My Interview With Anne Jackson

Technorati Tags: Anne Jackson, Author Sketches, authors, Books, christianaudio, Interviews, Permission To Speak Freely

Between Emerging & Traditional: My Interview With Jim Belcher

One of my favorite things about working at christianaudio is that I get to conduct author interviews. In was in this capacity that I was fortunate enough to speak with Jim Belcher, author of the recent book, Deep Church: A Third Way Beyond Emerging and Traditional:

In this edition of “Author Sketches” we talk to Jim Belcher, author of the recent popular book Deep Church, A Third Way Beyond Emerging and Traditional. Jim talked to us about his own struggle to find a “third way” as a pastor and church-planter, his motivation for “theological peacemaking” and revealed how his friend Rob Bell became the catalyst for writing this book in the first place.

You can download the interview for free at christianaudio.com by clicking here (registration is required). You can also read my review of Deep Church by clicking here.

Technorati Tags: christianaudio, Deep Church, Emerging Church, Interviews, Jim Belcher

Love Has Many Stages

Here’s an inspiring and jolting quote:

Love has many stages. The highest level is when you cannot decide whether to love or not love because there is no room for hatred. The love of your neighbors comes naturally in response to obeying Jesus and God. Loving the neighbor is proof that you heart is full of love. When we say neighbors, we mean all of humanity. All people are brothers because we all come from God.

~ Sheik Nabil, The #2 leader in Hezbollah, excerpted from Tea With Hezbollah by Ted Dekker and Carl Medearis

Technorati Tags: Hezbollah, Jesus, Love

What About God As The Monster? An Open Letter To Brian McLaren

Dear Brian,

I just finished reading your book, A New Kind of Christianity and I wanted to accept your invitation (in the prelude) to reply.

I really appreciated this book. First, I found your proposal that we shift our scripture-reading paradigm from a “constitutional” approach to that of a “portable library” of ancient Jewish sources to be both a compelling and accurate way of characterizing a key hermeneutical difference. As I’ve worked in recent months to birth a fresh expression of church in my area, I’ve become convinced this is one of the most important shifts I need to model for others.

I also appreciated your perspective of Christ as the lens through which we read scripture. Of course, lots of folks from a diversity of traditions have affirmed this, but I think you’ve articulated it in a way that presents Christ as more than just the atoning incarnation of God, but also as God’s powerful and practical means of bringing peace-making and justice to the world. That, to me, seems like a high Christology and a much needed correction to foundationalist reductions.

I do have a few questions. Have you seen “The Answer Man” (originally titled “Arlen Faber” in 2009)? I loved this film and your book reminded me of a particular scene. The main character, Arlen Faber (played superbly by Jeff Daniels) is considered the world’s leading authority on God. But he bears a terrible secret: He hasn’t “heard” from God in twenty years. One of his only joys in life is old classic Hollywood monster films (like The Wolfman, Dracula, and Frankenstein) and he collects model figures of these monsters. Anyway, there’s a scene where Arlen is talking to a troubled younger man named Kris, who is asking him about God:

Kris: So what’s the deal with heaven and hell anyway?

Arlen: I’ve seen hell, and it’s name is Reno, Nevada.

Kris: I can’t believe God would punish people for not believing in him.

Arlen: Ah, the rapture.

Kris: What’s that?

Arlen: Well, I like to think of it as a monster movie. The monster destroys some people and spares others.

Kris: So who is the monster?

Arlen: God. God is the monster.

While Arlen is clearly mocking the very “soul sort” narrative you condemn, Jeff Daniels plays it more beautifully nuanced than that. He also seems to have a deeply ambivalent frustration and affection for God as “the monster” that echoes his affection for those classic monster films. It immediately made me think of the refrain in The Chronicles of Narnia that Aslan is “not a tame lion.” Likewise, I think there is a sense in which God is the “monster” for us. Much is made these days of our intimacy with God, particularly as an inevitable consequence of God’s own internal Trinitarian intimacy and his subsequent mission to reach out to the “other” – and I agree with that characterization wholeheartedly. However it also seems to me that there must remain, for eternity, an ontological “otherness” to God that keeps Godself at an inscrutable distance.

In other words, Arlen was right. God is the monster.

I can’t help but wonder if you’ve dismissed this aspect of God. For example, when you discuss the long questioning of Job by God toward the end of the central poem in the book, you interpret this to be a demonstration of God’s openness, but you ignore the dramatic climax of those very questions:

“Will the one who contends with the Almighty correct him? Let him who accuses God answer him!” (Job 40:2)

In other words, God’s answer to Job is exactly the “might makes right” argument you later condemn in your book (p178). Furthermore, this interpretation doesn’t come from a “constitutional” reading; rather, it respects the very dramatic literary reading of the poem and even echoes the central conclusion of Job’s Babylonian predecessor, “The Poem of the Righteous Sufferer.” Frankly, I don’t see how this harsh, “might makes right” argument can be dismissed as an evolutionary vestigial tail (so to speak) from the Old Testament because it is also the exact argument Paul uses in his very disconcerting “vessels of wrath” illustration from Romans 9:

“But who are you, O man, to talk back to God?” (Rom 9:20)

This represents my main concern with your book, and, specifically, with your proposal that we embrace an evolutionary reading of scripture. I have no problem with an evolutionary paradigm per sé, but you seem to apply it selectively and without any specific method – other than to use Jesus as the plumb line. Yet, even then, you remain silent on the difficult, and even violent, elements of judgment in many of Jesus’ own parables. The overall affect of this silence is that it really does appear you’ve merely used this evolutionary approach to dismiss the distasteful characteristics of God in accordance with contemporary tastes and sensibilities.

As I survey the biblical characterizations of God I find God’s mercy right alongside a willingness to judge with violence (be that hardship, exile, physical death, or the eternal judgment of being discarded in a cosmic trash heap). This appears from the first book to the last and everywhere in between, with no apparent evolutionary pattern. Moreover, Jesus seems to be the chief expositor of both characteristics. Personally, I don’t think we need to turn theological cartwheels in order to abstain from human appropriations of God’s own violence (this is clearly your motivation, and, as a pacifist myself, it’s a motivation I sympathize with). In fact, I think Jesus demonstrates that we can embrace God as the monster while abdicating violence ourselves.

I hate to toss around the word “orthodoxy” – which is often used as a blunt rhetorical object – but it seems to me that a defining feature of orthodoxy is the refusal to resolve the tension of seemingly opposing concepts. The irony of your theology, which strives to be thoroughly postmodern (and I mean that as a sincere compliment), is that you seem fall into the thoroughly Modern trap of attempting to resolve the biblical tension between God as lover and God as monster.

What do you think?

Some questions for you (or anyone else who cares to pitch in):

1. If God is God and I am not, shouldn’t I expect to find some of God’s attributes to be personally objectionable?
2. Closely related to #1: Isn’t there some sense in which God must always be “the monster” or else cease to be God?
3. Is there room in your theology for God as “the monster” alongside God as the merciful liberator? If so, how?

Post Script: This letter – in a much shorter form – was part of an assignment for my Fuller Seminary class “MC 535: Emerging Churches.” You can read my classmates letters to Brian by visiting dearbrianmclaren.wordpress.com.

Technorati Tags: A New Kind of Christianity, Brian McLaren, God as monster, peace-making, Violence

On Spending Easter With a Porn Star: My Interview With Craig Gross

As the Production Manager for christianaudio, I sometimes conduct audio interviews with Christian authors. I recently spoke with Craig Gross, co-founder of XXXChurch.com and co-author, along with Jason Harper, of the recent book, Jesus Loves You…This I Know:

In this edition of Author Sketches we talk to speaker and pastor Craig Gross, whose latest book Jesus Loves Me This I Know, was co-authored with Jason Harper and continues the outward-focused themes explored in his previous books like Starving Jesus and The Gutter: Where Life Is Meant To Be Lived. In this interview Craig talked to us about touring the country with Porn stars, sharing Easter with Ron Jeremy, and learning to be less judgmental through his visit with Fred Phelps and the people of Westboro Baptist Church.

You can download the interview for free at christianaudio.com by clicking here (registration is required).

Technorati Tags: Books, christianaudio, Christianity, Craig Gross, Interviews, Jason Harper, Jesus Christ

Communities of the Spirit: Untamed, Chapter 3

(During the month of April I’m blogging through Alan and Deb Hirsch’s latest book, Untamed. Previous posts: Chapter 1 | Chapter 2)

Chapter 3: The Spirit’s Edge

This chapter came at an interesting time for me, because I’m thinking through some of the very issues they broach. Is it necessary to have a sense of direct contact with God? What is our normative form of relationship with God? For the Hirsch’s part of the response to these kinds of questions would be to re-affirm the necessity of a fully Trinitarian encounter with God. Hence, this chapter commends the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives as disciples:

“One of the foundational works of the Spirit is to usher us into the true knowledge and experience of God. Said differently: if there was no Holy Spirit, there would be no possibility of encounter with God, because it is the Spirit who mediates the knowledge of God and thereby leads us into truth and righteousness (John 16:5–11). And because the Spirit brings us into deeper awareness of, and conformity to, the one true God, he keeps us from becoming toxic.”

By “true knowledge” the authors don’t mean “secret knowledge.” Rather, they mean relational knowledge, or intimacy. For example, some people know things about my wife Jenell, but I really know my wife better than anyone – and that knowledge only comes from direct contact. The author’s point in this Chapter is the same: we cannot know God without contact with the Holy Spirit, for the Spirit is the point of contact in our relationship with God.

Moreover, we cannot have contact with the Holy Spirit without letting the Spirit be wild and unpredictable. It comes with the territory. To illustrate this, the Hirsch’s open this chapter with a story from Al’s early life as a Christian when some very Pentecostal new friends prayed for him to receive the Holy Spirit, complete with tongues, cursing of the devil, and shaking. All very strange stuff to someone not accustomed to such things. Indeed, Al wanted to run out the door.

But.

Something happened. Al made life-changing, perceptible contact with God through that encounter, and although he wouldn’t recommend the particular way that happened for everyone, he can’t deny the authenticity of his encounter with the Holy Spirit or it’s transformational effects on his life. That is what he does recommend to everyone. In fact, together Alan and Deb say it’s necessary.

And that leads me to a bit of an objection: Despite their characteristically strong emphasis on the Holy Spirit and direct contact with God, from my perspective it is precisely the excessively Pentecostal streams of Christianity that prove most “toxic.” I’m thinking here of the kind of Jesus-is-your vending-machine, there’s a devil-behind-every-door triumphalistic Pentecostalism that seeks to control both people and God. I can tell you from personal experience this kind of Christianity is quite rampant.

Granted, in this Chapter (and elsewhere in the book) the Hirsch’s warn against this form of Christianity as well, calling it “spiritual engineering.” In fact, one of the things the authors rightly point out is that both Pentecostalism and Cessasionist Fundamentalism are manifestations of the same desire for power and control (some would say they share a foundationalist heritage – one biased toward experience of God, the other toward the Bible). Still, I’m not sure they do enough to develop clear distinctions between classic Pentecostalism and the kind of Holy Spirit led, transformational pneumatology they seem to have in mind. My question is: How is it that your kind of focus on the Holy Spirit will lead to reliable Christlikeness when other kinds have not?

What they do say, very clearly, is that we need both the “light” and “heat” of the revealed word and divine experience, but we must learn to relinquish control to God, particularly as God pushes His mission forward through the wild, spontaneous, uncontrollable forays of the Holy Spirit. In this sense, their distinction seems to be twofold: an embrace of a peacemaking “radical middle” position that affirms the best of both, coupled with an emphasis on relinquishing control.

(As an aside, this “radical middle” approach has been at the core of Vineyard philosophy for over 30 years. For those who are interested I would recommend Empowered Evangelicals by Rich Nathan and Ken Wilson.)

While they don’t detail a distinctive pneumatology, they do outline some characteristics they believe would be present in any community of faith that was missionally engaged with the leading of the Holy Spirit:

• Serious creativity
• Risky mission
• Communitas (Community with intense common purpose)
• Lots of little Jesuses
• Love
• Learning community
• Miracles
• Spiritual maturity
• Discernment
• Unity around Jesus
• Ecstasy and intimacy
• Transformation and liberation

Each of these are briefly expounded upon in the book, but it’s clear the authors aren’t seeking an exhaustive list. Instead, they seem to be trying to sketch out a sense that authentically Spirit-led communities will have a depth and breadth about them that is often missing from current denominational sectarian streams.

Questions for Reflection:

1. What is your experience with the Holy Spirit?
2. Have you experienced versions of Christianity that seemed to seek control of others or of God?  How did you handle that?
3. What kinds of Christians have you encountered that most resembled Christ? What did those people have in common with one another?

Technorati Tags: Alan Hirsch, Christianity, Church, Deb Hirsch, mission, missional, Untamed

What Does The Gospel Really Look Like?

What does the gospel really look like in practice, on the ground, in the city, walking the streets, in the boardrooom and the legislative session, among the neighborhoods and schools of North America?

That was essentially the question asked by JR Woodward last year of 50 missional church practitioners, including myself. What would you write about the good news in your local paper if given the opportunity?

The 50 responses have now been collected and published in a wonderful little book called ViralHope: Good News From The Urbs to the Burbs and Everything In Between. It was humbling to contribute my small chapter to this book as many of the other men and women featured on the pages are people I have admired and emulated for years. Others I’m just discovering and getting to know. As Alan Hirsch writes in his endorsement of the book:

“ViralHope is a unique and enticing collection of postcards from a veritable who’s who of the missional church from across the Western world. It provides us with articulate and varied perspectives on how missionaries to the West are conceiving the good news in and for their various contexts. A worthy read.”

ViralHope would make a fantastic 50-day personal devotion, small group study reflection, or church-wide reading series. You can click here to get your own copy from Amazon.

Technorati Tags: Books, Christianity, Good News, Gospel, JR Woodward, missional, Missional Church, ViralHope

The Danger of Worship: Untamed, Chapter Two

(During the month of April I’m blogging through Alan and Deb Hirsch’s latest book, Untamed. Previous posts: Chapter 1)

Your sincerity is not enough. Everyone is sincere, but there is a real-live God, with real-live thoughts, values, and expectations that exclude other thoughts, values, and expectations as possibilities of goodness.

If the first chapter of Deb and Alan Hirsch’s latest book, Untamed, concerned the re-affirmation of a personally accessible God, then the second Chapter wants us to know that God is dangerous. Moreover, as history’s slew of cult leaders and televangelists attest, it is also dangerous to miss the truth about that God. Such false prophets are very sincere about their faith, as Martin Buber has noted:

“False prophets are not godless. Rather, they adore the god “success.” They themselves are in constant need of success and achieve it by promising it to the people. But they do honestly want success for the people. The craving for success governs their hearts and determines what rises from them. That is what Jeremiah called the “deceit of their own hearts.” They do not deceive; they are deceived, and can only breathe in the air of deceit.”

This means getting the “fundamentals” about God right, but before you make the mistake of hearing a re-hashing of fundamentalism here, you must understand what the Hirsch’ mean by this term; for them, the fundamentals refer to being like Christ:

“We easily lose focus on what is essential. We miss the fact that discipleship has to do with becoming like Jesus, living the Shema, and not forgetting that the “more important matters of the law,” namely love, mercy, forgiveness, justice (Matt. 23:23–24), are nonnegotiables in the equation.”

This is in sharp contrast to the fundamentals of fundamentalism, which are unquestionable, universally certain  doctrinal propositions of truth that must be consciously affirmed. For the Hirsch’s this is too abstract, and this places them squarely in postmodern territory (though, not lost in its wilderness). Indeed, it’s likely that many sectors of Christendom will dismiss the these ideas as legalistic because some of the focus is being shifted to include what we do (what they call, “living the Shema”), as well as what we believe (i.e. “believing in Jesus”).

The authors indirectly reject fundamentalist conceptions of legalism as a false dichotomy, instead seeing legalism as too much emphasis on doctrinal purity. They affirm that, “The reality is that what we believe about God does have consequences. History is full of people who have wreaked enormous damage and even killed for what they believe in.”Our theology dictates our conception of what it means to be good and right, and how it will look to build a just society.

For the authors, this is where the Shema – the core Jewish prayer, taken from Deut 6 – comes in. For the Hirsch’s, Jesus’ placement of the Shema (or what Scot McNight calls “The Jesus Creed“) in Mark 12:29-31 as the central explication of faith is his remarkable distillation of right theology and praxis in one simple statement, a statemnt which holds the two concepts of belief and action firmly together – making his “way” into a concrete, bodily faith:

“The follower of Jesus broadens his or her knowledge of God through living truth, not just believing in it. True knowledge of God must be expressed in practice or action—that’s why the Bible is one-third ethics. Obedience— body and soul—is part of the condition of God’s covenant (for example, Exod. 24:7; Jer. 11:3) as well as the momentous parting words of commission under which we live (Matt. 28:18–20). As C. S. Lewis says, “Obedience is the ‘holy courtesy’ required for entering into the divine relationship.”

This is how we truly come to know God: by faith, which means believing Jesus’ teachings to the extent that we put them into bodily practice and learn how, through trial and error, to become like him through the enabling grace of God given by the indwelling Holy Spirit. The teachings and actions of Christ, including the Shema, are not only the starting point for our theological conception of God, but also our guide for whether we’re getting it right or wrong.

Another distinctively postmodern aspect of this chapter is the Hirsch’s insistence that such a life simply cannot be lived individually. While we all can know God, no one individual can know God completely. Rather, because everyone is wired differently with a variety of temperaments, strengths, and weaknesses, we must pursue the knowing of God in community. That is the place of proper theology.

The rest of the Chapter explores some of the ways that people are derailed in their discipleship – with emphasis on the big three of sex, money, and power – but the core message remains the same: we recapitulate what we worship, therefore we must endeavor to know God as God really is. For the authors, this means that the first order of Christianity is a full-orbed, holistic worship (not just singing), which they call “dangerous” because it has the capacity to put us in contact with an untamed God who transforms us beyond our meager lusts.

Some Questions For Reflection:

1. Do you agree that we imitate that which we worship? Can you think of examples from non-religious life?
2. What is your concept of worship? What are the most effective ways you engage in worship?
3. What are you thought on the proposition that we can only know God in community?

Technorati Tags: Alan Hirsch, Christianity, Deb Hirsch, discipleship, God, missional, Postmodernism, Scot McNight, The Shema, Untamed, worship

Reading Blog: Untamed by Alan and Deb Hirsch, Chapter 1

Alan Hirsch has made a name for himself in recent years as a missiologist who has drawn attention to the neglect of mission to the West. His books, The Shaping of Things To Come (co-written with Micheel Frost) and The Forgotten Ways take up these subjects, along with his other missional initiatives such as the Forge Missional Training Network and Shapevine (started along with Lance Ford). For Untamed, Alan c0-writes with his wife Deb, an experienced and articulate minister in her own right.

Section 1: Untamed God
Chapter 1: Jeebus Made Me Do It

Homer Simpson is the template for this chapter. Trying to escape a debt to PBS, Homer gets shipped to the South Pacific by Reverend Lovejoy as a Missionary where he promptly destroys the pristine native civilization by preaching “Jeebus” and building a Casino-themed religion that introduces gambling and alcohol to the natives. For the Hirsch’s, this is a snapshot of what happens when we don’t really know God; we create toxic religious enterprises and institutions.

As has been pointed out abundantly by a growing collection of popular Christian authors in the last two decades – from Dallas Willard to Dan Kimball to Dave Kinnamon and Gabe Lyons – Christians often don’t look much like Jesus at all. Reflecting this, Bill Maher has said, “I don’t know anyone less Jesus-like than most Christians.”

It’s critical to reclaim the centrality of Jesus as the defining image of God. We know God by knowing Jesus Christ, or as former Anglican archbishop Michael Ramsey has said, “God is Christlike.” The Hirsch’s believe that this re-centering of Christ, not just as the savior of humanity, but also as the model of discipleship leads us to take Jesus seriously as a template for life. This incarnational view of God breaks us out of the tendency to “know” God primarily through the abstract concepts of his transcendent “otherness.”

However, this need to see God through Christ can include the tendency to create Christ in our own image. Quoting Voltaire’s famous saying – that God created us in his image and we returned the favor – the Hirsch’s explore the phenomenon of enculturated versions of Christ. Europeans create a light-skinned, light-haired version, Africans create a dark-skinned version, etc. While it’s necessary to recognize Christ ability to identify with every culture, this tendency can quickly becomes idolatrous. There’s an interesting example of this in Untamed, taken from an infamous sermon preached by Seattle pastor Mark Driscoll:

He [Driscoll] has become somewhat infamous for his portrayal of Jesus as some sort of ultimate fighter. But in attempting to “butch up” Jesus and make him appeal to “real men,” has Driscoll come close to creating Jesus in his own image? Consider this from one of his sermons:

“Latte-sipping Cabriolet drivers do not represent biblical masculinity, because real men—like Jesus, Paul, and John the Baptist—are dudes: heterosexual, win-a-fight, punch-you-in-the-nose dudes. In other words, because Jesus is not a limp-wristed, dress-wearing hippie, the men created in his image are not sissifed church boys; they are aggressive, assertive, and nonverbal.”

Now we don’t believe Mark’s original intention was bad. What he was trying to do is rescue Jesus from the overly feminized ways in which Jesus has been portrayed. We would agree and also want to rescue the image of Jesus from this [...] But the problem with Driscoll’s ultimate-fighting Jesus is that Jesus has been freed from one distortion only to be captured by another.

The Hirsch’s are very concerned with how an overly personalized and distorted image of Christ leads to toxic religious abuses. Instead, “Jesus must be freed in order to relate to all people; if he isn’t freed, the incarnation fails to make sense [...] That’s the whole point of the incarnation: he became a human in order to fully identify with each and every one of us.”

The authors go on to ask why is it that Christ’s holiness tended to attract the marginalized sinners of his day, but the “holiness” of Modern Christians tends to repel them? The Hirsch’s answer is that Jesus’ holiness wasn’t about conformity to the rules of personal morality, but rather individual and corporate conformity to God as revealed in Christ. The distinction they make here is the classic Evangelical distinction between religion and “relationship.” The authors affirm that Christ taught a reconciled relationship with God that leads to a genuine desire to please Him out of love.

However, that “conformity” to God usually sets us prophetically at odds with the surrounding culture (secular and religious). This is where the Hirsch’s view of God becomes “untamed” in the “gutsy” and “intoxicating” Jesus of the Gospels. There is a radical freedom expressed by God and his people to stand for what is truly righteous, unfettered by the rules of society.

Some Questions for Reflection:

1. Aside from Mark Driscoll’s “Ultimate Fighter” Jesus, What are some of the other caricatures of Jesus you recognize in Christianity that are inconsistent with the biblical picture of him?
2. What about Jesus do you identify with most? Does Christ seem attractive to you?
3. What do you think of the distinction the Hirsch’s make between moralistic religious conformity to the rules of society and relational conformity to the will of God? How can we reliably know the difference?

Technorati Tags: Alan Hirsch, Books, Christianity, Deb Hirsch, Mark Driscoll, Missional Church, Untamed

April Reading Blog: Untamed by Alan and Deb Hirsch

Last weekend I invited you to vote on what book I would blog through in April and the winner is Untamed: Reactivating a Missional Form of Discipleship by Alan and Deb Hirsch! Here’s the back blurb:

Discipleship is costly. Are we willing to critique and even challenge much we’ve been taught for the sake of the kingdom? For this is the radical nature of the discipleship to which Jesus calls us. He did not allow the outside culture to hold him captive; instead he established the kingdom of God and turned the world on its head. Jesus was untamed, and he calls his church to be the same. In this provocative and compelling book, internationally known missiologists Alan and Debra Hirsch overthrow culturized understandings of theology and culture, and cast a vision for a distinctly mission-shaped way of living the Christian life. Written for any Christian serious about issue of discipleship, Untamed covers such topics as church, humans as bearers of the image of God, family life, culture, and sexuality. Through it all they seek to answer the question, how are we to think and live day to day as followers of Jesus? Each chapter ends with suggested practices to help readers begin to live out the book’s principles as well as questions for group discussion.

I’ll be blogging through Untamed, chapter-by-chapter, every Tuesday and Thursday in April, staring tomorrow. Thank you to everyone who voted!

Technorati Tags: Alan Hirsch, Books, Deb Hirsch, discipleship, Untamed