rob Bell work. It’s especially a lot of work-product for me around Easter time.

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Rob Bell’s “Love Wins” Review, Chapter 3c. Jesus’ Social Revolution

Posted on April 12, 2011 by PaulVK

Jesus’ Egalitarian Social Revolution

Part of my project is to figure out what the Gospel is to Rob Bell as related in this work. Besides the “love of God” goal of the previous posting this chapter has another key identifying element of how Bell understands the Gospel.

“The gospel Jesus spreads in the book of Luke has as one of its main themes that Jesus brings a social revolution, in which the previous systems and hierarchies of clean and unclean, sinner and saved, and up and down don’t mean what they used to. God is doing a new work through Jesus, calling all people to human solidarity. Everybody is a brother, a sister. Equals, children of the God who shows no favoritism.

To reject this new social order was to reject Jesus, the very movement of God in flesh and blood.” Loc. 969-73

Let me first say that I think Christianity clearly brings a kind of egalitarianism to the world. The Apostle Paul who takes some hits on this subject actually has the best egalitarian quotes in the New Testament like Galatians 3:28.

It is also true that Luke in particular shows Jesus upsetting not just the order of the religious leadership of his day but also the Roman system of benefaction. Joel Green’s commentary on Luke does a good job of showing that throughout the gospel.

Culture is the water we swim in, the air we breath. Culture contains the values we can’t help but assume and the yardsticks that we use to evaluate right and wrong. There are few elements to our culture deeper than our belief in the egalitarianism. Fairness and justice are all about equality. Equal treatment under the law. Equal rights. Men and women are equal, yet as Animal Farm notes and protests, “some are more equal than others.” This is so deep within many of us we can’t help to think this way, or can we.

Our notions of equality often have a subtle tension with our ideas of merit. Lebron James deserves his unequal salary, attention and access in society because he performs. People who have exceptional skills or competencies are valued above others for those abilities. Every child ever picked or not picked for a team on a playground knows this. We are constantly valuing people by their smarts, their beauty, their moral performance, their wealth, their power.

If our economy of merit is a dark matter of our egalitarian universe, our valuing of others according to their usefulness to us is our dirtiest secret. We close our eyes to our egalitarian values when it comes to our wants and needs and the utility of others in that economy. I don’t see Jesus so much buying into the values we espouse as he is condemning of our utility based human trafficking.

There is no question that Jesus in Luke is upending established norms, but in what ways? Luke famously has the contrasting set of beatitudes with woes. “Blessed are the poor, woe to the rich.” It is not true that Lazarus and the rich man are the same nor get the same thing. The wealthy and powerful are brought low and the poor, powerless, helpless, meek Lazarus gets to rest in Abraham’s bosom. It is clear from Jesus in Luke that God is not impressed by the things that impress us within our little utilitarian-people-value-system.

Jesus’ value system seems not so much rooted in our own issues of “fairness” or “equality”, but rather more deeply rooted in the Old Testament system of the powerless who look to God for deliverance. Hear Mary’s song that opens the book of Luke in harmony with Hannah’s song which opens the book of Samuel.

Of Masters, Servants and Slaves

I find it difficult to see Jesus as an western-culture-egalitarian because of the heavy emphasis he places in most of his parables and teachings of the parent/child and master/servant relationships. The world of masters and servants are very difficult for us to process especially when we introduce the word “slave” into the mix. Because of the brutal legacy of American race based slavery followed by Jim Crow virtual slavery this is very volatile emotional language. The Apostle Paul gets dinged regularly by us for being non-egalitarian on slavery or gender issues yet in many ways we have less direct language from Jesus in the gospels on the subject. He talks about masters and slaves, usually casting us as slaves and he blushes not one bit.

Jesus told many parables about masters and slaves in which a social order of those who command and those who obey is assumed and not critiqued. Jesus clearly positioned himself as the “master” of his disciples gives them commands and orders without reservation or apology. He does transition his relationship to be one of “friends” at one point but quite clearly he continues to give them orders and demands complete obedience. What can we see in this? That all of these roles relate in a very complex social order that Jesus establishes. It is difficult to imagine that the heart of his message is the establishment of an egalitarian social order akin to what we assume today.

Embedded within master/servant/slave relationships are a complex web of expectations and obligations that establish his moral universe. In many of Jesus’ parables these relationships are not so much critiqued as accepted, in fact the story of Lazarus and the Rich man itself is deeply dependent upon the broader Ancient Near East system of hospitality and obligation found in the Old Testament. A righteous, wealthy man (it’s usually a man) has a duty to use his wealth for the benefit of the community. Even persons of minimal means have a duty to render hospitality to the poor and the alien. The story of Lot and Sodom also mentioned in this chapter is in fact about the failure of Sodom to extend hospitality to the visitors. The rich man fails both in his duty to care for the poor and to extend hospitality and it is his failure to do so that yields him the punishment in Hades that is explicitly described.

Yhwh es mi Patron

Related to the master/servant/slave relationship of Jesus’ value system is the particularism of a relationship to a master. After living a number of years in Latin America one aspect of American culture that became plain to me upon my return was our preference for impersonal relationships. The West likes to mediate our relationships through institutions. We pay wages, have employee policies, pay significant attention to human resource laws all in the pursuit of an egalitarian system. Traditional Latin American systems of patronage are far more personal and are likely closer to the kind of systems within with Jesus and his stories were embedded. Masters were free to treat servants and slaves as individuals and to treat them differently. That isn’t to say that there wasn’t a code of fairness and of justice(parable of the day’s wage for example) yet clearly masters related to slaves, and slaves to masters as individuals and individual circumstances, rules and exceptions were recognized.

Throughout the book Bell spends a lot of time criticizing Christian particularism. Deeds of good and moral people separated from the God of the Old Testament and Jesus are valued, which they should be, but the Bible clearly also values personal relationship and particularism when it comes to the claims of Yhwh and Jesus. The world is not without an owner. If someone thinks the virgin birth is hard to accept, try the statement “all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” It is certainly clear that God understands ignorance of particular information and can weight that into account as is done in many stories in the Old and New Testament of people coming into contact with the people of God. Completely eliminating any consequence to relational particularism, however, is difficult to warrant from anything in the Bible. God is a just judge, but justice requires understanding and weighting every individual case and that individual attention is intended to go both ways.

God within our egalitarian system

Our chief means of enforcing our egalitarian ideal is protest. If our society was less secular churches would more often be the targets of demonstrations. After apathy, the most common human response to the intrusion of God into our business is anger. “What gives God the right?!”

In fairness this is an old issue. The declaration that “there is no God” in the Psalms is not so much an atheist manifesto than an observation that God often seems to be an absentee landlord. Job wanted a face-off in court to make God respond. Of course in the end of the story the face-off didn’t turn out as Job expected. The point is, however, that an inevitable consequence of making people for God was to become the subject of our judgment. We don’t just ask “what if God were one of us”, we expect that he should assert no greater prerogative than we would allow each other.

CS Lewis and Dorothy Sayers imagined God writing himself into the story as his chief means of communicating with us. The downside of this for rampant egalitarians is that in the trinitarian system we use Jesus as a rope to make Yhwh one of us as too.

I am not my own

Part of the wonder of the pastoral vocation for someone as ADHD as I am is to simultaneously ponder multiple texts. In my adult Sunday School class I’ve got Rob’s Bell ringing in my ear while I work through 2 Samuel 8-12. In this portion of the book David is in a long and dangerous slide in terms of his regard for the Almighty. With each successive step he is increasingly viewing Yhwh not so much as the master of the universe who rescues him from lions, giants and insane tyrants as a tool to embellish his increasing empire. The ark makes such a nice God box. A temple would finish the city off nicely. As David, now sending bloody Joab to do his work, gets up late from his bed and sends for Uriah’s wife to fill it, God seems nowhere to be found. The book of Samuel opens with an infertile woman, Bathsheba and David couldn’t be so lucky. Uriah is dispatched in more ways than one and David imagines the empire of his hands is secure.

Yhwh then sends Nathan to David and the crisis comes to full exposure. Nathan tells the masterful allegory and David pronounces the justice due himself. The story then takes a twist. David has committed adultery. David has committed murder, but the charge leveled against him is despising Yhwh. David immediately confesses “I have sinned against the LORD” and his sin is taken away from him.

Um, didn’t we forget Uriah?

Uriah was the epitome of the faithful servant. Uriah refused to sleep with his wife or eat the king supplied feast while his people were sleeping in tents or out in the field. David, who earlier in the story couldn’t fail at anything now couldn’t make a drunk soldier sleep with the woman whom the man who could literally sleep with every virgin in town couldn’t resist. Uriah then is once again dispatched to the front with the orders in his hand for his final dispatch. Uriah is the real deal, a servant of his master. David has become a fraud. David is now an egalitarian with God, and no one else.

What does this have to do with Jesus’ social revolution? The Bible isn’t finally the story of human rights, of us getting what we deserve. It is the story of unfaithful servants getting better than they deserve in a very un-egalitarian way. David’s son will die, David will live. Uriah will die, his wife will be consoled by her new husband.

Jesus’ parables are mixtures of faithful servants getting their just rewards, and unfaithful servants sometimes getting judgment and at other times getting what they don’t deserve at the protest of the righteous. David’s big lesson is that he too is a servant and all servants must finally stand before the owner. David will get a lot of latitude, cutting down 2/3rds of Moabites, burning cities, taking crowns, putting together a first-rate harem, but forgetting whose servant he is a line he must not cross.

The Heidelberg Catechism begins with a very non-abolitionist confession. “I am not my own.” This is the language of slavery to a master. Jesus does undertake a social revolution, but it is a peculiar revolution. There is an egalitarian aspect to our servitude. We all finally report to one master. Uriah, the faithful servant, could disobey David’s command to participate in the cover-up by appealing to the higher master. In Jesus’ parable of the unforgiving servant he makes it clear that orders from the top must be applied at every level. The application is egalitarian even if the structure is not.

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The Evocative and the Descriptive

Posted on April 11, 2011 by PaulVK

A new quote from Rob Bell, his redux of the Apostle’s creed if you will.

My name is Rob, and I live in Grand Rapids, Mich., and I’m a Christian. I believe in Jesus, and I believe Jesus is the way, and I believe in heaven, and I believe in hell, and I believe the Bible is God’s word. And I’m not a universalist because I believe God’s love is so great God lets you decide. I believe in the communion of the saints. I believe the church is the fullness. I believe in the new heaven and new Earth. I believe in healing. I believe in miracles. I believe in salvation. I believe in the power of prayer. I believe that God is alive and working. I believe there’s been a resurrection, and there’s a whole new creation bursting forth right here in the midst of this one. And I also believe it’s best to only discuss books you’ve actually read.

http://www.mlive.com/news/index.ssf/2011/04/rob_bell_i_believe_its_best_to.html

I’m not entirely sure Bell’s words (both from the book and here) are intended to describe as much as to evoke. In that sense Bont “poetry” is probably not a bad descriptions, but here we are describing again.

There are times I want something evocative, and at times descriptive.

Usually when things are serious, like with lawyers, accountants, doctors, tax people, sales persons, etc. I prefer descriptive rather than evocative. When salespersons are evocative the descriptive result in my bank account is often consequential.

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CS Lewis’ House Illustration from Mere Christianity

Posted on April 8, 2011 by PaulVK

Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of—throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.

The command “Be ye perfect” is not idealistic gas. Nor is it a command to do the impossible. He is going to make us into creatures that can obey that command. He said (in the Bible) that we were “gods” and He is going to make good His words. He will make the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or goddess, a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine, a bright stainless mirror which reflects back to God perfectly (though, of course, on a smaller scale) His own boundless power and delight and goodness. The process will be long and in parts very painful; but that is what we are in for. Nothing less. He meant what He said.

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Rob Bell’s “Love Wins” Review, Chapter 3b: The Love of God

Posted on April 4, 2011 by PaulVK

A large part of the Rob Bell discussion on the Internet has focused on labels. Is Bell a universalist? Is Bell an evangelical? Is Bell orthodox? I’ll hazard my own label for Bell, he’s part of the emergent church movement who’s label has at least as much ambiguity as the other three. Part of the emergent movement’s struggle has been to resist labels and they have a point. The best thing we can do is listen to Bell to hear what he is saying and what he wants to say and take it from there.

Bell did an extended interview on his book where he denies (as he does in the book) the label of being a universalist but he embraces the labels of orthodoxy and evangelical. One of the most important high profile evangelicals to weigh in on this is Richard Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary, Rob Bell’s alma mater. Mouw and I are both members of the Christian Reformed Church. I took one course from Mouw when I was an undergrad at Calvin College. I’ve enjoyed and appreciated Richard Mouw’s work for years and very much respect him. His first and second blog posts have attracted a lot of attention Bell’s book and are very much worth reading. He places Bell in the larger tent of orthodoxy. Mouw has made a big deal about civility in the public sphere and has himself practiced a very generous approach to orthodoxy while maintaining his own standards for himself. He’s very clear and eloquent in his second blog post and I for the most part agree with him. Mouw is a peacemaker and Jesus calls people like him “blessed”.

My goal in this post is to take a look at how Rob Bell understands the gospel in chapter 3 in his book and why understanding where he is going and what he is doing is important for the broader Christian conversation in North America right now.

The Seeker Movement

I think it is important to locate Bell in the evangelical church conversation over the last two decades. If you want to understand the emergent movement you need to understand American evangelicalism and the seeker church movement. In the preface and chapter 1 Bell makes it very clear he’s responding to the Christianity he’s seen played out in the evangelical church and in public. He is trying to save the church from itself as well as invite unchurched people into the good news. In that same livestream interview linked above Bell says, “I want to see [everyone] experience good news, I want [everyone] to experience love.”

At the end of the 20th century Willow Creek Community Church in suburban Chicago and churches like it changed the American churchscape. Bill Hybels wanted to create “a safe place for people to hear a dangerous message.” The Willow Creek Association invited thousands of pastors and church leaders into their auditorium to learn from the “success” of Willow and to apply some of it in their own spaces. The seeker service was designed to be a culturally understandable and comfortable place to make a very traditionally evangelical “message of salvation” easily accessible. Wisdom, understood as “biblical lifeskills” as evidenced in church teaching and the lives of church members were leveraged to give the Bible credibility that it relates to modern, suburban Americans in giving them a rather successful and sensible way to live. The call to conversion, however, was standard 20th century evangelicalism. It was an appeal to accept Jesus into your life so that you would go to heaven when you die and not hell. “Closing the deal” employed a variety of standard evangelistic tools like the cross over the gap, the Roman road or the 4 spiritual laws. Churches across the evangelical spectrum trained with the “Contagious Christians” course. This “crossing the line” was of course the end goal. Helping people to live more peacefully and happily through “biblical wisdom” was of course good, but of course winning someone for an eternity of bliss in heaven was the heart of the entire enterprise.

Rick Warren in his “Purpose Driven Life” increasingly commodified the movement (the turn-key business approach to replicate the success of model churches like Willow Creek and Saddleback was a part of the leadership development conferences) while adding more of a high profile social justice strain to their chorus through his AIDS work in Africa and statements for environmental responsibility.

The seeker movement was willing to radically alter liturgy and church practice in order to seek the one, central goal of its system. The seeker movement was an appropriation of contemporary goal oriented business practices (remember Hybels does not have a theological degree) in pursuit of the traditional evangelical goal. It was Costco come to church and it flourished usually in the same places Costco does.

The Emergent Movement

Rob Bell and Mark Driscoll both named their churches “Mars Hill” and were both born in 1970. Both Bell and Driscoll are often labeled “emergent” but both occupy different branches of the same movement. If you listen to them, however, you’d think they were worlds apart. What they have in common is their reaction to the seeker movement and broader evangelicalism. They both focus with missionary zeal to plant churches and spread their message. For Driscoll the seeker movement was too soft. For Bell it was too cold and culturally antithetical. Driscoll rejects the accommodation impulse of the seeker movement while maintaining its hell-avoidance, fight the devil core. Bell continues to embrace the accommodation impulse (making church accessible), embraces the “win them with love” approach but as this book makes clear (its really the central purpose of the book) he wants to distance itself from the soul-winning, (afterlife, not present-age) hell-avoidance center of the Seeker movement.

The blogosphere food fight over Bell is of little value. It’s more helpful to ask “what is the shape of Rob Bell’s gospel”? How does it relate to the evangelical tent he says he’s staying within? Does it square with Jesus or at least how I see Jesus’ message and ministry?

Why Did Jesus Come?

Now remember, we’re only up to chapter 3 so we’ll likely keep refining or developing Bell’s thought. Chapter 1 basically makes the point that the traditional evangelical “Jesus came so that his followers can be rescued from a post-physical-death-literal-hell that threatens all of humanity” is in his opinion not at the center of Jesus’ mission. Bell asserts in chapter 1 that this theological construct is offensive to non-Christians and/or non-church people, doesn’t make sense of lots of good things and people in the world, and isn’t what Jesus as found in the gospels was about anyway. All of the questions of chapter 1 essentially say that the traditional construct that “salvation” should be exclusively or in a majority sense understood as post-physical-death-literal-hell-avoidance is no longer plausible and should be rejected. Labels say as much about who assigns them as they do what labels are assigned, so on point alone will many will stand with John Piper and bid Bell a “farewell” from the circle they recognize as evangelical. Bell will say that Jesus came to save, but he wants to in the rest of the book answer the question “save from what?”

Jesus Came to Communicate the Love of God

Towards the end of chapter 3 Bell makes the correct observation (in my opinion) that Jesus in the canonical gospels did not generally use the threat of hell to reach out to those categorized as “sinners” to the religious authorities of his day. Jesus didn’t say “turn or burn” to the woman at the well in John 4. In this section what Bell gives us is both his Old and New Testament missiology. The religious leaders of Jesus’ day, assumedly in continuity with the Old Testament, had “their God-given calling and identity to show the world God’s love.”

He goes on in the next paragraph: “whatever special standing they believed they had with God was always, only, ever about their being the kind of transformed, generous, loving people through whom God could show the world what God’s love looks like in flesh and blood.”

Before I say anymore I think it is important to note that this is very much core American evangelical language. “God is love and the Bible is God’s love song written to a lost world.” If you’ve been around evangelicals before you’ve heard this line. This a standard, evangelical position.

Part of what I think a lot of evangelicals won’t own up to is that to a degree Bell is a product of evangelical success in our culture. Contrary to thousands of years of assumptions regarding “who God is” American culture firmly imagines that God is love, will first do no harm, and wants to have a cozy, romantic, ecstatic relationship with all of us.

This stands in direct contrast to many other traditional religious movements that see God or the gods or the spiritual world as a threat that must be managed at great expense. Danger has been assumed and security and acceptance must be purchased through significant sacrifice. Sacrifice may literally mean animal or human sacrifice, or monetary sacrifice, or demanding moralistic, cultic or ascetic behaviors. American evangelicals have been screaming “God is love” for years, and people have gotten the message.

“The Wrath of God is Satisfied” or “the path to God is opened wide”?

In 2007 a student from Calvin College worshipped at Rob Bell’s church and was singing “In Christ Alone” with his eyes closed and noticed that the church had swapped out “the wrath of God was satisfied” for “the path to God was opened wide”. Now again it’s easy to use this as exhibit A for Bell’s departure, but the more relevant point to most of us who don’t go to Bell’s church is “why did he feel the need to make this change? What is he responding to?” and then to figure out what we make of this other reality and how we want to respond to it.

Clearly Bell is responding to the cultural assumption that God a completely non-threatening reality to every human being in the world. This assumption gets at the very heart of a lot of implicit and non-specific presuppositional ideas of who God is and who we are. Within our culture there are a lot of poorly defined, vague notions and feelings about this subject informed by “It’s a Wonderful Life”, “Avatar”, and our cornucopia of religious and self-help movements. The best articulation that I’ve seen for the current majority cultural religious assumption is Christian Smith’s work calling it Moralistic, therapeutic Deism. As described by the book “Almost Christian” they are these five articles:

1. A god exists who created and orders the world and watches over life on earth.
2. God wants people to be good, nice and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
4. God is not involved in my life except when I need God to resolve a problem.
5. Good people go to heaven when they die.

These cultural assumptions have impacted us all to one degree or another. They also create what is called by Tim Keller (borrowing from Alvin Plantinga) a defeater belief making one of the traditional evangelical atonement theories unbelievable. The idea that Jesus has to protect us from God the Father “just doesn’t work” culturally for many people. That of course doesn’t mean that it isn’t true, it just means that this version of Christianity isn’t believable, and worse, is offensive. One element of the belief package they have unconsciously absorbed from their culture is the assumption that God is not only great and good but also nice and that people are good for the most part making the traditional idea that regular, tax paying, house maintaining, child raising people are under threat of penalty for “run of the mill” sins from an angry God is unthinkable.

In seeing this it is important to separate out some questions. “what is true of God and us on this score” is one question. “How do I approach a population with this particular cultural package” is another. Both questions are enormous and responding to either is a huge enterprise.

If you believe the Bible as Christians conceive of it is the faithful revelation of Yhwh and that Jesus is claiming to be in that trinity I think it is difficult NOT to recognize that humanity in its rebellion is under threat of condemnation from Yhwh and that one take of Jesus’ mission was to deal with this threat. There is certainly more to the story than this (Read “The Nature of the Atonement: 4 Views http://www.amazon.com/Nature-Atonement-Four-Views/dp/0830825703) but in my opinion this is an undeniable element of the Christian tradition and one that has support from the Bible.

“How do you approach a population with this particular cultural package” is a separate question. What are the consequences (in this age and the next) for having this element of the Christian tradition either eliminated or under-developed? Many of the most vocal critics have been those from the “young and reformed” community who have a particularly passionate relationship with penal substitutionary atonement. It’s not mystery why they are so upset.

Accommodation or Capitulation

Missionaries need to make strategic decisions when doing their work. Some missionaries take an approach that seeks to gain a hearing through a strategy of accommodation. “See, there are already ideas and beliefs that you have that are in harmony with the gospel, won’t you consider these as well.” Others undertake a strategy of capitulation: “Your life is messed up. Your belief system isn’t working for you. Throw yours away and adopt this one.”

The line between these two strategies isn’t always that obvious, but I think the are both valid approaches and both have strengths and weaknesses. Bell is undertaking an “accommodation” approach. Driscoll is undertaking a “capitulation” approach. Please be aware that this isn’t necessarily a function of their belief systems. Tim Keller, who in terms of positions is possibly closer to Driscoll than Bell I think also takes and “accommodation” approach.

I want to be clear that taking an “accommodation” approach in missions is NOT a bad thing. If you compare the passion narratives in Matthew and Luke you’ll see significant differences. Most scholars attribute this to Luke making Jesus more intelligible for his audience as opposed to Matthew’s audience. This is an attempt at accommodation for the purposes of intelligibility. Traditional theology has long asserted that God accommodates himself, “condescends” on our behalf to communicate to us. The tension this approach always has within it is whether essential elements of what is communicated are being subverted or betrayed by the accommodation communication process. That is what we have to evaluate.

Bell Understands the Gospel as his understanding of Love

From what I understand from what Bell has written here he is in sync with the culture in terms of the question of how much of a threat God is to us without Jesus and how what he understands love to be. He might think different but in terms of what I’ve seen in the book so far that is what I see.

What is interesting, however, is that although Bell seems to want to follow CS Lewis I’m not sure how much of Lewis Bell has read on love. Lewis in fact did a lot of work on the lexical spread of our usage of “love” and applied it to this issue of the threat that God is to us and our vulnerability to a just condemnation. Tim Keller, another fan of Lewis who has also adopted some similar positions to Bell on hell (Read “The Reason for God” on hell), who also takes an accommodationist missiological approach to our culture spends a lot of time differentiating different understandings of love. Just a couple of weeks ago, in fact, this issues dominated one of his Sunday sermons . How our culture understands “love” is a deeply important missiological subject which in many ways stands at the heart of not only our capacity to evaluate Moralistic Therapeutic Deism but also our expectations and assumptions with respect to our view of God.

Lewis in the “The Problem of Pain” will delineate the difference between a “heavenly father” and a “heavenly grandfather”. Parental love is complex to the child. Loving parents say “no”. Grandparents, hopefully relieved of parental obligations can dote and spoil.

I might write a separate posting on the issue of “love” for our context, but this is sufficient for now. Bell seems to be following our cultural reduction of what we understand “love” to be uncritically making any theological tradition that sees God as a threat to our autonomy and even existent unthinkable. Once this threat is removed some elements of evangelical Christianity will disappear. A further question I might want to return will be “can you be a Christian and NOT have a dangerous God?”

Because this is long, I’m going to create a separate post for the second element of Bell’s gospel that emerges in this chapter, which is “Jesus came to bring social revolution.”

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Rob Bell’s “Love Wins”, Review, Pt. 3, Chapter on Hell, part 1

Posted on March 31, 2011 by PaulVK

In JI Packer’s piece “Still Surprised by Lewis” he finds the secret to CS Lewis’ contribution to be his blend of logic and imagination. In processing Bell’s third chapter on Hell, I find the Bell trying to follow Lewis’ imagination but his greatest failings to be in the area of logic.

The Word “Hell” Isn’t in the Bible

Bell begins his chapter once again pushing back from the evangelical construct he created in chapter 1. He then moves on to an analysis of the words in the Bible that tend to be rendered as “hell” in English.

This is a helpful thing because when I tell people that the word “hell” isn’t in the Bible, they give me strange looks. It’s a word trick of course, but it is helpful to do the exercise that Bell runs you through in terms of Sheol, Gehenna and Hades. His analysis of each is brief and cursory but its a popular level book and he doesn’t expect his audience to go too deep into the weeds. He merely wants to do a bit of deconstruction to open people up to a bit more nuance.

First some quibbling with his deconstruction and this is where we get into the “logic” failure of Bell and the careful attention to words and meaning that this subject deserves.

Jesus talks about afterlife punishment in far more passages than the word “hell” gets mentioned. This was one of the main points of a blog post I wrote a while ago. If in fact often comes up when Jesus in Luke is dealing with feasts. The Bible has a lot of metaphorical hyperlinks to its notions of post-life blessedness and feasting is a main on in the New Testament that is also in the Old. Jesus plays off on this often and in Luke where he’s often attending feasts and feasts come into his parables participation on the feast is synonymous with inclusion into the future blessing that God will bestow and exclusion from the feast with perdition. This entire theme, and some of the most important passages on the subject will be missed by doing a concordance search of the word “hell”.

It depends what you mean by the word “hell”

As I continued reading the chapter I was increasingly aware that Bell was hopping between dictionary definitions of the word “hell” throughout his chapter, often without much acknowledgment of what he was doing. He was trying to blend, but blending without definition or differentiation tends not to yield insight but rather confusion.

In the next section Bell opens up with some stories from a trip to Rwanda and some experiences he had with the consequences of those horrific events. He recounts seeing a little boy with severed hands. There he says this:

“Do I believe in a literal hell?
Of course.
Those aren’t metaphorical missing arms and legs.”

I remember the Saturday Night Live sketches on our use of the word “literally”. In common parlance we have begun using the word to add emphasis rather than its traditional meaning.

“He literally bit my head off.” Really? How then can you still be alive.

Language is fluid but communication and thinking is helped by both parties in the communication process having agreement of understanding on the meaning of a word being used.

The subject of the book per the subtitle is the after life destination/destiny of every human being but in this little quote a literal hell is understood to be the kind of suffering that we experience prior to death.

I don’t have a problem with using the word “hell” as a synonym for suffering, and I don’t have a problem understanding suffering we experience in life as consequential to our rebellion against God and the wrong we do to one another, yet blending the meaning in this context is very problematic.

If we are trying to focus on suffering as consequence of our own agency and freely chosen activity, what does it say that “hell” is associated with the suffering of this little boy? This little boy “put through hell” by the evil actions of others. Is that use of the word “hell” helpful to this conversation? Isn’t the focus on our work the consequences that are imposed, by God or systems established by the creator for evil deeds in the service of justice and correction? Correction will be a big subject later in the chapter, but why use “hell” in this context in this way?

We have many words for suffering and sometimes we use “hell” as a metaphor for pre-death suffering. I think we want to stay a long ways from saying that all suffering is “hell-like” in terms of understanding “hell” as corrective or retributive justice for evil done. It’s better to say that the perpetrators of the dismemberment of this boy deserve hell, rather than saying that the boy gets hell as a result of their actions.

Later in the chapter he will make the same move with the word “death” and my critique is the same. We understand the use of the word “death” metaphorically, and we understand its literal usage. The Bible also uses the word both ways, but we can mostly understand which way it is being used how, when and where. That’s how language works.

Bell also notes that “death” is not annihilation. That’s important but he doesn’t camp on it. The fact that death is not annihilation relativizes “death” in important ways.

“Hell” as Jesus’ way of hyperbolic warning

Bell goes on to make the point that Jesus often uses hyperbole in his teaching which is absolutely correct. “If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off.” “Unless you hate your father and mother you are unworthy of me.” I know no one who takes these admonitions literally, nor do I think they were intended as such. One of Bell’s main points in this chapter is that this is how we should understand a lot of Jesus’ warnings.

Here again I think we should take a closer look at understanding consequence, agency, and what we mean by the word “hell”.

Bell clearly wants to follow Lewis and Lewis makes the point very clearly that within the moral order established by God, doing wrong will have binding, eternal consequences. He makes this point in Mere Christianity in the chapter “Three Parts of Morality”

“I do not think that is the best way of looking at it. I would much rather say that every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with. God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.”

I think this is a tremendously helpful insight into one aspect of morality and I think it is an important message for a secular world that has little visceral connection with the idea of a God who judges our actions at the end of the age. Is this one aspect of Jesus’ warning? I can embrace that. One part of hell and heaven are our own making of it. I see that all the time in people lives. They are creating their own hells and cursing God and others for it. It’s a very sad imprisonment.

I do not, however, see this as either the majority reading of Jesus’ warnings.

Our secular culture tends to give us a rather solipsistic moral universe. If a universal, objective judge is removed morality tends to be reduced to “what works for me in the long term according the interests I desire and the values I define.”

Garret Keizer in “The Enigma of Anger” makes an enormously important observation regarding the acquisition of an independent moral consciousness. The turning point in the Samuel story of David is in the story of his adultery and murder in chapters 11 and 12. David has been going in power and God has increasingly becoming a tool to his own power and glory. This culminates in doing what he did with Bathsheba and to Uriah and telling Joab “let it not seem evil to you”. Word comes that whether or not it seemed evil to David, it was evil to God and now He was about to intervene. David’s son’s would be “struck” by God (2 Samuel 12:15 KJV) and in a sense his life would be taken as a replacement for the death David deserved (by virtue of the Levitical law) for what he did with Bathsheba and to Uriah. What we see in David is that continual turning of his core self as illustrated in 2 Samuel 8, 9, and 10 and coming to full flower in 11 and causing the misery he suffered. What is key, however, is God’s intervention in David’s sinful path. This intervention was initially unwelcome and Nathan plays a dangerous game in bringing it about, but finally it is in David’s and Israel’s interest that God intervene so that David not become the kind of tyrant that Saul had become.

Do we create hells, yes, in the sense that we bring onto ourselves the miserable consequences of our actions and we corrupt our own hearts. This is all right and good and helpful to bring to our context. Jesus’ warnings, however, go further. In fact, more is demanded by the evil of this world.

Those who raped, killed and maimed in Rwanda deserve more than the twisting of their own selves, they deserve what they have done to others. This always raises both sides of the difficulty of lex talonis. On one hand it can leave everyone blind. On the other a multiple murder has but one life to offer to repay for all that he/she has done. Rwandan butchers have but two hands to give and these children are not in a position to receive.

Bell is clear that he also affirms after life redemptive correction, but we’ll get more into that as we go through the book. I think it is safe to say, however, that Jesus often gives a full throated warning to people regarding not only the temporal consequences of their thoughts and actions for themselves but always assumes that there is one ultimate judge who will address all wrongs.

Raising the issue of God striking David’s son as a consequence for David’s sin raises exactly the kind of issue that we object to. Was it fair for the son to suffer? Our reaction reminds me of the scene from Charlie Wilson’s War and the story of the Zen master and the little boy. Does something inside of me kvetch at the story in Samuel. You bet. Another part of me knows how much I don’t know. Another part of me realizes that lives are lost and lives are taken by forces and circumstances that look completely arbitrary and that this happens in small, unnoticed ways every day and in large ways like the Japanese tsunami and the Haiti earthquake. Our anger and revulsion this obvious reality is instructive. On one hand we imagine a better world, one that we’ve never experienced (CS Lewis’ argument for the existence of God from desire in Mere Christianity) and our instinctive rebellion that someone more powerful than ourselves is decided for us and doing to us and there is little we can say or do about it. That is the feeling of smallness and powerlessness that we hate and define as wrong but it is also an essential component of our willful desire for mastery over all.

I remember when on a rafting trip our raft capsized into the river. I was amazed at the power of the river. I was nearly helpless in its grip. I experienced a tiny portion of what thousands of Japanese felt in the tsunami. I experienced an essential truth about the smallness of humanity and our fragility, a truth that will come to bear on all of us at some point as we inevitably and eventually lose everything to the age of decay. Death will have us.

Are we really angry that God presumes this right to give and take life for reasons he doesn’t disclose to us or that we don’t have that power ourselves.

More Later

There is more in this chapter that I think is important. Bell’s gospel and seeing Bell as an evangelical starts to come through here. This is already overly long and I’ve got to dash to do other things but I’ll have to get back to it later. pvk

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The Servant of the LORD in the Time of Trial

Posted on March 30, 2011 by PaulVK

In Luke 22:39-46 the emphasis is on prayer in the time of trial. In Luke 22:47 that time of trial comes upon them while Jesus is still speaking. Luke more than the other gospels casts this scene as a conflict between Jesus and Satan and concludes the next segment with “but this is your hour, and the power of darkness” (vs 53).

There is an irony in the type of conflict in the time of trial. Again it seems like the Genesis flood is an archetype of these eschatological day of the LORD moments. Look at them throughout scripture: the Genesis flood, the barrenness of God’s servants, Joseph’s famine, the Exodus plagues and the Red Sea drowning, God breaking out in the camp various times, especially the episode with the bronze serpent, the warfare judgments against Israel leading to exile, the beasts in Daniel, the crucifixion scene in the Gospels (esp. Matthew) and the many scenes of judgment in Revelation. They seem to be mixtures of divine wrath, unleashing of cosmic chaos and unleashing of the demonic yet the final purpose of all is the revelation of God’s sovereignty, the punishment of evil and the establishment of the God’s kingdom (in Daniel, Gospels and Revelation) through the agency of the Son of Man.

These moments of chaos seem to highlight the power of evil but it seems that ironically evil undoes itself in the midst of the chaos. Evil is ultimately fruitless and counter-productive. Evil will blow itself out and ultimately be found wanting. Evil finally has no future.

The role of Jesus especially in Luke here with the reference to the Son of Man is ironic. There is a strange and unexpected reversal of the Daniel 7 image. Here the Son of Man is destroyed by the demonic beast and the chaos of violence and judgment falls upon him, and here he refuses to wield a sword against the beast. The kiss of betrayal (does Jesus get kissed in Luke?!) heightens the irony.

In the midst of the chaos in Luke, with all of the eschatological tension Jesus is calm, composed and in control. The whirlwind of chaos rages around him, his disciples losing composure, the servants of darkness carrying weapons for war, Jesus in command, the willing victim, still healing his enemy in the midst of betrayal.

The disciples have not prepared themselves for the time of trial and they are not like their master. They act on instinct, violence, like their enemies. They mirror the servants of darkness, the bandits who run the temple. Jesus alone is prepared, in control, ready to be swept away in the flood only to emerge from the tomb.

I can’t help but think about this in terms of the Japan disaster, the Haiti earthquake, the times of trial that consume us. They become eschatological moments. Again, from a distance we attempt to suss out agency but we cannot. Can we suss out agency of the angel of death over Egypt? Can we suss out agency over Job’s disaster? Some exegesis of these storms can be done, but it is fairly pointless. The focus should be on the servant of the LORD in its midst.

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All the Kissing of the Bible

Posted on March 30, 2011 by PaulVK

In my text this week Judas betrays Jesus with a kiss so I did a quick Bible search to find all the kissing of the Bible.

1. Most kissing in the Bible is family kissing, usually same sex at a tearful and important reunion. Special note the father kissing the Prodigal Son in Luke 15.

2. There is political kissing, servants kissing kings.

3. Some kissing of idols, negative of course.

4. There’s not a lot of romantic kissing. The two exceptions are Jacob kissing Rachel at the well at their first meeting. This is REALLY exceptional stuff. Apart from this the only other romantic or sexual kissing is Song of Songs or the temptress in the book of Proverbs.

5. The “sinful” woman kisses Jesus’ feet in Luke 7. Again, this is dramatic stuff, no wonder the town leaders were horrified.

6. Judas betrays Jesus with a kiss and Jesus highlights that irony. Given the majority of kissing, points 1 and 2 you can see why.

7. There’s also the “holy kiss” as a greeting among Christians. I think again in terms of familial reunion.

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CS Lewis Sneaking Purgatory into the Evangelical tent?

Posted on March 29, 2011 by PaulVK

From a CRC-Voices post

As I read it, most evangelicals have simply assumed that at death or the second coming we are “translated”, morally perfected. I never heard much said about it.

The older I get the more I appreciate my need to struggle with sin and corruption in my life. There are patterns, ways, attitudes, biases, etc. in me that are dogged, sometimes in a Romans 7 sort of way. Since we don’t believe in perfectability (unlike some protestants) how are these habits, patterns, etc. dealt with? I don’t mean the penalty for them, but the habits themselves. Are they instantly taken away from me upon death or resurrection? I don’t know.

Purgatory dealt with some of the penalties needed to be handled in the RC schema of sins and also the habits.

CS Lewis in The Great Divorce and to a degree in The Last Battle clearly sees post-death process in terms of sin. The passage in The Great Divorce for example where the pilgrim is released from the sin on his shoulder.

The Wikipedia article demonstrates that this issue has long been a subject of discussion and study in the church as well as in Judaism, Islam and Mormonism. Religions with reincarnation have this issue built into their schema.

Lewis has been a trail blazer for many evangelicals. Tim Keller quotes more from Lewis in his first book than from any other author. Bell is clearly following Lewis. I remember my history prof at CTS saying “at some point after you get out of seminary you should make an attempt to go deep into an important theologian like “Augustine, Luther, Calvin or CS Lewis.” That’s quote the company to keep.

The article that Dave posted that was retracted basically was asking the question (from a rather hard lined Reformed perspective) whether Lewis is kind of a trojan horse for heretical theology.

If you look in my review of Rob Bell’s book pt 2 in the section under Sickness Unto Death you’ll see that Lewis and Keller follow Kierkegaard in some of this thinking. Ideas have legs.

Here’s a link to a wonderful piece by JI Packer on Lewis called “Still Surprised by Lewis”.

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