The Emerging Relational Theology #4

Hans Frei's narrative theology focused on a hermeneutic through which to understand Scripture interfaces with the ethics based narrative theology of Stanley Hauerwas as we allow God's story - God's Heilsgeschichte - to become our story.

This ethical narrative theology of Stanley Hauerwas is heavily influenced by Alasdair MacIntyre's "Virtue Ethics". Virtue ethics is an ethics based on the development of character. In contrast to deontological and utilitarian ethics which following the Enlightenment attempt to form an objective and detached universal ethics based detached reason, and free from the biases of culture or tradition, an ethics based on character says that morality is formed in a person as they develop character in community. This differs from relativism because it is not my story, but our story, and for those who follow Christ, God's story that we are a part of. We are relative in the sense that we are God's children, connected to relationship - our story tied up in Christ's.

A big part of this shared narrative in a community forming character in a person has for Hauerwas to do with a counter-cultural understanding of the body of Christ as salt in the world. Coming from the United Methodist Church, Hauerwas speaks out against what he calls "Christiandom" in books like "Resident Aliens" and calls for us to model another way that is in the world but not of the world. Joining him in this is the Radical Orthodoxy of John Milbank. Like Hauerwas, Milbank is concerned about the church being co-opted by culture, specifically the spirit crushing values of modernism. Because of this Milbank's Radical Orthodoxy speaks in the context of a post-modern critique on modernism, but it would be a mistake to see it as postmodern theology, rather it is an attempt to return to the roots of Christianity focusing on the patristics (the early church fathers) applying this to the post modern context we live in today.

One person who has championed Radical Orthodoxy in an easy to understand way (Milbank and others have a habit of overloading their work with mind numbing histories of philosophy), and addressing this directly to the emerging church is James K.A. Smith. In his book "Who's Afraid of Postmodernism?" Smith argues that rather than promoting relativism, postmodernism as the death of modernism also heralds the death of secularism, which is indeed good news.

As you can see, the emerging relational theology that began with narrative theology has taken on many different bannersn(narrative theology, postmodern theology, radical orthodoxy, ancient-future faith, neo-evangelicals, the emergent church) and a host of names - Hans Frei, Gerorge Lindbeck, Stanley Grenz, John Milbank, James K.A. Smith, Robert Webber, Stanley Hauerwas, and Nancy Murphy just to name a few. What they all have in common is a shared understanding of a relational theology, of people as relational beings in community with each other and a social God.

These growing critiques reflect a move away from modernist assumptions from both the left and right, each respectively critiquing their own traditions. As a result Christians on both sides of the theological fence are finding commonality and space for conversation rooted in a new shared relational approach to theology. In contrast to a modernist tendency (found among both liberals and conservatives) to break from the past and tradition, this approach is characterized by (1) a deep appreciation for history, (2) a recognition that there is no neutral ground and that we all speak out of a cultural context, and that (3) faith is not an individual intellectual project, but rather is formed in a communal context: Spiritual formation comes through relationship and discipleship. It is always incarnational: a faith lived out in relationship that cannot be detached from this communal context. As social beings we cannot live in the general, but are always situated within a specific world and history that shapes us. Relational faith entails a specific faith contextually rooted in the unique narrative of Scripture and the Christian community that forms a person in Christ – an identity rooted in social context to God, community, and history.

Perhaps the clearest voice here has been that of Robert Webber and his "Younger Evangelicals", but that will have to wait until next time...

Evil in us

Adam recently asked this in the comment section of a blog on God's justice. I thought it was such a good question that I wanted to devote a blog post to it. Here's Adam's question:

I just finished reading your essay on penal substitution vs christus victor. I am very intrigued and I think you are putting into words some things that have been on my mind for a while. One thing I struggle with there and in this blog post is the idea that christus victor takes on a victim mentality to sin. I would really like to know how this view of atonement fits in with the idea that we do viciously choose to sin and are guilty, not just victims, of evil.

If God is out to fight evil then in a sense he is out to fight us since the fall corrupted us such that we have become evil ourselves. This is the one issue I am grappling with. I can understand how the cross works to free us from the oppression of evil, but not how it deals with the fact that I am evil.

I do think there is a tendency for people today (myself included) to see ourselves in terms of victims. This comes as a response to many people being wounded by self-destructive guilt and self-loathing. As a result we shake off this negative self-hatred, and instead see ourselves as broken. Christus Victor speaks to this self understanding. But at the same time there is a danger in us only using Christus Victor to echo the sentiment of our own time, rather than letting it speak to evil on a much broader scale, including the evil in us. If we have all been hurt, it stands to reason that we have also deeply hurt others. We need to own up to that, not out of self-loathing, but out of compassion for the hurt we have done to others which produces other-focused regret and remorse.

Christus Victor, as expressed by the early church stressed that we shared culpability in our captivity. This is expressed in the often misunderstood legal idea of humanity being enslaved to the devil. The point here Gustav Aulen argues was not (as Anselm had it) to say that the devil has any rights, but to stress humanity's own participation and guilt that led to its bondage. This echoes the Hebrew prophet's understanding that Israel was in Exile under the oppressive pagan rule because of her sin. In the New Testament this external political bondage is taken to a deeper level where we see that our enemy is not some other nation, but evil and oppression itself, and that this evil is not in them over there, but in us. Which brings us to Adam's question: if God is opposed to evil, and we are ourselves evil, how can we be saved?

We cannot simply be removed from external bondage, nor is it enough to merely wipe the legal charges clean. What we need is a change of identity. We need to not only change what we do, but who (and whose) we are. So Scripture speaks of us going from being children of wrath, defined by the hurt and hate of the world, to being adopted children of God. In terms of the Atonement, this is known as "recapitulation". God becomes human, entering into our estate in all of its weakness, woundedness, shame, and guilt. God in Christ so deeply identifies with us in our wretchedness that he "becomes sin" and suffers godforsakenness and accursedness for our sake. Because having been embraced in our darkness and ugliness, we can share in the resurrection life of God.

That plays out in our own lives as we experience the new birth, where God's spirit comes to live in our hearts, and we can cry out with this inner witness "Abba! Father!" as the Spirit of God in us testifies to our inmost being that we are a new creation, born from above. We die to our old self, defined by the world, an enemy of God, and are raised to life in Christ. As we abide in Christ, in an intimate personal relationship with God, we come to know God's grace and love first hand, and that love transforms us into Christ's image. So the cross works to free us of our evil when we come to Jesus and join him in his cross and resurrection. There at the foot of his cross we die to our evil hurtful self, and are born again. We are brought out of our self-focus and separation, and united with Christ, restored into relationship with God, where we were always meant to abide and thrive. In that sense we are justified, meaning "set aright", by being restored into relationship with God as his beloved.

Yes we were because of our own evil God's enemies, but God loves his enemies and gave his life for us while we were his enemies so that we could be conquered and overcome and brought back to our eternal home.

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)

Why Christmas Matters

As much as Christmas is celebrated here, I think we have lost sight of it's significance. Why does Christmas matter? Isn't it really a minor holiday made to replace the pagan birthday of the sun god in Romans times and co-opted by Santa Claus and shopping in our own time? Looking at the media you would get the idea that Christmas is about childhood excitement, family, wonder, warmth, lights, songs, presents... and those are are great things. I'm really looking forward to sharing all that wonder and thrill with my little boy.

But there is something deeper still that happened in a manger long ago. A homeless unwed teenage girl gave birth to God incarnate. Christmas is about the Incarnation, and every understanding of the cross and of our salvation and hope is ultimately rooted in the Incarnation. Anselm's famous treaty was called "Why God became Human" (Cur Deus Homo). Likewise Irenaeus' Recapitulation is about how "God became what we are so we could become what he is". Every major theory of the Atonement is rooted in the idea of God come among us, in humility, taking on our weakness, sorrow, and needfulness.

That is what Christmas is about. The day that God came among us in weakness. Seeing that when God comes among us he does not come as a powerful domination ruler, but in the form of a little child. Christmas is about God turning all of our expectations of what power, glory, and holiness are about upside-down. It's about how God entered into all of our helplessness and need. It's about finding God in the middle of our ordinary nitty gritty lives. It's about hope in a gray world.