A Subversive Easter Message

I've been spending a lot of time lately looking at the way the Old Testament is quoted in the New, and I've found something pretty surprising: 9 times out of 10 the New Testament citation completely flips the original meaning of the Old Testament passage on its head! Take for example Paul's Easter message in 1 Cor 15 where he writes that "The last enemy to be destroyed is death" (1 Cor 15:26). Paul then quotes the familiar line "Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?" and declares that "The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ" (1 Cor 15:55-57). As Paul is using the phrase, Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting? is addressing a defeated death: where is your sting now, O death? For you have been defeated by Christ! But take a look at the original passage in Hosea that Paul is quoting from:

"Shall I ransom them from the power of Sheol? Shall I redeem them from Death?
O Death, where are your plagues? O Sheol, where is your destruction?
Compassion is hidden from my eyes." (Hos 13:14 NRSV)

The sense here is the opposite of what Paul is saying. It is about inviting death to come and destroy Israel in punishment. The NET translation makes this difference quite clear:

"Will I deliver them from the power of Sheol? No, I will not!
Will I redeem them from death? No, I will not!
O Death, bring on your plagues! O Sheol, bring on your destruction!
My eyes will not show any compassion! (Hos 13:14 NET)


Now in both Hebrew and Greek there are no question marks (or any punctuation at all), so you can't really tell whether it says "Shall I redeem them from Death?" (a question) or "I Shall redeem them from Death" (a promise), but it is pretty significant that most English translations (NAB, NASB, NCV, NRSV, TEV, CEV, NLT, NET) read this as a rhetorical question that implies a negative answer "Do you seriously think I will rescue you from death!?" The only exceptions to this reading are the NIV and KJV. Similarly, most English versions translate the part quoted by Paul to mean "What's keeping you death? Come!" meaning Hosea is not mocking death, but calling for death. Now how do we know that this is what Hosea meant? Context. Look at the last line: "Compassion is hidden from my eyes" and then read the whole chapter too and you'll see it ends by saying,

"They will fall by the sword;
their little ones will be dashed to the ground,
their pregnant women ripped open." (Hos 13:16 NIV)

This was not good news when Hosea said it, but Paul has turned it around. He has taken a passage which in its original context was about death being poured out on people and made it about humanity being liberated from death because of the Resurrection where Christ overcame death. Again, if you look at how the NT quotes the OT you will find that most of the time it is reversing the original context, subverting it, redeeming it. It takes the original context which says "I hate my enemies and want to destroy them" and makes it about redemption, forgiveness, and making things new again. I love that.

I could go on for pages and pages with other examples of this. If you want to see for yourself, just pick any passage from the NT that is quoting from the OT and then read the whole OT chapter to see what the original context was. You'll see that over and over the NT turns the original meaning around. If you ever wondered why it was that the disciples were so shocked that Jesus had to die on the cross, it's because this was a complete reversal of everything they had learned about the messiah from the prophets. They had learned from reading the OT prophets to expect the messiah to come as a warrior and kill all the bad people. The NT takes all of these messianic prophesies that are about violence and destruction and reverses their meaning. Instead of being about an oppressed people getting revenge, it makes it into a story where all of us need mercy and grace.

Now this kind of crazy exegesis that takes the meaning of a passage and turns it on its head is also exactly how we need to read life. The very heart of the gospel is that God has turned everything around at Easter. The one condemned to die is shown to be victorious. Jesus in his death has conquered death. So while we might look at our lives and see darkness, while we might see pain and hurt, while we might be hopeless screw-ups, God says to us through the resurrection, "behold I make all things new!" God takes what we see around us and flips it right-side up.

Christ entered into our hurt and helplessness and overcame it. That's why the early church could have hope in the middle of horrible persecution, that why people who are suffering can find hope in the middle of that blackness, that's why those who are wracked with guilt and feel helpless to change get so overwhelmed by grace. So my prayer for you this Easter is that you could find a way to see yourself the way God sees you, that we all would learn to see grace in the middle of our messed up lives, to have eyes that see hope in a dark world. It can be really hard to see that sometimes. But that is the truth of the Resurrection. Love has and will overcome hate and hurt. Because of that, nothing you have done, nothing that has been done to you needs to define who you are. In Christ we can be re-defined by grace.

Happy subversive Easter. Christ is risen!

Junkboy

I was recently asked if there was a gospel tract that expressed the Christus Victor model of the atonement. An alternative to those nasty Chick tracts that talk about threat and fear and ticked off God. I was reminded of a little book I read a long time ago in German called "Ein Ganz normaler Müllmensch" (trans: "Just Your Average Junkboy") that I really loved. Since there is no English translation, I decided to translate this sweet little tract myself for you (and you thought knowing German was only good for reading Karl Barth!).

So without further ado, I present to you the story of Junkboy. Just click the picture below to read the rest.

Atonements Debate: A Response to Recent Criticisms

I'm reading through the book The Atonement Debate which is a collection of essays by evangelical theologians who gathered together at a symposium hosted by the Evangelical Alliance and the London School of Theology to debate the pros and cons of penal substitution in the wake of the recent controversy in Europe sparked by a comment by Steve Chalke in his book The Lost Message of Jesus that was critical of the doctrine.

In this post I want to address the chapter by Garry Williams entitled "Penal Substitution: A Response to Recent Criticisms". Williams begins by addressing a criticism raised by Steve Chalke: that it would be inconsistent for God to command us not to practice retribution, if God made retribution the center point of his redemptive work in Jesus. Chalke sums up his position saying that "I for one believe that God practices what he preaches". Williams in response argues that God does in fact have a right to act differently than humans do. He appeals to Paul's argument in Romans 12 where he urges us not to practice retribution, but to leave that to God.

Williams is, I think, right in saying that God is not subject to the same rules as humans are. God can judge in a way that no human can. God has a right to demand our worship in a way that no human does. So Williams makes a valid point here generally. However, while we cannot take everything God does is a model for human behavior (since we are not God), the cross is presented in the New Testement specifically as a model for ethical behavior. So we can and should take the message of the cross as a model of how we should act. Paul grounds his teaching on ethics in Philipians on our imitaion of the way of the cross. Jesus also calls us to "take up our cross" and follow him. If, as Williams insists, the central message of the cross is a demonstration and affirmation of retribution, this would mean that retribution is being set forth as a model of human interaction. If the "way of the cross" is the "way of retribution" then we are called to follow in that way. Since we clearly are not called to practice retribution in the New Testament, retribution is not the "way of the cross".

Secondly, Williams in championing retribution seems to be missing the larger point of the gospel. Even if we do accept that divine retribution is justified and right, and that we as sinful humans are headed towards that judement, this by itself is by no defintion the "gospel". The gospel is a way to avoid that retribution, a way for God to not send us to Hell. The whole point of the gospel is that the economy of quid pro quo justice, of get what you deserve, of sewing and reaping is superseded by the superior economy of grace where God acts, despite the fact that we have not earned it, to save us, heal us, and set us free. I am sure that Williams agrees with all of this, but his focus on retribution seems to loose sight of the larger perspective of salvation and grace.

This is not simply a matter of semantics. Williams, in focusing his soteriology seemingly exclusivly on the idea of retribution leaves no room for the idea of sanctification. As Williams puts it, the only problem is the need for punishment. Once that punishment is "exhasted" on Christ, Williams says, the "obstacle" to new life is removed. In other words, there is no objective onological problem of sin in people that needs to be healed, the problem is with God. Here I think Williams gets it backwards. If God is angry at sin, it is because sin is a real problem. Remove the problem by healing the sin, and you remove the cause of God's righteous anger. So God acts in Christ to heal, to cleanse, to renew, to sanctifiy, to liberate, to make us new, thus addressing the problem of sin which is our problem.

The papradigm here is a medical one. If a person is sick they need a doctor. That is precisly the reason Jesus gives of why he has come to seek sinners: they are sick and need a doctor. If salvation is framed however only in terms of retribution, then the entire idea that sin is a problem that needs to be healed is simply lost. Sin becomes only an act that needs punishment, and once that punishment is taken care of, the problem just vanishes. This strikes me as a very shallow understanding of the depths of human brokenness. There are real consequences to us hurting and being hurt. Deep and profound consequences. We might even describe them as a kind of "retribution" flowing out of that action, as Williams does. But the task of salvation is for God to break that vicious cycle, to set us free from that bondage, to heal our brokenness, to make us new and clean again. That's a perspective that allows for the reality of so called "divine retribution" (and we do need to be very cautious of such phrasings as they can easily evoke a picture of sinful and petty human anger), but views it in its proper perspective within the larger picture of God's redemptive work. Simply put, it is the dilema, not the solution. The solution is grace, which is a creative, restorative, transformative, action of God, not an inaction.

Biblical Literalism & Conservative Values

It's common for people to link authoritarian conservative values with biblical literalism. I'd say however that the opposite is the case: strict biblical literalism leads away from authoritarian conservative values and towards compassionate redemptive values because (hold onto your hat) authoritarian conservative values are anti-Gospel.

Before I explain what I mean, let me first define biblical literalism. Of course it does not mean taking every part of the Bible literally. It does not mean "in accordance with... the primary or strict meaning of the word or words; not figurative or metaphorical". No one thinks for instance that when the Bible describes God as "a rock" that God is literally an inanimate stone composed of minerals. We all get that this is a metaphor. So what does it mean? A literal interpretation of the Bible is "adhering to the primary meanings of a term or expression," the "plain" or "unadorned" meaning. The confusion with the term "literal" is that the meaning of the word has changed over time. It used to mean "plain meaning" and now it means "non-metaphorical"

All biblical literalists interpret the Bible by looking for the plain meaning and intent of the author. So while all get that when David says "My heart has turned to wax; it has melted away within me" that he is being melodramatic not literal, a literal interpretation would claim that Jesus really did raise from the dead because all indications say that the authors did not intend for this to be taken as a metaphor, but as historical fact. A literal interpretation is all about the intent of the author. When Jesus says to a young man "Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor" a literal interpretation would think that he really meant that.

The funny thing is that the verses quoted to back up an authoritarian conservative view of morality - strict adherence to the law, severe punishment as a consequence of transgression, no mercy without payment, a low view of humans as evil, etc - invariably come from the Old Testament. If you read the New Testament literally the clear picture you get is of grace. Its a picture of God loving his enemies, of God coming among us in Christ "not to condemn sinners but to save them." It is a picture of God valuing redemption over retribution, and taking any blame, condemnation, humiliation, and damnation upon himself at Calvary. It is a clear message to us that grace should likewise be our ethic, that love trumps everything, that we should always seek redemption, and rather be wronged than seek an eye for an eye. This is absolutely everywhere throughout the New Testament. The picture is not of a strict Father God who demands unquestioned obedience or responds with corporal punishment, it is the picture of God the Father in the story of the Prodigal son who is so loving that it is humiliating to the older son and to the values people held at the time focused on upholding honor. It was a scandal, and still is, but that amazing shocking counter-intuitive picture of grace is the Gospel, it is the image of God incarnate. Read the New Testament literally, and you get a morality based on grace that is in stark opposition to an authoritarian conservative morality. That morality is described as the sinful flesh, as the way of the world.

Now this does not mean we can simply toss out the Old Testament, but you will not find a conservative theologian who would not agree that the New Testament contains a superior and fuller revelation of God's heart than the Old. All would agree that we read the Old Testament in the light of the New, as seen through the eyes of Jesus. Yes, the OT lays out the basis upon which the fuller revelation of the NT is laid, but that does not means that when Jesus says "you have heard it said... but I say to you" that we can ignore his words. We are followers of Jesus the Christ, not followers of Mosaic law. Grace trumps law.

So if that's the case, why is it that so many evangelicals quote almost exclusively from the Old Testament? It's almost as if they have never even read the New Testament(!). My theory is that this is because most sermons focus on Old Testament narratives. If you go to a conservative church like I do, then I'm sure you've noticed this. Most sermons do not preach out of the New Testament, they preach out of the Old. The reason is that pastors are taught in seminary that narratives preach better, and the Old Testament has lots of narratives. So they tell a story from the Old Testament and connect it with a moral. But half the time these are sub-Christian morals. Why they do not preach a narrative from the Gospels is frankly beyond me... maybe they want to save them for Christmas and Easter. But my prescription is going to sound very traditional: we need better biblical preaching, and we need to read our Bibles, we need to let the way and heart of Jesus sink into our bones, we need to have his eyes to see, have his heart, have his values. And those values, taken literally and strictly, and doing the same with the teachings of the Apostles will not lead to authoritarian conservative values, they will lead to grace. Go literalism!

Preaching grace

In the public square Christians are sadly known as people who specialize in judging others - who is moral and immoral, who is saved and who is damned. To a certain extent we do need to be able to evaluate our world, and to recognize things that are messed around us. Everyone does in fact do this. It's impossible not to. But the response that should characterize us as Christians is that of grace not condemnation. Grace recognizes that there is real wrong and hurt, real sin and evil in us and in our world, but instead of responding with condemnation, grace responds by "always hoping, always believing, always trusting". Grace does not deny or ignore the reality of brokenness in our lives, it does not pretend that we are not screwed up. Instead Grace defiantly loves and hopes in the face of our failure and stupidness. Grace counterintuitively seeks to redeem the lost causes. It looks at the reality of our world filled with suffering and injustice and insists that despite all this, we choose to believe that God's grace will still win the day.

Grace is what we should be known for as followers of Christ, but sadly we Christians are largely known for what Phillip Yancy has called 'ungrace'. Ungrace is "that state of being in which self-righteousness and pride are a result of thinking that we have somehow earned God's approval and may now stand in judgment in his behalf." In a rather amusing passage from Church Dogmatics Karl Barth sums up how ridiculous we look when we try and take on God's roll in judging,

"Man thinks he sits on a high thrown, but in reality he sits only on a child's stool, blowing his little trumpet, cracking his little whip, pointing with frightful seriousness his little finger, while all the time nothing happens that really matters. He can only play the judge." (CD IV/2 60.2, p.446)

We may think we are battling for God in our outspoken condemnation of wrong around us, but if we are not doing this in a radical spirit of grace, then we are simply not representing Christ and God. If there is one single sin in the New Testament that is seen as the most severe, the most harmful, it is the loveless judgmentalism exhibited by the religious leaders. The harshest words of Jesus are reserved for condemning exatly this sin, and Paul in Galatians has a cow when that church begins to buy into this way, asking them incredulously if they have completely lost their minds and telling them that in following this way of judgment and law they have "fallen away from grace". He means that quite literally because the way of judgmentalism exhibited by the religious leaders of our day is the opposite of grace. It is, Paul says, and 'ungospel'.

From a biblical perspective, and in particular from a New Testament perspective this is the most serious of all sins. No other sin is so harshly condemned. Yet when do you hear pastors from the pulpit confronting these religious leaders, calling them on their sin as Jesus does? Instead they manage to hide in a mantle of religious self-righteousness. As if we had never read the New Testament. The problem is not so much that there are some obnoxious people who use religion and a cover for their hate. The problem is that the church does not vocally speak out against it as clearly being the deadly sin that it is. The problem is that the way of grace is rarely ever preached.

This way of grace is not self-evident. It goes against the grain our natural (read: carnal) inclinations. So we need to hear grace preached to us so it saturates our thinking and becomes second nature to us. Christians are not those who do not judge, we are those who love, hope, and forgive in spite of seeing our own failings and the failings around us. We are not those who have it all figured out, who are upstanding and flawless. We are, as a Switchfoot song goes, "the church of the dropouts and losers and sinners and failures and the fools". We are those who love because we have been loved when we were unlovable.

The Bells, Smells, and Narrative of the Gospel

Many Emergents seem to be drawn to the "bells and smells" of traditional mainline churches. They have come to appreciate ritual and symbol. So they pray the Divine Hours, and go to Taize services. Coming from an Evangelical background of white washed walls and folding metal chairs they revel in the beauty of stained glass cathedrals and the echoing beauty of hymns like a Midwesterner raised on pork chops and mashed potatoes might eating their first Haute Cuisine meal in Paris.

My friend Suzanne once told me of how growing up in the Episcopal church she never really paid much attention to the service. Years later after having become a born again Christian, she had returned to an Episcopalian mass and suddenly the hymns were filled with meaning for her, and she could hardly believe that she had missed it all before. It had all just rolled off her back - stand up, sit down, sing a song, repeat some words - it had all just been a meaningless ritual to her. Pretty, but with no real connection to her life Monday through Saturday. Now she saw it exploding with meaning.

That's because art - all art - needs to be connected to a narrative in order to move, in order to be anything beyond aesthetics, beyond mere decoration. Suzanne connected to the bells and smells of the Episcopalian mass because she had a connection to the story that it pointed to - she had a first hand encounter with the living and risen Jesus and her story was now shaped by His story. The "art" in church was meaningful because of her narrative connection to it in the same way a certain song might capture all your feelings about something, or how a symbol like a Christmas tree might bring back all sorts of memories and feelings. In each case you are connecting that song and that symbol with your own narrative and therefore experiencing it as full of meaning.

But here's the rub: many Emergents who connect the aesthetics of traditional services to their own narratives of a relationship with God also suffer from an "allergy to evangelism". They have had so many bad experiences with hit-and-run evangelism that they have simply jettisoned the entire idea of sharing the Gospel. Instead they focus on the kingdom of God - on being involved in social justice, caring for the poor, fighting slavery and poverty and AIDS. These are all certainly vital things that we need to care deeply about and be involved in, but they do not change the fact that people also need God personally, that they need to be loved and touched and transformed by Jesus. My concern is that Emergents who have "deconstructed" evangelism and jettisoned it will go to "smells and bells" mainline churches that do not ever preach that one can have a first-hand life transforming intimate relationship with God, and that the next generation will grow up in that vacuum like my friend Suzanne and like so many others like her have - people who do not have a narrative and personal connection to the symbols and aesthetics and for whom it is therefore meaningless and empty rituals- mere Sunday decoration.

So what I am calling for with all the bells and smells surrounding you this Christmas, with all the symbols and songs, is for us Emergents to remember our narrative connection to the Gospel, to recall the story of our own encounter with Jesus, and to look for ways to invite others into that story, ways to encounter people with the living Jesus that are beautiful and creative and real. In short, the Emergent church needs to rediscover evangelism. Not an evangelism disconnected from the kingdom of God, but one that is about loving people and caring for all of who they are, one that ties personal faith together with social action.

The Two Christianities

Throughout Christian history there have been two definitions of what it means to be a true Christian. One representing the established institutional church focusing on holding onto tradition and orthodoxy, where ascribing to correct doctrine is the true test of whether one is a Christian; and the other representing renewal movements and a revitalization of personal faith, and seeing being born again and having a relationship with God as the heart of Christian faith. We can see both of these competing definitions within Evangelicalism. It is easy to think of certain groups that one could apply either focus to. For a while I thought that the "correct doctrine" was descriptive of how Calvinists understood faith, but I think that is incorrect. Even within Calvinism we find both - people focusing on correct doctrine like Charles Hodge, and others focused on a relationship with Jesus like Charles Spurgeon.

More often than not one finds both of these diverging emphases internalized in a single individual, producing a sort of theological "multiple personality disorder". For example, an Evangelical may insist on the need to adhere to correct doctrines such as the infallibility of the Bible, and declare that anyone who denies these “fundamentals” cannot call themselves a "real Christian". However, if one were to ask this same person whether the heart of Christianity is not in fact much more in knowing Jesus in a personal relationship, they would fall over backwards to agree with you. They may still insist that correct doctrine is vital, but not claim that salvation hinges on it. To those on the outside Evangelicalism seems to be focused on adherence to doctrine, to those on the inside it is focused on relationship. So why are we giving people this false impression of what the heart of faith is about?

Donald Dayton suggests that the problem is that the people who represent the public voice of Evangelicalism - those behind the microphones and writing books - are predominantly white intellectual men with a strong Calvinist background, whereas the opposite is true of Evangelicals "on the street". Historian Douglass Sweeny agrees,

“White men are in the minority, few evangelicals are intellectuals, and evangelical beliefs seldom conform to a standard Calvinistic worldview. In fact a simple head count of evangelicals, both here and around the world reveals that most of us hail from lower-class, “Pentecostal” religious traditions (a blanket term Dayton uses in opposition to “Presbyterian” and that refers broadly to Arminian, Wesleyan, Holiness, and/or Pentecostal Christians, people who rarely resonate with the words of Calvinist intellectuals).”

As a result, Evangelicalism, being largely a folk movement rooted in personal faith which is continually reforming itself, has not for the most part produced theologians who can express the heart pulse of ordinary Evangelical faith, but instead have been much more influenced by the doctrinal battles that characterize the academic and political world - for example getting caught up in the Fundamentalist vs Modernism controversy. In this vacuum, Evangelicals looking for a way to express their faith will simply “borrow” the doctrinal statements formulated by these non-representative voices, creating a theological “Frankenstein” by sewing a dogmatic head on to a relational body. Take a look at the doctrinal "statement of faith" posted on your church's website for instance, and notice that very little is said about a relationship with Jesus or living in grace, and instead it is filled with definitions (the Trinity, the infallibility of the Bible, etc.) that while correct formulations, seem detached from what a vital living relationship with God is about.

My intention here is not to propose a relational faith that is divorced from biblical fidelity and orthodoxy, but rather to draw attention to the fact that the way we Evangelicals have learned to convey our faith theologically does not seem to capture the rich relational aspects that it is inwardly characterized by. What is needed is to develop doctrine and theology that arise out of the reality of our relationship with God, and foster a community of people characterized by Christ-likeness and grace. The choice then is not ultimately between doctrine and relationship, but to have right teaching that is rooted in and characterized by right relationship with God and others. In this, relationship - loving God and others - is primary. Right doctrine arises out of right relationship. Placing doctrine over relationship on the other hand leads to not presenting the heart of faith in a loving relationship with God to those outside of our faith, but instead showing them a religion characterized by self-righteousness, condemnation, legalism, and a heartless Pharisaical faith that is in opposition to biblical teaching.

God's Justice

In the OT justice is primarily focused on Israel who is oppressed under pagan captivity calling out for justice. We can see this is the Psalms which speak of being "saved" from those who pursue and attack David, to the Prophets who speak of the poor being lifted up from under their burden. Jesus quotes several of these prophesies that speak of good news to the poor, and it is from this understandable that the Jews at the time expected the Messiah to be one who would destroy the evil pagans and restore Israel to its former glory.

But the message of the NT and Jesus instead says that evil is not just "them" over there, it is "us". We are all sinners, and if we only seek to destroy the bad guys to bring about justice, we will find ourselves at the end of that sword. To put this in the language of Paul, we have all sinned, we are all guilty, and we are all subject to wrath. So the good news of wrath - that the bad guys are gonna get it - is really bad news because we are all guilty of oppressing and hurting others.

At the same time though we are also victims of sin. Both sin done to us by others, and also by our own sins that imprison us in hurtful self -destructive behavior. So while we need to be saved from wrath, that can't be all. There needs to be a different way for justice to come about, not by destroying our enemies (which will just come back to get us since we are all guilty of hurting others), but of a way to lift ourselves out of the bondage of hurting, and to stop the cycle of blame and revenge. So here we go from the idea of retributive justice (and also of the idea of acquittal from retributive justice) to the idea of restorative justice, of a justice focused on setting things right, mending what was broken. Because while we now see in the light of the NT that we are the oppressor, we are at the same time the victim too. The victim of others hurtfulness, but also the victim of our own hurtfulness, and merely not getting punished does not actually take us out of that bondage to hurt we are stuck in. It does not bring about justice in us to simply get clemency. We need to go beyond a punitive model to a restorative model that heals what has been broken in us and our world, one that redeems and makes all things new, that gives us new life. Going from the way of and eye for an eye to the way of overcoming evil with good through love of enemies and unmerited grace that God demonstrates by loving us first while we were his enemies because of our hurtfulness. That is the good news to the poor.

A History of Relationship with God in the Church

I've just finished a summer intensive in church history at Asbury and had a chance to explore some of the history of German Pietism, Moravianism, and early Methodism. I've been paying special attention to the idea of a relationship with God and wanted to sketch out a brief history of relationship with God throughout church history.

I'm sure we are all familiar with the church in the Book of Acts, which took off at Pentecost, and was characterized by the infilling of the Holy Spirit, intense community, caring for the poor, and sign & wonders. This carried on in the primitive church, and the persecution of Rome not only was unable to crush the early church, but in fact the persecution seemed to intensify their resolve and enlarge their numbers.

With the "conversion" of Constantine we see the beginnings of a downward trend, as the church gradually became less characterized by the living God in people's hearts transforming lives and society, and instead with an institution of power that represented the very opposite of what Jesus stood for. By the early middle ages we can see that the church is an institution characterized by massive wealth and shocking use of oppressive power and violence. We do see in this dark age occasional glimmers of light in people like St Francis of Assisi or Julian of Norwich who had deeply intimate relationships with God that overflowed into compassion for the poor. But these beacons of relationship with God are mostly drowned out by Rome. This was the time of the bloody crusades and inquisitions, which meant not only that heretics were burnt at the stake, but that more often than not, people were martyred by the Roman church because they exhibited Christ-likness. One example is the Waldesians who from an orthodox standpoint were completely in line with Catholicism. They felt that rather than amassing wealth, they should give what they had to the poor and live among them incarnationally. Because of this they began to gain a great deal of moral authority among the people. Pope Innocent III (whose name as we see is quite the misnomer) was at the time the richest man on the planet, and he saw these humble monks as undermining his authority among the masses. So he ordered mercenary crusaders to invade the town were the Waldesians were and kill them. While they were at it, for good measure, they killed everyone else in the town, too.

So while we do see signs of vital transforming relationship with God in the monastic and mystical movements, the official focus of faith is not one of personal relationship, but rather a mediated faith administered by the institution. Everyone was baptized as an infant, and thus a member of the church. No was choice involved, no concept of new birth existed. You accepted the authority of the church, or you were killed. The point here is not just that this was extremely oppressive and murderous, but that people simply did not have any concept that they even could have a relationship with God, since it was not taught, and no Bibles were available to read. People like Julian of Norwich surely existed. God was there despite the darkness. But they were the exception to the norm. Officially, personal relationship with God was not promoted as an option.

The turning point, as you might have guessed, was Martin Luther who in his "Turmerlebnis" (tower experience) rediscovered the Gospel of salvation by grace while reading the Apostle Paul's book of Romans. Luther describes this in his own words as "like being born again". This rediscovery of the Gospel sadly went into a recession after Luther's death in 1546. By the early 1600's the Lutheran church had become engulfed in the scholasticism Luther hated so much. Large tombs of theology were written with every answer to every question so that if the Lord God himself was unsure on a particular point of doctrine, why he could look it up right there. Pastors would hold long and tedious lectures expounding ad nauseum on these topics that were completely irrelevant to the lives of the congregation. In response to this cold and barren propositional theology that Lutheranism Protestantism had become, German Pietism was born, and with it the resurgence of Luther's own message.

While remaining theologically orthodox to Lutheranism, the German Pietist movement, headed by Philipp Jacob Spener, sought to cultivate in people a living and intimate relationship with God. One of the key ways that it sought to do this was through “Bibelkreise” (meaning "Bible circle" evoking the picture of people sitting together in a circle reading the Bible). These groups were very similar to the home-group Bible studies common in Evangelical churches today. One of the central teachings of Spener was "Wiedergeburt" (born again). This new birth into a relationship with God was at the very heart of German Pietism. Out of the German Pietist movement, Zinzendorf and the Moravians emerged adding a strong focus on evangelism. It was the Moravians who John Wesley met while on a missionary journey to Georgia in the new American colonies. Wesley writes in his diary of his encounter with the Moravian leader August Spangenberg who asks Wesley about his personal relationship with God,

Have you the witness within yourself? Does the Spirit of God bear witness with your spirit, that you are a child of God?
I was surprised, and knew not what to answer...
"Do you know yourself?"
I said, "I do." But I fear they were vain words.

As is well known, at Aldersgate Wesley did come to the personal assurance he lacked, where his heart was “strangely warmed” as he listened to a reading of Luther's commentary on the book of Romans. It is worth noting that it was the combination of the proclamation of the Gospel message of saving grace, combined with seeing this lived out in the vibrant and personal faith of the Moravians that together resulted in Wesley coming to an assurance of God's love and forgiveness.

Not surprisingly these renewal movements experienced persecution from the institutional churches, now including the Protestant churches. One bewildering example is a decree issued in 1690 under the urgings of the Lutheran officials declaring "private meetings in which the Holy Scripture is explained" as "dangerous" and forbidding them "upon pain of imprisonment"*. This is painfully ironic coming from the denomination of a man who stood before Rome alone with his Bible and translated the Scriptures for the first time in to German so common people could read the good news. As the Pietist renewal movement, centered in a vital and transforming relationship with God, continued to grow in numbers and in conflict with the traditional Protestant state churches, people began to flock to the new American colonies in search of religious freedom. Puritans, Pietists, Methodists, Moravians, Anabaptists, Quakers, and many others traveled to the colonies. It was in this atmosphere that the First and Second Great Awakenings exploded in tent meeting revivals across the new frontier.

In the next installment we'll explore how this idea of a living personal relationship with God took shape in the new world, from the First and Second Great Awakenings, to the forming of denominations, and finally the neo-Evangelicalism of Billy Graham.

* Quoted in Dale W Brown, "The Problem of Subjectivism in Pietism" (unpublished PhD dissertation Northwestern U, 1962) p 86. From Johann Arnds et al. Der Deutsche Pietismus: Eine Auswahl von Zeugnisen (Berlin: Furche, 1921) p 109

Deconstructing Derrida

I just returned from the 2007 Emergent Theological Conversation with John Caputo and Richard Kearney speaking on the deconstructionism of Derrida. The basic idea of deconstructionism, (as Caputo and Kearney have interpreted it in a Christian context), is based on a "theology of the cross" that crucifies the flesh, crucifies pride, deconstructs what we think we know in order to open up the possibility of us getting closer to the absolute beneath all our biases and blinders. This is surely something crucial to do if we want to be faithful to Christ who calls us to die so that we might find life.

In the final session, Kearney was asked whether he thought that all religions lead to the same God. He responded:

"Yes, I think they do. I think that all religions are pointing to the indeconstructable source and end of life which is love... hence the need for constant deconstruction so as to preserve that kernel which remains unknowable and unpossessable by any one religion. That's not relativism, that's a respect for the absolute which no finite human being or institution can claim to possess."

Now I don't have a problem with what Kearney says above. Where I do have a problem is what he leaves out. He rightly says that Christianity is, to quote E Stanley Jones "the human system built up around Jesus, man-made and fallible". But Christianity is not the Gospel, Christ is. Christianity is not the truth, Christ is the truth. Both Caputo and Kearney speak of Christianity as it that was all there was - our fallible human religion, and do not seem to have a working understanding of Christ as beyond and above that, as God's speech to us. The Gospel is not about proclaiming religion. The Gospel is not even about proclaiming Christianity. The Gospel is the proclamation of God's personal self-revealing in Jesus Christ in order that we messed up humans can encounter the living God of the universe, that we can meet Truth with a big "T" relationally and salvicly.

Deconstruction is about us chipping away at the crust to get to the absolute core, but the Gospel is about the Absolute breaking through the crust to us. That is way bigger that any religion. It is in the thundering words of Job "Higher than heaven, what will you do? Deeper than hell, what can you know?" Indeed, what the Hell do we know? I know nothing. But the Gospel is not about what I say or know, it is about what God has said through the Incarnation. The Absolute has entered into our broken and blind world and revealed to us this "treasure in jars of clay". I can't claim to have a hold on truth, but I can let Truth get a hold of me, and I can do that because Truth has broken through the crust to me. That's not about knowing, it is about being known. It is about trust. In trust I proclaim that the one true God above all culture, religion, and thought has been revealed in Christ.

In an earlier session Caputo expressed disdain for the kind of evangelism characterized by a triumphant Christendom. Think we can all agree that we we can do without that "anti-gospel". Again the problem is not in what they say, but in what they leave out. No body wants that. But what I do want is - out of trust, in humility, in compassion, with fear and trembling - to boldly and unapologeticly proclaim that the Absolute Truth beneath the crust we chip away at has come to us in Jesus Christ, and that because of that act of the Absolute towards us, we can know the Truth in a personal intimate relationship and let that Truth set us free. That Gospel is the very deconstructive hammer that shatters every religion (including ours) and every philosophy (including Derrida's). It is, as E Stanley Jones says "an evangelism that evangelizes the evangelist because it sends us to our knees even as we proclaim it". Jesus is the indeconstuctable cornerstone. Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces, but he on whom it falls will be crushed. (Luke 20:18)